Finally have some time so where were we?
Oh yeah, DAY TWO, in the back of a spanking new hearse-style BMW with a liveried chauffeur, blatting down the empty 6-lane highway, heading for Guangzhou.
All around, hundreds of miles of neat banana plantations and dotted here and there the most picturesque villages, very Pacific Islander in style only clean with it, and each village has about a dozen huts built on the prettiest side of a small lake, and out to the middle of each lake is a wharf. I then and there decide that having your own wharf is one of life's necessities!
Then we cross over Pearl River on this spectacular bridge - amazingly long and all modern-engineering-marvel and so aesthetically pleasing - and it strikes me: there's waaayyyy too little traffic for way too much infra-structure!!! Like, a brand-new six lane highway? A zillion-dollar bridge? To service banana farmers? Something is definitely wrong. Either China is showing off - Guangdong is the closest area to the rest of the world afterall - or there are secret plans afoot that, if known, are sure to disturb the comfort of those self-same banana-growing villagers!
(Actually discovered later there was a petrol boycott and that explains why there was no traffic)
And then we reach Guangzhou ... and must pay for the privilege. Yup, toll gates on the city boundary where you're charged to enter the city and they give you a card stating the time you arrived so I guess you're charged on your way out as well. Luckily we were the only souls on the road because, in regular circumstances, that's going to hold up traffic bigtime. Or maybe that's why there were no other cars: everyone else knows the secret country lanes where you can avoid the toll booths.
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