Who would be a taxi driver in China?
You may get to drive like a maniac through the traffic in your green VW, but it has some serious
downsides.
If the pollution doesn’t get you, the cyclists will - and then you have to find the destination in a
landscape that changes by the day.
True, these are problems the world over but they are somewhat magnified over here.
First off – the pollution.
Sitting around in traffic belching out fumes all day may give you a bit of husky edge to your voice for the first few years.
But after that it may destroy your voice altogether – especially when you are crawling along around the cities.
Then there are the cyclists.
I was told the other day there are professional cyclists who go around aiming to be hit by drivers
with the intention of extracting compensation from them.
It works about at about 400 yuan (about £25) if they are knocked off and cut or bruised.
The deals are negotiated on the road, although I don’t know if there is a sliding scale for more
serious things.
As for finding your destination – forget it. With all the buildings being erected and demolished all the time, the taxi driver has absolutely no chance of keeping up.
On the way back from Sun Yat Sen’s Tomb today I had a piece of paper with the name and road of the hotel on it.
The taxi driver looked blank and said something in Chinese, to which I agreed.
I also had a map and showed him where the hotel (one of the biggest and tallest in the city), but he was still none the wiser.
Eventually we went on a general trawl into the city centre with me playing look out.
I thought this would be easy – after all, this hotel has 46 floors and looks down on several cranes.
But there are also quite a few other rather tall buildings so it wasn’t very easy.
On top of this are the criminals who frequently rob the taxi drivers – forcing them to put up steel bars between them and the passengers.
As we sped around, weaving in and out of the traffic, I thought I was in some kind of video game - maybe a live action version of Frogger (the taxi, like all of them in Nanjing was green).
The congestion didn’t seem to apply to the car as it made its way through some rather tight gaps with the help only of its horn.
It was hair-raising to say the least, but it doesn’t make up for everything else.
Oh yeah, and they don't accept tips...