Four road accidents in the past two days have claimed at least 47 lives amid China's Spring Festival travel rush that started last week.

The latest accident occurred on Saturday morning in Guizhou province, when an overloaded coach overturned and crashed along a 100-meter slope, killing 13 people.

The coach, designed for 19 passengers, was carrying 34 when the accident occurred in Congjiang county, some 450 km southeast of the provincial capital Guiyang, government sources said.

In Nanning, seven people died and 12 others were injured when a van tumbled into a 30-meter-deep ravine on Saturday morning in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, local police said.

The accident occurred on a mountain road in Daxin County, some 154 km west of the region's capital of Nanning, police said as their investigation continued.

On Friday night, a bus in the northwestern province of Gansu fell into a ravine and caught fire near the county seat of Ningxian, Qingyang City.

The death toll in that accident rose to 16 on Saturday, local firefighters said. Most of the victims were migrant farmers and their family members from Langfang City in Hebei province, according to local authorities.

Also on Friday, a coach carrying 29 people flipped over into a 100-meter-deep slope in the southwestern province of Sichuan, killing 11 on board and injuring 18 others.

These accidents occurred as China's transportation sector gears up for the Spring Festival, a time when hundreds of millions of people travel back to their hometowns for family reunions.

(China Daily 02/03/2013 page2)