I apologize to my regular readers who have been wondering why I dropped off the face of the blogosphere for the past week. In fact, I spent several days traveling over the weekend because I was scubadiving on a sunken Ming dynasty town in Qiandaohu (Thousand Island Lake), a reservoir created by the damming of the Xin'an River near Hangzhou back in 1959. I shot some underwater video there and will YouTube it when I have it edited into watchable shape.

I'll also be traveling over the next four days, up to Changbaishan, near the North Korean border, which should be interesting. The area we are going to is supposed to be nice, but also supposed to be awash in always-entertaining Chinese mass tourism. On the other hand, Qiandaohu was awash in mass tourism, but we still found ourselves in a nice, peaceful area, so we'll see what Changbaishan brings.

I thought I would share something that happened on the 3-hour drive from Hangzhou to Qiandaohu. It was night and we were about an hour into the drive. I was sitting in the front passenger seat when the driver asked if I wanted to watch television.

"Huh?" I replied, at my articulate best, thinking I had misunderstood him.

"Television!" he repeated, before flipping down the sun visor in front of me to reveal a six-inch LCD screen connected to the DVD player in the dashboard of his battered and nondescript Volkswagen Jetta. He pressed a button and the screen flashed into life, immediately blinding my night-conditioned eyes. After blinking away the tears I gently told him that, no, I preferred to watch the night-time scenery roll by. He turned the screen off and flipped up the sun visor again, disappointed, I suppose, that I was not overwhelmed by what was clearly his disintegrating car's most magical feature.

This little episode reminded me of when I watched an enormous SUV backing out of my apartment complex's parking garage some weeks ago (depressingly, SUVs are increasingly popular in energy-starved China; you can't cross a street in Beijing without stumbling into the path of a Porsche Cayenne). It was also at night, so I could clearly see the glow of a similarly sized LCD TV in his dashboard. I remembered thinking to myself, "I hope he's watching his rearview mirror as he backs into traffic".

Now, I have nothing against TV (heaven knows) and rear-seat LCD screens and DVD players are a fashionable accessory in minivans and SUVs in the US. But it's a little alarming that they are ending up in the dashboards and sun visors of Chinese cars, where drivers can see them. Personal motor vehicles are something of a recent phenomenon in China and, with all due respect to my Chinese friends and colleagues, the Chinese as a people have not entirely mastered the art of motoring yet. In fact, China has a stupendous road mortality rate that is completely out of proportion to the number of cars actually on the road (which is also growing rapidly).

Hey, where's the TV?

I don't think it's too paranoid of me to suggest that the last thing your average Chinese SUV driver--or any SUV driver for that matter--needs is a TV set in his dashboard. It will only fight with the mobile phone for attention and I'll probably be the guy who ends up riding the hood like TJ Hooker. (If you're not an American in your 30s, look it up on the Internet.)

More after I get back from Changbaishan.