Manigango to Ganzi

A two and half hour trip by minivan, packed with Tibetans, down the valley from Manigango to Ganzi. A cautious driver (staying in the right lane, looking ahead to avoid sudden manoevers) and sunny breaks in the overcast sky, made my mood already swing upward after the bad days in Manigango. The drivers catiousness was no luxury, we soon discovered. First we passed a minivan turned over in the ditch with a big V-shaped dent in the front roof. It probably veered of the road into the concrete ditch. Nobody around. Not long after, a serious accident involving two luxury jeeps in a head-on collision. Both were heavily damaged, with crushed front and broken windshield. A few minutes before, we passed an ambulance with wailing sirens coming from the other direction. It probably carried one or more people from these jeeps. After manoevering past the wreckage, on a downward slope a big truck lay overturned sideways, blocking the entire road. There were a lot of people around, and cardboard everywhere (the truck's cargo). It had probably braked too hard and skidded. Some people had improvised a bypass by filling up the ditch with dirt and covering it with cardboard before and after the wreckage. They collected money for either their work or the trucker or his famliy, I don't know.
Three car accidents in just two hours. This story just illustrates how dangerous the roads can be here. I think it's not so much the roads themselves, but the driving style of the motorists that make driving in this country a high-risk operation.