About Us

• Peter Schindler – our driving holiday designer
• Our philosophy
• Atonement

Peter Schindler – our driving holiday designer

Pity the customs official who needs to deal with Peter when he crosses a border by car. His documents can be rather confusing, if not downright suspicious: his car has an Austrian license plate; he holds a Swiss passport, but it shows that his residence is in Hong Kong; as for his driving license, take your pick: two from China, one from the U.S., and several others; and his miniature laminated marriage certificate says that his Malaysian-Chinese wife is Australian.

When he was a lot younger, he raced cars in Europe – Formula 2, Formula 3, Formula Super-V and Renault Elf – for four years, on occasion even successfully.

He then entered the ‘dark years’ of his life during which he studied I.T. at M.I.T. and business at INSEAD.  Painfully, he heaved himself up to become an associate partner in Accenture’s China practice (www.accenture.com).  Then it was time to move on.
His passion for driving has never left him, however.  In 2005, it resulted in what BBC Radio (www.bbc.com) called a love letter to the pleasures of being on an open road: On the Road – Driving Adventures, Pleasures and Discoveries (See www.ontheroadeditions.com for more info.)

Having driven over the years a million-plus kilometres on roads in Europe, the U.S. and Asia, and loving every moment of it, he nowadays quenches his thirst for driving by taking to the roads of China.  The upshot is www.ontheroadinchina.com, a company through which he offers driving holidays in China and wants to show the world just how beautiful China can be.

Most recently, between May 9th and August 12th 2007, a dream came true for Peter.   After two years of preparation, Peter took off on a 100-day road trip through China, not in a Land Rover or a Porsche Cayenne or a Hummvee, but in the granddaughter of a 1950s Lotus, a car made for British race tracks and Sunday morning leisure rides on the smooth-as-a-baby's-bottom country roads of England. Peter's 21,000km journey along China's two great rivers - the Yangtze and the Yellow River - took him from the artificial glitz of Shanghai to the natural splendour of the Tibetan Highlands, and from the terraced rice fields of Longsheng to the plains of Inner Mongolia.

At the end of the journey, Miss Daisy - as Peter's open-top mother of all sports came to be called - was auctioned off at a gala charity event hosted by Yao Ming.  Nokia, the title sponsor of this adventure, donated the proceeds to the China Youth Development Foundation (CYDF www.cydf.org.cn).

Watch Peter on the Road in China…

For more fun videos and an extensive photo show of this incredible driving adventure, please visit www.ontheroadinchina.com/nokiadiscoverchina.

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Our philosophy

On the Road in China offers driving holidays in China. They are the kinds of holidays that elsewhere might be called "fly-and-drive" holidays.

The goal of our China driving holidays is to introduce you to some of China's most beautiful regions - beautiful in the sense of landscape, culture and cuisine.

Our driving holidays include everything - rental cars, hotels, fuel, toll fees, meals, entrance tickets, international insurance (including evacuation services), etc.

Cars – the rental cars we provide – are a means to an end:  to indulge in driving on open roads, to experience freedom, to enjoy privacy and to be able to go to beautiful places that are out of reach of other means of transport.  Note: our driving holidays have nothing to do with rallies or speed.

Our holidays are designed to be "high-end" experiences.  They are professionally planned, exciting, fun, insightful, and all-inclusive.  The guiding principles are "less-is-more" and "make every moment last" such that our holidays feel as different as possible from the grind of everyday life.

As such, our driving adventures are designed to appeal to customers who are individualistic, that is, to customers who value personal attention ("They make me feel important"), freedom ("I don't feel boxed in"), flexibility and in-depth experiences.

Our driving holidays could be called "soft adventure" – they cater to those who are adventurous at heart, but no longer care that much for doing trains “stand-by”, staying in youth hostels or lugging around backpacks.

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Atonement

We at On the Road in China want to show you just how beautiful China can be.  But we also recognise that driving 4x4s in China to get to these magnificent places leaves behind an unwanted cloud of emissions.  We are therefore searching this year for a meaningful way to lessen the impact of what is our business.   We are currently thinking about choosing an appropriate carbon off-setting initiative to which we will make contributions.  If you have any suggestions, please Contact us. 

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