A Bryson in China

Wrong Way Home

It was a most interesting ride home! Most rides between work and my apartment in Dongguan City are pretty interesting, but yesterday’s was more eventful than most.

It was Friday afternoon, and I was already expecting a difficult return. Traffic is getting more congested here. The infrastructure being built in China is great, but when there are so many new cars entering the highway daily, it is hard to stay ahead. They say there are somewhere around 400 new cars being registered to the Dongguan area alone on a daily basis! In Beijing I’ve heard its up to 1000 new cars a day. Like so many places around the world, Fridays seem to be the worse day for traffic jams.

So back to my story: On our way out I said my driver “yo bien,” meaning in my broken Chinese to take the route to the right out of our industrial park. The straighter direction is more commonly used by the drivers, but I figured there was less chance of a problem to the right. ………. WRONG!

All was going pretty good until we got to an interesting intersection as we got closer to Dongguan City. Another highway merges into the one we were on at a point, where there are also several exits. It gets about 6 lanes across, and someone was bright enough to put a stop light at this point to further confuse and stall traffic. Only on this day it didn’t look so good ahead either.

My driver was immediately eyeing the traffic congestion ahead. It didn’t look good. Again he looked at me for my input. This time I opted for “tsis zo” for go straight instead of a right option. Again: WRONG!

Soon we were looking at traffic stalled at what looked to be a complete stop ahead. But locals being who they are, they improvise quickly. You really have to give it to these folks sometimes. They are creative, if not necessarily safety conscious. Cars were quickly turning down the wrong way of an entrance ramp to get back to another ramp to go back anywhere that traffic was at least moving in some forward motion. Riders hopped out of cars to direct their cars backwards, while defying oncoming traffic to pass. All the while their friends positioned their vehicles for awkward turns to go in the other direction. The Chinese really are on one hand incredibly patient with each other in these situations, but at the same time impossibly impatient about any delay whatsoever. No problem to cut each other off up and down the highway, but don’t make ‘em wait an extra second or you’ll have horns blaring.

Of course, my driver followed suit with the idea of moving somewhere instead of waiting a few extra minutes. With a quick 180 with the van, we were headed back directly into the oncoming traffic from the entrance ramp – although it wasn’t going to go anywhere anyway pretty soon. And off we went to chase another route.

We had to go many miles to get back to the original route. But we were moving. That seems to be the most important thing desired here!

Scene from our van turning from traffic jam on right to go wrong direction back down entrance ramp. Car and truck on right ahead are in reverse into the traffic too.

posted by A Bryson (formerly) in China @ 10:50 AM Comments: 0