China catches the spirit of Route 66 Wang Xudong loves camping so much that he named his month-old twins the Chinese equivalent of "Cam" and "Ping." And the kind of camping he loves is caravanning. Sitting in a deck chair outside his Chinese-made motor home parked in Beijing's largest "RV park" - where a luxury imported American recreational vehicle, or RV, can be rented for a cool £400 a night - Mr Wang waxes lyrical about China's nascent RV culture and the joys of life on the open road. He tells a tale of urban Chinese who are plum worn out by work yet still happy to battle Beijing's gargantuan traffic jams on Friday night just for the chance to wake up next day and breathe the fresh air of an RV park. "Even in a traffic jam, I am happy," says Mr Wang, who last Friday fought through an evening of fearsome thunderstorms to arrive at Beijing's Nanshan RV park at 10pm - where he immediately set about barbecuing his supper in the pouring rain. It is all worth it, he says, for the chance to get away from it all and engage in the kind of games that grown boys everywhere love: racing around in all-terrain vehicles, grilling meat and jumping waves on the jet ski. Blink and this could be Los Angeles. But the pot of gruel boiling in the rice cooker on Mr Wang's picnic table says it is not: this is China and it is not yet a kingdom of RV enthusiasts. On paper, China has about 100 caravan parks - but most of them are pretty useless, since they are neither located on tourist routes nor within reach of anything that might be called scenery. So RV pioneers need a caravan with Chinese characteristics: a generator, a tank that can hold water for three or four days and a shovel to bury several days worth of poo, in the absence of a US-style sewage hookup. Then there's Grandma: the Chinese middle class love to travel with the grandparents in tow and China's 30 or 40 RV manufacturers are happy to make caravans to order, with facilities for Grandpa's wheelchair or a disabled loo. Carting the elders around in an RV is "a form of filial piety," says Mr Wang, enlisting no less an ally than Confucius to support his caravanning habit. With only 5,000 RV owners, China has a long way to go before it catches up with the US, the spiritual home of the RV, where there are nearly 9m caravanners. But Mr Wang forecasts that RVs will catch on like BMWs in China in the years to come, as a symbol of an all new Chinese way of life that embraces nature, mobility, and the right to stop and go at will - a Route 66 kind of lifestyle that could not be more different from riding a Chinese bicycle. Novelty value Liu Yujiao heads the RV sales department at one of China's leading RV makers, Great Wall Motors. He says lots of people in Europe and America have time and money for RV travel, while the super-rich in China have money but no time. So China's RVs are driven by small entrepreneurs, white-collar workers and retired government officials. They buy locally produced RVs for travel or entertaining while the überwealthy sometimes buy imported caravans - minimum price Rmb1.3m ($205,000) - to impress their business contacts. Locally made RVs cost nothing like that much - Great Wall's RVs run from Rmb220,000 to Rmb250,000 - but they cost more than the average American family would spend on a caravan, he says. Mr Liu expects the costs of production to drop once Chinese RV makers start to enjoy the economies of scale that only a nation of 1.3bn potential caravanners can deliver. But that may take a while: at the moment, RVs are still so novel that when one rocks up at a motorway toll booth, staff are often baffled how to charge for it. Even getting a number plate for an RV can be hard. Silk Road reversed The Wangs of the world will be towing generators and burying poo for a few more years before China's RV infrastructure catches up with the revolution in the hearts of those who love the freedom of the motorway. Meanwhile, Mr Wang and members of his online RV club (www.21rv.com) are trying to set up a trip across central Asia to attend the London Olympics. That gives the word "caravan" a whole new meaning; Marco Polo never had it so good.