28 Nov 06
Driving from Hohhot to Badaling, the comedy signs are back, after a scant day: Don't Try Fatigue Driving, Downclimb Path etc. Very funny - but the point is that these are English-language signs miles from any major city. The Chinese authorities are getting ready for the future, and not just the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Today is meant to be the last full day of driving. It's just under 300 miles, and most of it's motorway with a backdrop straight out of a Rupert Bear annual: dark, distant triangular hills, with thin, twisted trees in the foreground. There's often a strong animal scent in the air, which makes sense when we're told that there are tanneries in these parts. There's also a slight whiff of boredeom in the air, and to stave it off we just keep getting faster and more 'local' in our driving techniques, abandoning any attempt at conventional lane discipline, even undertaking on the hard shoulder, street sweepers permitting.
We're averaging 70mph and 26mpg and then, just a few miles short of Badaling, everything grinds to a halt. There's a huge queue - 12 miles long, apparently - caused by a truckers' blockade. We edge from lane one to lane three. Then, desperately, from lane three to lane one. With terminal gridlock imminent, we manage to get through on the mobile to someone who's the other side of the blockade. Take to the hills, he says, rather melodramatically. So we turn around - we're quite possibly the last people able to do so before meltdown is complete - and spot a Mercedes support van disappearing up a side road. We follow that and a handful of locals into the hills, up a dirt track that eventually joins a new leisure resort called Jackson's Hole. We get through there OK, but a guard at another private complex tries to bar our way. A Mercedes mechanic's timely deployment of a packet of fags does the trick, and soon we're back on the main road, the right side of the blockade.
