Tragedy of Travel

Our National Day Holiday was coming to an end. We’d spent several days in the remote and beautiful Suomo valley, at Zhuokeji, the home of the Zang minority of Tibetans. It had been one of the best short holidays I have ever taken and our final day had been spent relaxing in Chengdu enjoying some great Western food at some of the best restaurants in the city. We’d booked tickets on a mid-afternoon luxury coach to Chongqing.

Our bus left on time, slowly leaving Chengdu in our wake. After nine hours on board a bus the day before, we were accustomed to sudden and unavoidable braking and lurching and we paid much less attention to it now since we were cruising down the mostly smooth four lane motorway. Deep in conversation with my friends, it was a second sharp braking which sent everything loose and light, flying through the air and every passenger gripping the coach tables between our seats as the bus began to drift dangerously now towards the side of the road. It was now miraculously three lanes wide – with a lay-by or stopping lane about 100meters in length.

The front fender of the bus bounced off the guard rail and the driver, having maintained control during the sideways drift finally brought her to a steady halt a few feet from the rail. We quickly accessed the damage around us, no-one appearing to be injured although the young lass sitting opposite was a few months pregnant and had bumped into the table causing her and her husband some concern when she suffered some sharp pains. They’d been playing cards with friends but their cards were now all over the floor.

The driver and the young steward quickly left the bus and with some difficulty opened a luggage compartment on the roadside while traffic whisked by so close it was dangerous. The driver then carried the bright red fire extinguisher fifty meters or so to the rear of the coach and placed it in mid lane behind us. While watching what he was doing through the rear window we could see a pair of green plastic slippers lying on the road amidst pieces of broken plastic – orange and white – headlight and indicator covers.

Could we possibly have hit a person? This was the question that naturally began to run through our minds as we waited, retrieving our belongings from where they had been tossed. There was no sign of blood or a body. Sitting in the rear of the bus it was not immediately clear why we had stopped. We had seen nothing, heard little and felt only the sudden braking and bumping along the guard rails. Beside the road there was the typical deep ditch with a concrete embankment eight or nine feet deep making it almost impossible to gain access to the highway at this point.

After a few minutes a local farmer appeared on the top of the concrete retaining wall. As he surveyed the length of the bus, the slippers and broken plastic on the road, his facial expression remained the same – he gave nothing away. We waited for some facts. The minutes seemed to drag and no one left the bus. After another couple of minutes, two women arrived from the rear of the bus, the younger one quickly making a call on her phone. Neither of the women’s expressions changed but the younger expressed just enough to confirm that we had in fact hit someone.

A few of the passengers, including one of the two pregnant women managed to pick up some spare seats on another bus which stopped a few minutes later. We remained on the bus waiting and watching as a few more of the locals came over to look. These included a young boy of perhaps five or less and everyone’s gaze, although still showing little or no emotion was riveted to the mid point of the coach, just by the rear door.

It was not long before a stunned young woman staggered, almost drunk like, along the embankment, gazing first at the slippers of her child and then at where we now knew the body to be lying beneath the bus. We passengers trapped like fish in a tank, could only sit quietly and watch and pray. The young women standing on the bank slowly sunk to the ground as her grief overcame her shock. She sat there alone weeping over her knees. No one touched her for what to us seemed like forever.

After about five minutes a small group of neighbours had gathered and two of them forcibly moved her along the bank to opposite the green slippers in an effort to avert her gaze from where her child lay. Most of the Chinese passengers strangely showed little if any emotion at the news that it was little girl and she was dead. It was nearly fifteen minutes before the police arrived from the small town of Zizhong, and a further minute or two before the ambulance arrived.

Just as we remained trapped within the coach, so the mother and her neighbours were cut off by the deep gulf between the embankment and the road. The driver was instructed to reverse the coach up about two meters and the ambulance officers placed several sheets of newspaper on the tarmac beside the coach. They then moved the broken and bloody body of the child. Those of us watching caught our breaths and moved away from the window unable and unwilling to see more. Her body was then covered with more newspaper and in a few minutes we moved off in the direction of Chongqing.

Information was sketchy and we relied on the young lass travelling with us and later another passenger with good English to feed us facts. We had been told that we’d be transferred to another coach but after about ten minutes down the highway we took an exit, and returned again heading back towards Chengdu. It was thirty minutes before we passed the site of the accident again and the child’s body lay where it had been when we left. This, at the time shocked me but I realized later that they would be waiting for an official photographer. The bus needed to be photographed, examined and statements from the passengers who had seen the child dash in front of the bus, needed to be taken while we waited for another coach to take us home.

At Zizhong the bus was parked in the grounds of the Traffic Patrol where we spent some of our time chatting with another foreign couple on the bus and getting a little more detail from the one other passenger who spoke English. About 7.30pm and well after dark, the photographer arrived, took out a number board which he flipped over until it read 057525. Each of the photos was taken with this number in full view. I dare not guess that this was the number of reported accidents in Sichuan already this year?

We left Zizhong at nine o’clock. I thanked the driver, trying to express our appreciation that despite the death of the child we were grateful that he was able to avoid more casualties.

Just the day before, returning to Chengdu, in another marathon nine hour bus ride over one of Sichuan’s worst roads, every second, presented a sequence of potential accidents only narrowly avoided as trucks, buses, cars, buildings, trees, animals and people manage to manoeuvre safely on the rough, narrow and torturously winding roads.

Only the week before this holiday began I had witnessed a man collide with the taxi ahead of mine. The driver had managed to spot him early and had braked hard. The man appeared not to suffer any serious injury although he managed to smashed the windscreen and bounce off the hood of the taxi.

What should have been routine trip to Chongqing of less than five hours on the four lane motorway that joins these two cities, in less than two hours turned into the most tragic experience of my years in China.


My apologies for the length of this review but I felt the need to relate the incident in its entirety. Needless to say, the midnight ride in the taxi from where I got off the bus to my home was also a trial after such a long and tragic evening.