I still cannot be sure – thanks to the state of mind I am in – but this part of China really looks ugly to me (which doesn’t help with improving the state I’m in). For half of the day I was trying to get through big cities, biggest of which – Hangzhou – is really huge and apart from two universities which were quite nice buildings – one very modern, one oldish style – there were no other noticeable pretty buildings at all; all that apart the fact that I don’t like to drive through cities on my journey anyway. The landscape I was going through was I guess OK, if I tried hard to imagine it without involving all the negative emotions in me, but still nothing one would like to spend days touring through.

I was heading to Huang Shan mountains that are supposed to be very scenic but there seems to be no easy access to it from the South-West where I was approaching it from and going back 63 kilometers after I took a similarly long detour around it was more than I felt like doing. I mean I did turn on the road leading there but my current absolute unhappiness with anything together with the fact that it seemed very overcast ahead of me made me turn back after riding just a few kilometers.

I was about to write about the horrible driving experience here before but I had other things to write about. Well, today it was in my face the whole day with no nice things to beat that for making a story so here it is:

Generally speaking China is the worst country to drive in from among the countries I’ve already visited on this journey. The traffic seems chaotic in the other countries but people are aware of the traffic around and comparably courteous. Here, on the other hand, the people are breaking rules with no consideration to the traffic around them. I’m really amazed I’m not seeing more accidents. I mean I did see (just today alone) a couple of car accidents and a person who was apparently riding a push bike lying on the road in blood, but that is really not too bad compared to how dangerous and suicidal the Chinese behave.

Cars, motorbikes, pushbikes, pedestrians, busses etc. will not look if there is a car coming on the main road and will simply drive in from any type of side road. It is up to you to stop in time if you can. So many times today I had to break heavily to not shoot down a pedestrian or biker that simply crosses a highway type two or three lane road slowly while I’m approaching at 110 km/h. I can be sounding the horn from far away continually until stopping at a point where our paths would collide, one meter from the crossing person, and these people don’t even turn their heads. Sometimes it really looks like they do want to be dead. Running into a lorry, bus or a passenger car would be very easy too if one was not alert to the maximum. They also don’t look if anything is approaching before they join the traffic, however heavy it is.

Not respecting the red light on intersections is not a novelty in Asia either, but here again they don’t even give way to the traffic that has the green light. It is truly unbelievable. And they do it right in the face of a policeman sometimes directing the traffic in the middle of the intersections in support of the lights. The police don’t care.

This is another thing for which I should stop the trip right here. With my mind wandering I could get myself into big trouble. I do try to concentrate on the traffic as much as possible, which admittedly doesn’t leave too much space for looking around to enjoy the country, but I caught myself very close to an accident on a few occasions when I lost the focus in favor of my other thoughts.

What is also unique to China are the bus drivers. In the other countries these people are the only ones that seem to follow the rules, are indicating when turning etc. Not in China though! They are in fact even worse then the others. In Shenzhen for example I was cut off very dangerously several times by a bus that ignored my presence on the road completely. What’s kind of funny was that on most of the occasions it was the exact same bus first overtaking me before turning right and breaking to take my lane and eventually stop right in front of me.

I could go on and on but I think you get the picture.