In 2001 I visited the DPRK (North-Korea) for a week, which was a very strange experience. Although it was a vacation, I was glad to be back in China afterwards, and I felt like I needed another holiday in order to get back to reality. On this trip I met among others Dan Gordon and Nick Bonner (Nick’s company Koryo Tours had organized the trip). It later turned out that Dan was preparing a film about the DPRK during the week we were there. He had a DV camera with him all the time and was shooting a lot of footage, but at that time nobody knew why he was doing that. This footage later became the basis for his first documentary ‘The game of their Lives’, about the North-Korean soccer team that made it to the soccer World Cup finals in 1966.

Dan and Nick have since made several films about life in the DPRK, and the lateste one is about a US defector who has been living there since 1962. The 90-minute film, that premiered at last month’s Sundance festival, is titled ‘Crosssing the Line’. There used to be 3 other US defectors, but they either died, or finally managed to leave (Robert Jenkins). They were the first foreigners to meet Mr. Dresnok in 45 years. Mr. Dresnok says he does not want to leave anymore, although he once tried to get asylum in the Russian embassy. It turns out he also has an 18-year old blonde son now, who looks British but is completely Korean.

CBS’ 60 minutes interviewed Dan and Nick about their latest documentary, and show a lot of footage about the DPRK and Mr. Dresnok. I enjoyed every second of the 13-minute program, even though I had to wait an hour to load the whole program due to China’s internet firewall. Fascinating stuff!

The 13-minute program on CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=2405878n
A 7-minute, less interesting, version on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZtkHUkZ8Rg

Last month I proudly wrote that game.com.cn had achieved 1 million page views. But the site has kept on growing at an unbelievable pace over the past 6 weeks and reached another milestone this weekend. Sunday, the first day of the Lunar new year, we managed to get more than 2.5 million page views in 24 hours!

Demi & the team: one again fantastic work over the past weeks. You really deserve your New Year holiday, so enjoy it with your families and friends. I owe all of you a nice lunch or dinner after we are back in Shanghai. Thanks for this great start of the Year of the Pig!

Something funny happened just now. A Dutch radio station wanted to interview me about Chinese New Year, and told me they would call me at 8:10 PM. However, their program schedule changed a bit, and they called me already 20 minutes earlier. At that time I was in a store in Oriental Plaza, where the music and the people were very loud. Because the interview was live I literally sprinted outside to be able to hear the presenter. But that was not a good idea either, because I ended up at Wangfujing, normally already Beijing’s busiest shopping street, and even more busy during Chinese New Year. So I crossed the road to the back of the Beijing Hotel while talking on the phone. There I was able to do the interview in a more quiet environment. At least for the first 2 minutes or so: then suddenly some guys started to light fireworks right behind me! The presenter didn’t know what was going on, and immediately asked me what was happening. He had to laugh when I explained it to him. I’ll check if the program is available as a stream or download on the internet, I’d like to hear it back myself. It must have sounded weird. If I find it I’ll put a link here.

Update: I found a link, click here to listen to the program. The item is after about 50 minutes (the last item of the program).

On Friday I drove from Shanghai to Beijing. It was a great experience to do this once, but I will think twice before doing it again. I have often said that in general Chinese are not the best drivers in the world, mainly because the drivers education is terrible (no practicing on the road, low test-passing standards, and even the possibility to buy drivers licenses in smaller cities), many don’t have a lot of experience, and nobody follows the rules. And the trip to Beijing proved this: I have never seen so many accidents in one day as on Friday. I took pictures of a few accidents, but most of the time I just drove on as soon as possible.

The whole trip door-to-door turned out to be about 1300 kilometers (800 miles), a bit longer than I had calculated. The first 600 kilometers it was raining constantly, sometimes it rained so hard that you could not see more than 100 meters ahead. This made driving very tiring, but also very dangerous. Many drivers, especially those of buses and trucks, did not care about the rain and drove as if they were the only ones on the road on a clear, sunny day. Combine that with a lot of inexperienced drivers (likely driving home to their hometowns for the first time in their new cars) that drive 60 km/h in the left or middle lane, and accidents are guaranteed.

One accident occurred right in front of us. I saw a traffic jam ahead (caused by another accident), and immediately slowed down. The car to the right of me, however, just continued at the same speed and only noticed the traffic jam a few seconds later. He could not brake in time anymore. The result: 4 cars that were a total-loss, and hopefully not too many injuries. It was a interesting experience to see how quickly cars can crumble though (hoods that fold, bumpers that fall off), and I was surprised that you hardly heard it (just some metal-to-metal ‘clang’ sounds – in the movies it sure sounds different). But I was very happy that I was not in that lane.
We had several other near-accident experiences, and I was glad I was behind the wheel myself. People just don’t use their mirrors, and move from right to left without looking whether there is a car next to them. One car almost crushed us. This driver was ahead of me in the left lane of a 4-lane highway, and wanted to pass two trucks in front of us. But one truck was just passing the other, so he decided to move to the far right and pass the truck over the emergency lane. That turned out to be too narrow, so he moved back right away, but did not notice that I was now in his old spot! I blew the horn and immediately jumped on my brakes. It was a very narrow escape, but the other driver did not even blink. Crazy.

You should not take this trip for the natural scenery, because that was a bit of a turn-off. I actually knew that already, because I had flown this route tens of times over the past years, and never noticed anything special. Northern Jiangsu province is very poor, and at some place the landscape reminded me of painting of Holland in the 1600-1700’s. Rivers, woods and grassland. Quite nice to live if it would be closer to a metropolis, but nothing exciting. Shandong province was nicer, especially the southern part where there are some mountains. But the landscape here was very barren and dry. Hardly a tree grew on the slopes of the hills, and most of the fields were brown. While driving through Hebei province it was dark already, so I could not really see that much. But it must be very poor, because all I could see was pitch-darkness. No lights, no towns or villages, no advertising along the road, just a new (and empty) 6-lane expressway in a dark landscape.

The whole trip took us about 12 hours. The roads were generally excellent, much better for example than the average German Autobahn. The first hours in the rain were very slow, but once we were in Shandong it became dry, and all the other cars had disappeared. The last part therefore went especially fast. I managed to drive 180-190 km/h for at least two hours in northern Shandong and southern Hebei, and then you make up a lot of lost time. From Jinan to Beijing only took us about 2.5 hours, including getting gas and getting the license to enter Beijing with a non-Beijingnese car. Just before arriving in Beijing we almost ended up under a big truck that was ghost driving on the Tianjin-Beijing expressway: the truck had probably missed an exit and decided to turn around completely and drive back in the left (=fast) lane. I was doing about 150 km/h at the time, and suddenly saw his headlights coming closer very fast. I braked and immediately moved to the right – just like the truck did… It went OK, but my adrenaline was at the upper limit again.

This is probably the one and only time that I am going to drive this route. It’s just too dangerous, and I don’t want to lose my life because of some stupid or inexperienced driver. The only problem is, I still need to get back to Shanghai next weekend with my car. Not sure yet how to solve that, but I still have a week to think about it. Suggestions are welcome.

Today I am planning to go to Beijing. Not by train, as most Chinese would do, nor by plane, which is the fastest option. No, for the first time I am going to drive my car the 1200+ kilometers from Shanghai to Beijing. Why? Because I have never done it before, and it seemed like a good idea a few weeks ago while having a couple of beers. But now I am not so sure anymore. First of all the weather seems to be rainy for most of the ride (Jiangsu and Shandong province both report heavy rain), and second the trip will take at least 12 hours that I also could have spent relaxing, reading or doing sports (or working of course, but it’s holiday now, so I try to forget about that for a few hours).

I actually don’t know anybody who has driven this road him or herself, and that surprised me. Shanghai and Beijing are China’s main cities, but nobody I talked to has ever driven a car between the two of them. In Europe or the US a 2400 kilometer road trip (roundtrip) is not uncommon actually, but here people look at you as if you are crazy. The roads should be OK, according to my map most of the roads should be expressways. Of course traffic is a bit dangerous, especially in rural areas. From past driving experiences I know that I can expect ghost drivers, trucks that back up on the high speed lane, bike riders in the middle lane, farmers crossing the road with loads of vegetables, and of course the trucks and buses that do not follow any of the road rules in order to get from A to B as soon as possible.

Anyway, too late to turn back now. I am going to get going! The next blog post will hopefully be from Beijing.

Tomorrow I am going to Beijing. Finally, because I have not been there in many months. I miss the city, it is so much more authentic than Shanghai. Even though Beijing has lost most of its charm over the past 10 years, because of the demolishing of most old neighborhoods, it still has that old-China feeling to it. I miss living there. I like living in Shanghai, but residing in Beijing is still much better in my opinion. A better climate (colder in winter, warmer in summer, but not so humid as Shanghai), and you can leave the city every now and then to go hiking or mountain biking.

So I am always a bit jealous of friends of mine that live in Beijing. One of them started a blog in which she writes about her life in Beijing. She wants to remain anonymous, so I won’t reveal her identity, and therefore let’s call her Suzie for now. Her blog is http://beijingnotebook.blogspot.com/. I have known her for many years already, but Suzie only started to blog about 2 months ago. She has kept updating her blog regularly during that time (even though she did not have much traffic so far), but not surprising because she wants to make a career change to become a writer. And Beijing is probably a good city to start writing, the combination of modern and ancient, and traditional versus international, always gives me lots of inspiration. If you’re interested in life in Beijing, give Suzie’s blog a try.