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June 3, 2019

Traffic jams, unusual methods of transport for ponies, wonderful scenery and arrive at one of the world’s fastest growing cities

At last the great day has arrived and Mike and I left the hotel at 5:30 am, with Rowena and Ianthe getting the supporters’ bus for the 7 am start of the rally at the Great Wall.

 

They laid on an amazing party with dragon dances, lion dancers, acrobats, drummers and the lot to send us off.

Figure 1 The Great Wall Lion dance with the wall in the background
Figure 2 We get flagged off to the start at the Great Wall

It was a real treat that Ianthe and Rowena came to see us off. We are both looking forward to seeing them again in Paris.

 

Our day has had three themes. Quite a lot has been spent in traffic jams. The route along the Wall is clearly a Sunday favourite and by the time we had been flagged off we were sent into the middle of a traffic jam that lasted about 90 minutes. Eventually it thinned out. As we passed a toll booth we passed a pickup truck with, amazingly, a couple of ponies standing in the back. They seemed perfectly happy though the method of transport can hardly be called safe.

 

The second theme has been spectacular scenery. First we were taken through a beautiful valley that could have been in the Scottish Highlands in shape though the colours were a little different. The road was a gravel track with only one lane so lots of banking up and edging past took place. Then in the afternoon we drove up some lovely hills that could have been in Southern Spain.

Figure 3 Mike as we took pictures of some spectacular scenery

The third theme has been the extraordinary speed of economic development in China. We arrived in Hohhot this evening.  This is an amazing place. If you believe the figures its average annual rate of economic growth in the 2000s has been 24.8%. Its GDP is 132 times what it was 40 years ago. I counted 61 cranes as I passed and there are surely more. It is the capital of Inner Mongolia. The population is already 3 million and still growing fast. It specialises in food products, energy and technology. About half the growth now comes from technology companies and it is a major centre for big data.

Figure 4 Just some of Hohhot’s cranes

The pace of growth has led to a massive traffic jam as we arrived that was only solved by someone opening the barrier so that we could drive down the wrong side of the road (oddly we discovered that the cars going down that side had been diverted to our carriageway). I suspect the jam is still there.

 

But more generally, you need to drive halfway across China to see how rapidly it is developing particularly in the less well known East of the country which is being opened up very fast.

 

As the Belt and Road initiative develops, this is the part of China which is likely most to be transformed.

 

 

 

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