My CITS tour group for the day was an eclectic mix, consisting of a French couple and Spanish lady all about the same age as me and an older Chinese couple who didn't speak any English. The six of us fit tightly but neatly into a little minibus with our driver and English-speaking guide.
The drive to the Hanging Monastery was a little less than two hours and mostly unremarkable. The road was in decent condition for the most part, there was little traffic to compete with and the countryside rolled by offering little to the eye, with the dust and smog I'd grown accustomed to draining the colour and life from the world.
However, there was one noteworthy event of the journey – a thought – a powerful and scary thought.
About an hour into our journey, we had to negotiate some road construction works. Nothing remarkable about that as there are construction projects everywhere you look in China. The new road was at least double the width of the one we were using, no doubt it would become a motorway with three or four lanes in each direction. Again, not a particularly noteworthy observation, but as we were driving away, I wondered why they would build such a big road when our much smaller road was far from full? What vast volume of traffic would it take to fill the new road? And what did that say about the expectations of car ownership and usage in China?
Considering the already terrible air quality, the prospect of such a huge road being filled with traffic, and car ownership becoming normal for the many millions of Chinese people, was a profoundly scary thought. How can the environment cope with such punishment?
