Imagine you're climbing a steep mountain pass, a precipitous drop to your right with no barrier to guard the plummet downwards should you stray too far to the edge.
Just as you near a blind uphill hairpin bend, the three-wheeler truck behind you (an unusual breed of small cheap blue conveyance beloved of Chinese farmers) overtakes you towards the hairpin. At that moment a passenger bus full of people overtaking a petrol tanker rounds the bend from the opposite direction on your side of the road. It looks grim. It's a narrow two lane road and there are no less than four vehicles battling for space between the mountain and the drop-off.
But something miraculous happens - instead of a major collision and a fatal fall down the mountainside for one or more of you, the tricycle truck zooms into the space in front of you created when you moved as far to the right as possible, the bus slides into the small space left by the tricycle truck, and the petrol tanker, having pulled on the brakes a little for good measure, gives everyone involved a friendly toot on his horn as he rolls past down the mountain. After all, he'll repeat this scenario every few minutes on his journey.
This is just a normal day on country roads in China. Character building. You'll get used it.
The roads themselves are a different matter. Graded into national (guodao 国道 - G), provincial (shengdao 省道 －S) and county roads (xianxiangdao 县乡道) the number of lanes and quality of the driving surface decreases accordingly. Most maps fail to include my own grading - mud trails (B - for bog risk) goat tracks (C - for carnage, as in when you run into one of those critters) and corrugated potholed dirt roads (T - for tractors only).
What I've come to enjoy is the sheer novelty value of some of China's roads - like this dirt track in Inner Mongolia. For reasons known only to the locals, a 2.8m height barrier was necessary right here in the middle of nowhere, preventing trucks and buses (and campervans) from passing.
Then they just went and made a barrier-free side road, for everyone else. Does it make sense? Of course not. Did it make me laugh? Yes.
2. Tolls
Every decent road - and despite what I've said there are quite a lot of them in China - has tolls. Every time you come to a provincial border or a highway intersection there's a toll booth. Charge depends on vehicle size and distance travelled, as well as road quality (a new bridge will have a higher toll than an old highway, for example) and which province you're in.
It varies from the cheapest at 6 yuan (Qinghai) to the most expensive at 33 yuan (Shanxi) for every 100km travelled.
The toll booth operators have usually never seen a campervan before, so we're used to a protracted Q&A before the correct toll amount is assigned.
'Are you a goods truck?'
'No, a campervan.'
'A what? A bus?'
'No, a campervan.'
'A what??? Let me see your vehicle registration licence.'
(now on radio to friend in next tollbooth) 'Xiao Wang! Get a load of this! It's a CAMPERVAN!!!'
3. Road Signs
Road signs on all major roads are usually helpfuly bilingual, although this gets less helpful in places like Inner Mongolia where the two languages are Chinese and Mongolian and the signs look like this:
Can you read this? I didn't think so.
In Xinjiang, far western China, the road signs are bilingual in Chinese and Uyghur and look like this:
Still can't read it. But there is something coming in 11km, then nothing for another 251km.
China also has the best road safety signs in the world:
And sometimes the message is the same but the Chinglish differs:
4. Police
To be honest the one thing I was really worried about, like, waking up at night worried, was Chinese police. I had heard dreadful stories about unprovoked police brutality, about bribes, about deaths in custody. Custody was one place I had tried to avoid all my life, and I didn't want to find out if the rumours about police custody in China were true.
So the first time we were pulled over by the police I was understandably anxious. We were diverted off the highway in Inner Mongolia into a lay-by filled with policemen and women. A senior officer approached the driver's window and looked at us with a stern face, his eyes narrowd, his posture ramrod straight.
'Licence' he requested, briskly.
My husband handed over his licence, a small navy blue plastic holder with the licence inside behind a clear plastic cover.
He took it with his white cotton gloved hands and tried to open it, but the gloves were too slippery and he couldn't get a grasp on the edges of the smooth plastic. He sighed.
He handed it back to my husband, who was about to put it away.
'No! Wait! Let's try that again' he said.
'Pardon?' I said.
'Hand it to me again.' he said, taking off his gloves and putting them in his pocket.
'Licence' he requested again. I wasn't sure what the hell was going on.
Then I realized we were being filmed by a three man film crew. We weren't in trouble - we were part of a police training video for highway patrols.
We did one more take, all smiling this time.
Then the entire film crew and all the police took a tour of the campervan.
I'd like to say this has been our only experience of police in China, but in fact we've now been pulled over dozens of times for licence checks or vehicle registrations. The police presence in Xinjiang is impressively oppressive, with bunkers, camouflage gear and gun-toting batallions of police manning every checkpoint, of which there are many. At these points, you must complete a registration (
dengji 登记）and show your passport as well as your licence. Spot vehicle inspections are common.
In other parts of China there is a lack of manpower in the police force, made up for with these:
Police Officer, Inner Mongolia
5. Fuel
Fuel stations are magnificent entities in China. The best are in the east and north, where they span both sides of the highway and encompass acres of grounds, a restaurant, a supermarket, a souvenir shop, a motel, public toilets and a place to buy petrol. Giant hot water canteens dispense boiling water for all your travelling tea and instant noodle needs.
In other places, the fuel stations sell nothing but fuel. They're so remote the staff usually live on site, and behind the fuel pumps is a vegetable garden where they grow vegetables when they're not pumping gas.
Prices are pretty fixed across all of China, given that most fuel stations are state owned.
Some handy fuel phrases:
Petrol ＝
qi you 汽油
Diesel ＝
chai you 柴油
Fill 'er up ＝
jia man 加满
6. Water
I never thought that our biggest problem with the campervan would be finding water. The van has a 120-litre capacity water tank for showers, washing, and flushing the toilet. Divided by four people, 120 litres doesn't go very far and we usually need to fill our tank every day.
At home, and in other countries, this would be accomplished with an outdoor tap and a hose, available at every single fuel station. Right?
But this is China. After finding that only tap in most fuel stations is indoors, inside the manager's private bathroom, we often manage to convince staff to run our hose from it to the van by parking close to the building like this. It doesn't always work, but mostly the staff are terribly helpful and only too happy to oblige.
We have to disconnect if the manager wants to use the bathroom though.
In drier parts of China where rain is scarce we usually have to buy water, from a roadside
jiashui 加水 (add water) stall. These take many forms, and the water might be trucked in, pumped from underground reservoirs, or from nearby canals. The well water is best and technically drinkable. Canal water is usually dirty and undrinkable. The price for 120 litres varies with demand - the cheapest is 5 yuan, and the most expensive, in the deserts of western Gansu, is 20 yuan.
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| Roadside Add Water, Xinjiang |
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| Cave house Add Water, Shanxi |
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| Satellite Add Water, Hebei |
7. Mechanical Assistance
What exactly do you do if you break down in the middle of nowhere?
Luckily for you China has a system of roadside assistance as complex and provincial as you might imagine. Here's how it works:
Roadside assistance is tied to your insurance policy, so the first thing to do is call your insurance company's 24 hour assist number - if they have one - and get them to help. If you don't speak Chinese, you're stuffed. They will then contact the local roadside assist provider to come and help you, usually a guy in a minivan with a few tools. One of the worst possible places to break down is on an elevated highway, where there may be an emergency parking lane but you'll be sitting in the baking sun for hours while you wait with no way to get off and find food or water.
If you're on a smaller road help will be available close to a fuel stop, and China is absolutely riddled with vehicle mechanics in little shacks just like this.
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| Mechanic's shop, Inner Mongolia |
Please don't be put off by the ramshackle appearance of these mechanic's shops. They can fix anything, and they manage to keep all of China truck fleets going from one end of the country to the other.
For the sake of simplicity, when we've had breakdowns (not many, thankfully) we've kept insurance companies and roadside assists out of it and just used what's available nearby, like this tyre repair tent on the road from Xinjiang to Qinghai. The tent is spray-painted optimistically with the characters for 'shop'.
It sure didn't look like much but but when we had a tyre blow-out and couldn't get the hydraulically-tightened wheel nuts off the wheel, the tyre shop tent mechanic could and did. Repairs are also inexpensive: the standard rate for a tyre change across China is 50 yuan.
Once the flat tyre is removed you can then take it to a different kind of shop - a butai 补台 - tyre patch -shop like the one below inside a cave house in Shanxi, and have on-the-spot repairs in the middle of nowhere....
