As we left Zhengzhou, the bus made its way onto a tree-lined country road, on which we were to remain for a decent portion of the journey. This seems pretty typical in terms of Chinese transportation: local roads become major inter-city thoroughfares as people try to avoid highway tolls or, simply, because there is no direct highway.
Passing through a town centre
So it was that this road was crowded with industrial trucks, coaches and cars. The traffic often slowed to an inch as we passed through the numerous villages, with thousands of people milling about and blocking passage. At one point, I could barely believe the scene: it seemed a town had set up its market on the road. Whole extended families made their way to it on the back of carts loaded with produce, oblivious to the incessant honking coming from our coach. Children would run out into the road every seconds. A dog decided it wanted to sleep in the middle of the road. An old man decided he wanted to take his daily walk down the middle of the road.
No Audis here
This portion of the ride felt claustrophobic: we stayed on the same road, and the trees and crowds limited visibility of the surroundings to about 100 metres.
We also passed through some quite particular villages; several of them had thousands of old door and window frames on display. And I mean thousands of them. The road was lined on both sides with massive stacks of the ornate old wooden pieces, likely salvaged from the urban area demolitions. That was pretty surreal.
When we got into Shandong, however, the scenery changed drastically. Gone were the cramped spaces and the crowds. The road became a smooth, well-paved highway (Shandong’s road system is apparently among the best in the country, and I can certainly believe it) and the landscape opened upon to reveal well-tended farmland and rocky hills. After Henan, things seemed infinitely more serene.
Where is everybody?
The rain was chasing us, coming down intermittently. The whole area had a mist hanging over it and my mom said it reminded her of Northern Scotland. Having previously lived in Shandong for a year, I couldn’t get over how green the countryside now was (I later found out that it had rained more than usual that spring). My memories were of a brown, parched land.
For a province with over 90 million people, this region appeared sparsely populated and remote. It was calming introduction to my old “home” in China, a nice welcome back. Of course, from the outskirts of Jinan on in it was all traffic gridlock, road construction projects and miles of dense, dusty human settlement.
But, hey, that’s just China.
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