Driving the Silk Road—in a New $7,000 Chinese Car
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 08.30.07 | 11:21 AM ET
The Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Fairclough took the old-China-meets-new-China story on the road, driving 1,700 miles along the ancient Silk Road in a Chery A1, a compact car developed by a government-owned automaker. He and three friends spent a week driving through Western China from Urumqi to Kashgar, a route that crosses the harsh Taklimakan Desert. The trip poses challenges, among them errant sheep and sandstorms—check out picture five in the accompanying slide show. In the end, Fairclough emerges with a great portrait of a China on the verge of developing a road-tripping culture.
He writes:
The total length of roads and highways in China has more than doubled over the past five years. State-owned oil companies are building new service stations. Other amenities, such as clean bathrooms, remain scarce. At one PetroChina service station, the bathroom was three slits in the floor of a concrete blockhouse thick with flies.
According to Fairclough, China is also developing its own road-trip literature, a la Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” He writes: “‘Go the Distance Now,’ a book chronicling five years spent traveling around China by car, was published in January. The author, Liu Yilin, writes that ‘driving a car yourself is like a bird flying with its own wings,’ and that car travel offers people a way to be ‘healthy, free and happy.’”
Related on World Hum:
* The Rise of Chinese Car Culture
* Road Deaths Will be World’s No. 2 Killer of Men by 2030
Related on TravelChannel.com
* No Reservations: Anthony Bourdain in China
Photo of Xinjiang, China by pmorgan, via Flickr (Creative Commons).
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
