Traffic woes, crowds and arguments make the holiday memorable for all the wrong reasons
Tales of travel chaos are piling up as 710 million people take to the roads, railways and air during China’s “golden week” holiday crush.
An extra day has been added to the annual week-long National Day break this year because the Mid-Autumn Festival falls on October 4.
Highways, public transport and scenic attractions have been packed across the country, leading to complaints on social media about safety and health hazards as tourists spend hours caught in crowds without access to food, water or toilets.
One tour bus driver abandoned his coach full of passengers mid-journey after police stopped the vehicle to check his driving licence, news site Sohu.com reported on Tuesday.
On Sunday evening, Shandong traffic police discovered that the man, surnamed Zhang, did not have the right type of licence to drive the coach, and his tour company should not have been operating on the route, the report said.
Zhang managed to flee the vehicle before police could arrest him, but his 38 passengers were left stranded during a 1,000km journey from the city of Handan in northern Hebei province to Changshu in eastern Jiangsu.
Big traffic delays in China as millions head out for longer golden week break
There have also been several cases of people mistakenly being left at service stations by relatives.
One man’s family drove off from a service station in Yancheng, Jiangsu without him after he had gone to the bathroom on Sunday, according to a clip posted on video-sharing site Pear Video.
They were reunited and on their way again soon after, but not before a police officer chastised the driver for managing to lose someone when there were a group of just three.
