What I Learned Hitchhiking Around China

Posted: 12/10/2014 | December 10th, 2014

On the second Wednesday of the month, Kristin Addis from Be My Travel Muse writes a guest column featuring tips and advice on solo female travel. It’s an important topic I can’t cover so I brought in an expert to share her advice. 

It was February in China and, considering the town of Lijiang’s elevation in Yunnan province, still very much a cold winter wonderland. Standing outside waiting wasn’t how I wanted to spend the morning. But Ya Ting had such enthusiasm for the idea of hitchhiking that opting for the bus just seemed boring at this point. She had been hitchhiking around China for months and considered it such a casual and obvious option that it took the fear right out of me.

China had been on my bucket list ever since studying Mandarin in Taiwan seven years prior. I knew from conversations with friends that traveling around China would not be as carefree and easy as in Southeast Asia. What I didn’t plan on was spending about a month without coming across another foreigner, hitchhiking over 1,000 miles, and learning more about Chinese culture and hospitality than I think possible from traveling by bus or train.

Ya Ting had taken me under her wing after hearing me speaking Mandarin in a hostel dorm in Lijiang. She was fascinated by my fluency and wanted to travel together, which was how we ended up on the side of the road looking for a ride to the Tiger Leaping Gorge. Within 20 minutes, we had our first ride. I guess it wouldn’t take hours after all. He couldn’t take us all the way and ended up dropping us at a freeway crossroads. I figured that would be the end of our luck, but almost immediately we got another ride.

Hitchhiking turned out to be more of a study of anthropology than a scary, irresponsible joy ride. It was astonishingly easy and drivers turned out to be incredibly nice and normal. As a new hitchhiker, I expected creeps and serial murderers I’d have to fight off with mace. In reality, they came from all normal walks of life: members of minority village tribes, university students, and businessmen returning home from a work trip.

Not once did I feel threatened or unsafe.

Our most noteworthy encounter was when a twenty-something kid picked us up. He couldn’t take us the whole way so his uncle bought us lunch and a bus ticket for the rest of the journey. It’s as though he felt obligated to help us find a way to complete our trip. It brought tears of joy and gratitude to my eyes. This was the first time I understood the importance of generosity and the high esteem that guests command in China. It was a selfless act that would repeat itself in the weeks to come.

Ya Ting’s theory had been that we were so getting so lucky because we were a local and a foreigner together, and that had sparked intrigue. She didn’t think we would get so lucky once we split up. After a few weeks traveling together, we said good-bye and I would test her theory.

I stood behind the tollbooth on a heavily trafficked highway on-ramp in Sichuan province, casually lowering my thumb each time a police car drove by. I was well aware of the challenge before me. Ya Ting was no longer around to do the talking, nor did I have someone to lean upon if something went wrong. Now I was just a strange foreigner on her own who suddenly had to manage with a borderline-conversational Mandarin ability.

At first, a few cars slowed down for a closer look, only to speed off. Then others simply weren’t going in my direction. Minutes stretched on, and I was feeling defeated. After about 30 minutes (or an eternity depending on who is counting), a kind duo picked me up and took me the entire eight hours to Chengdu. They hosted lunch on the way, and, as I had come to learn was typical of Chinese culture, refused to allow me to pay for any of it. I was amazed at the kindness that was still extended to me now that I was just a foreigner on her own and no longer had Ya Ting’s dynamic personality to help me along. This reinforced my belief that people weren’t being friendly because of Ya Ting but that Chinese culture dictates a hospitality we don’t often see in the West.

A week later, two business partners returning from a trip from Tibet picked me up. They drove about twice as fast as the buses and, in between white-knuckling it in the back seat and eating the occasional slice of yak jerky (delicious dehydrated beef-like meat with Tibetan spices), we discussed the topography of California as compared to Sichuan province.

They stopped on the way for a lunch of the famous ya an fish, which the driver, Mr. Li, had selected from the fish tank, along with some six other massive dishes to be split among us three people. He explained that the fish had a double-edged sword inside its head. Given my perplexed expression he elected to show me, calling over the waitress and asking her to break the fish’s head open.

I was all but convinced I was going to have to eat fish brain until the waitress triumphantly pulled out a sword-shaped bone from the fish’s head. She then cleaned it and fashioned it into a bracelet. It simultaneously became the most sharp and lethal yet genuinely interesting piece of jewelry anyone had ever given me. It felt like my heart grew two sizes it that moment.

China smashed many of my perceptions. Before this, I never understood why anyone hitchhiked. Getting into vehicles with strangers seemed dangerous and stupid. In reality, it taught me about kindness, improved my language ability immensely, and provided an insider’s view as a foreigner in China. From eating meals with locals, to sitting in their cars, to hearing the music they liked most, or whether they preferred bagged chicken feet to dried fruit, I witnessed Chinese life in a way that almost nobody else gets to see. Without hitchhiking, I may never have understood the generous and communal nature of Chinese people.

Kristin Addis is a solo female travel expert who inspires women to travel the world in an authentic and adventurous way. A former investment banker who sold all of her belongings and left California in 2012, Kristin has solo traveled the world for over four years, covering every continent (except for Antarctica, but it’s on her list). There’s almost nothing she won’t try and almost nowhere she won’t explore. You can find more of her musings at Be My Travel Muse or on Instagram and Facebook.

Conquering Mountains: The Guide to Solo Female Travel

For a complete A-to-Z guide on solo female travel, check out Kristin’s new book, Conquering Mountains. Besides discussing many of the practical tips of preparing and planning your trip, the book addresses the fears, safety, and emotional concerns women have about traveling alone. It features over 20 interviews with other female travel writers and travelers. Click here to learn more about the book, how it can help you, and you can start reading it today!

Book Your Trip to China: Logistical Tips and Tricks

Book Your Flight
Find a cheap flight to China by using Skyscanner or Momondo. They are my two favorite search engines. Start with Momondo.

Book Your Accommodation
You can book your hostel in China with Hostelworld. If you want to stay elsewhere, use Booking.com as they consistently return the cheapest rates. (Here’s the proof.)

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance
Travel insurance will protect you against illness, injury, theft, and cancellations. I never ever go on a trip without it. I’ve been using World Nomads for ten years. You should too.

Need Some Gear?
Check out our resource page for the best companies to use!

Want More Information on China?
Be sure to visit our robust destination guide on China for even more planning tips!

How I Built This (What I Learned Being a Scammy Marketer)

As I approach my ten-year anniversary of blogging, I want to tell a tale. The tale of an accidental travel writer who simply wanted to afford beer, dorm rooms, plane tickets, and backpacker pub crawls.

I shared part of this story before but, today, I want to go into more depth.

Once upon a time, I started this website with a selfish goal: to make money to keep myself traveling. I wanted my website to be an online résumé where editors could see my writing and go, “Yeah, we want to hire that guy!” — and then pay me to go somewhere and write a story about it. I imagined myself a cross between Bill Bryson and Indiana Jones. My dream was to write guidebooks for Lonely Planet. I imagined no cooler job than a guidebook researcher.

Anything was better than working in the cubicle I was sitting in at the time.

These days, it’s not about how I can keep myself traveling. It’s about how I can help others travel. Every day, the team and I constantly ask ourselves: “How do we help and inspire others to travel cheaper, better, and longer?”

Today, it’s all about you.

But, back then, the only thing I ever said was “How do I help myself?”

So how did I get from a “me centric” to a “reader centric” website?

In those early days, I worked as an English teacher in Bangkok and Taiwan. Blogging was never meant to support me full–time — let alone lead to book deals, conferences, speaking events, and so much more.

In fact, I didn’t care much about this website. I mean, sure, worked on it and didn’t want it to fail. I wanted it to become popular.

But building it into something bigger than myself was not the goal.

Instead, I wanted the dream: passive income. I wanted money to be coming in while I slept.

I was 27 with no responsibilities. I wasn’t looking toward the future. I just wanted the good times to never end.

While I earned a little bit of money from affiliates and selling links on this site (back in those days, you could make a lot of money selling text links to companies looking to artificially increase their Google ranking), I spent most of my time creating AdSense websites, designed solely to get people to click on Google ads. Yes, I was a scammy internet marketer!

I put all that money I made back into these websites — getting people to write articles, optimizing the websites for search, and creating more websites — and lived off my teaching income.

I found keywords that paid well and designed very niche and ugly websites around those subjects. I had websites on teaching English, growing corn, taking care of dogs and turtles, and even raising pigs. At one point, if you went searching for advice on how to train your beagle, every website on the first page was mine.

Yes, those were some weird days. All the content was legit (I hired dog trainer friends to write the articles), but the websites lacked soul.

As time went on, between this website, my teaching job, and those AdSense sites, I made more than enough money, earning upwards of $8,000 a month.

Then one day it all changed.

I was part of this group called the Keyword Academy. It was run by two guys from Colorado, Mark and (I think) a guy named Brad. (We’ll call him Brad for this story.) As part of my membership, we had monthly consulting calls. During one, Brad said, “Matt, why are you building this crap? You know travel. You have a website that people read and like. You have a skill set. Focus on that. This shit is stupid. We only do it because it’s quick cash.”

And he was right. That shit was stupid. All I was doing was taking advantage of the fact that Google couldn’t differentiate spam websites from real websites. Travel was really my passion.

So, in late spring 2009, I shifted my focus back to this blog and, over time, let those other websites die or sold them off. (They made money for about a year after I stopped updating them.)

And, when Google finally learned to filter those spammy websites out, all the people I knew from those days were left with nothing. I have no idea what they do now. It’s certainly not running websites as I’ve never come across their names again.

But the experience taught me some important lessons about creating an online business:

First, until your hobby can pay your rent, don’t quit your day job. There are a lot of people telling you to “follow your passion” — but they neglect to tell you that unless your passion can pay your bills, you should keep your “unpassionate” day job. Teaching English and those scammy websites allowed me to have some income while I focused on “Nomadic Matt.” It wasn’t until the end of 2009 / early 2010 that Nomadic Matt earned enough where I needed no other sources of income.

Second, no matter how good or helpful your blog is, marketing is important. If no one knows how to find your website, it’s all for naught. Those crappy, scammy websites taught me how Google and SEO worked as well as the importance of marketing and messaging. I took that experienced to improve this website, optimizing my content for Google, created products, and started networking with bloggers outside travel.

I think this is one of the things that gave me an edge over other bloggers at this time. While they focused solely on writing and social media, I focused on that as well as SEO. This ensured that I ranked high in search engines, got visitors every day, and helped get my “brand” other there (I got interviewed on CNN once because the writer found me on Google).

And, as I built this community and saw my friends’ incomes collapse with the change of an algorithm, I learned the most important lesson of all: when you create a business that helps others, you create something sustainable and gives meaning and joy to your own life. I hated those other websites but I will work 24/7 on this one because I love what I do.

I don’t agree with basically anything I did in those early days. It was a very scammy way to make money. But I don’t regret one moment of it because it showed me a better way and helped get here. I guess the saying is right. When you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

P.S. – If you’d like to learn how to start a blog the right way, avoid my early mistakes, and get a peek at all the processes and methods I use to continue to grow this website (without scammy ads), check out my blogging course. It gives you all my secrets as well as direct feedback on your website from me and tech support from my tech team.

6 Lessons Learned from 3 Months in China

China is a fascinating and rapidly changing country. Old customs and habits hang on as modern skyscrapers go up every second, the country becomes more of a global powerhouse, and people from around the world move there. Last year, my friend Scott Young, best known as a learning hacker who learned MIT’s entire computer science program in one year, said to me, “I’m going to travel the world for a year and learn languages.” I was thrilled with the idea! Today, he shares what he learned while living in China for three months — and how the media portrays countries is often very wrong.

Recently my friend Vat and I finished a three-month stay in China. The plan was, with minimal preparation, to arrive in China and speak as little English as possible, in order to learn Mandarin Chinese.

We shot a mini-documentary about the experience here:

The trip transformed my perception of China, from the unfair image it sometimes has in the West. In this article, I want to share the biggest lessons I learned about China, life, and travel from that experience.

Once you’re interested in the local culture, people open up more

Originally Vat and I hadn’t planned on going to China at all. We were warned that China might not be the best place to meet friends, because people were unfriendly to Westerners. Instead, we were told to go to Taiwan.

Some visa complications made it impossible to stay the full three months in Taiwan, so we switched to a three-month stay in China at the last minute.

From the first day I arrived in Kunming, I had my perceptions flipped. Far from being insular and hostile to foreigners, people came up to talk to me the first time I went out on the street. It happened to be all in Chinese, so I didn’t understand much, but it did cause me to rethink my assumptions.

As my Chinese improved, this continued throughout my stay, from my landlord introducing me to people who could help us learn Chinese, to getting to know the couple who ran a noodle restaurant nearby.

If you’re interested in other people, their culture, and their language, they’ll be friendly to you. China isn’t an exception.

Don’t judge a country by its media coverage

Hating China is a popular pastime of Western media. Some of the accusations are at least partially true: parts of China are quite polluted, political freedom isn’t the same as in the West, the Internet is firewalled, and some parts of China are quite poor.

I saw a very different kind of China. Kunming, where I lived for most of my stay, wasn’t polluted. I had frank conversations with Chinese people about communism, Tibet, and democracy. Some sites are blocked, but China has its own versions of YouTube, Netflix, eBay, and Google.

China is still developing, but the economic growth means that most people have seen their living standards improve rapidly in the last 20 years. People I spoke with were generally optimistic about the future.

Everything is food here

The relationship with food in China is fascinating, and I was amazed at the diversity of ingredients and flavors.

Western countries tend to simplify Chinese food down to chow mein, fried rice, and General Tso’s chicken. That’s a bit like saying Western cuisine is just burgers and sandwiches.

Chinese food in China, on the other hand, is some of the most varied food on the planet. Not only does regional diversity mean food can change completely from province to province, but nearly every imaginable ingredient finds its way into some kind of Chinese dish. Chicken, pork, beef, and vegetarian dishes are all options, of course, but where else can you eat fried insects, try stewed frog, or shop at a Walmart selling live turtles?

Food is also an avenue for connection. In the West, each individual has his or her own plate, separate from others. In China, each person has a bowl of rice and eats directly from shared plates in the center. While this style of eating makes it hard to dine individually in some restaurants, it creates a communal feeling, making food more than just nutrition.

Chinese is both incredibly interesting and extremely difficult

I won’t lie to you, learning Mandarin Chinese was a struggle. Thousands of characters, with many almost exactly alike. For example, try and spot the difference between these two characters:

Chinese is a tonal language, which means that the intonation doesn’t just change emphasis but also what words mean. My friend went to a restaurant and attempted to order “shu? ji?o” (boiled dumplings) but instead ordered “shuì jiào” (go to sleep).

Finally, few English words borrowed into the language survive unscathed, often sounding completely different from their original. McDonald’s, which is available throughout China, adopts the Chinese name “Mài dàng láo.”

While the Chinese language, like China itself, may seem daunting, it hides one of the most interesting linguistic systems on the planet. Chinese words have a tendency to be built up out of simpler pieces, like building a sentence out of Lego:

• panda = “bear cat” (xióngm?o)
• chameleon = “color change dragon” (biànsèlóng)
• pumpkin = “south melon” (nángu?)
• potato = “soil bean” (t?dòu)
• university = “big learn” (dàxué)
• movie = “electric shadow” (diàny?ng)

With great difficulties also come great rewards. Learning Chinese may have been mind-bending at times, but it also allowed Vat and me to interact with completely different people in China than an English-only perspective would allow.

Near the end of our stay, I conversed over tea with a tattooed Buddhist. Together we talked about Tibet, religion, and cultural differences. That conversation would never have happened had I refused to learn any Chinese.

You can count to 10 with one hand

The language differences extend even to simple gestures. The Chinese, for example, have a system of gestures for counting all the way up to 10 with just one hand.

If you’ve only been counting to five with one hand, you’ve been missing out. The Chinese have a system for counting 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 all with just one hand. Months after leaving China, I caught myself using this method to count things while I held a book with the other hand.

One to five are what you’d expect, but see this video for six to ten:

The first time I saw this, I was in a store and the shopkeeper was telling me the price was 10 yuan, indicating it with forefinger and middle fingers crossed. I saw this several times before I realized they were telling me the price and not just holding out hopes that I’d come back to buy more.

China has the best places you’ve never heard of

Ask people which places they know of in China and most people will raise their hand for Shanghai and Beijing. The more geographically inclined might get Sichuan, Guangdong, or Xi’an. But what about the tropical island of Hainan? The impressive winter festivities in Harbin? The bamboo forests in Chengdu?

It’s arguable that China has the same linguistic and cultural diversity as the entirety of Europe, except far fewer tourists. While — until the last few decades — China’s closed borders made travel in the country a daunting experience, China is full of great places you’ve probably never thought to explore.

I had never heard of Kunming, a “small” city of around seven million in the southwestern province of Yunnan, before researching places to live. It ended up being one of my favorite places I’ve ever lived in, with weather a perpetual spring, mountain temples, and lunch for under a dollar.

My advice: don’t settle just on Beijing or Shanghai as places to visit. Doing a little research online can turn up dozens of places that will offer the Chinese experience for less money and fewer tourists.

Everything you say is right and wrong all at once

I imagine that my American friends from Washington state would probably scoff at the generalization that they’re the same as everyone in Texas (and vice versa). Seattle isn’t the same as Houston. There are enormous variations in culture, food, and even language across the United States.

Now imagine that instead of having a history of a few hundred years as a nation, you had a few thousand. Instead of one or two mutually unintelligible languages, you had dozens, possibly hundreds. Now quadruple the population and you have modern China.

The biggest lesson to learn about China is just how big it is. China is hard to describe because few generalizations are very accurate. Depending on where you go, China will be impoverished or opulent, polluted or pristine, densely packed or nearly isolated. As such, everything I experienced and have written about will be true of some people who go to visit China and false for others.

China began as the backup country when visa complications came up. It ended as a place I can’t wait to go back to.

I can’t sell China as being a perfect experience, free of worries. English is sparse. You need to watch out for pickpockets and scams in the bigger cities. Pollution can be bad. The Internet can be frustrating. But if you want an adventure and a chance to change your mind about the world’s biggest, oldest, and possibly soon-to-be the most powerful nation on Earth, I highly recommend going yourself.

Scott Young writes about learning, travel and productivity at his blog, ScottHYoung.com. He tries to take complex things and make forming habits and learning easy and simple. You can click here to sign up to get a free copy of his ebook detailing strategies to learn anything faster.

7 Things I Learned While Driving Through the American South

The American South has a mixed reputation in U.S. popular culture: it’s home to sweet tea, greasy but delicious food, country music and the blues, friendly and helpful people, and beautiful and diverse landscapes. However, it’s also supposedly filled with guns, racists, bigots, and rednecks, and it’s the subject of other negative stereotypes.

The first time I visited the South was in 2006 on a road trip across the United States. As a liberal Yankee, I wanted the negative stereotypes to be true and my beliefs to be validated. Instead, I found an incredible region of helpful people, a countryside dotted with rolling hills, farms, and forests, and hearty food rich in flavor. From Charleston to New Orleans and everything in between, the South was extraordinary.

Now, nine years later, on another road trip through the South, I wondered if it would provoke the same warm feelings. America is a more politically divided country. The South has drifted to the right politically, and I wondered about heated debates about “that president,” gay rights, and more. Would I feel like a stranger in a strange land?

After spending months exploring the region, I realized that the Southern states, encompassing a large area of the United States, are not as culturally and politically monolithic as they once were. There is prodigious variety here, and the region left me with many impressions:

The food will make you happy

Food plays a central role in Southern life and is rich in both flavor and diversity. Each region has its own specialties — barbecue in Missouri, Memphis, and North Carolina; Creole food and oysters in New Orleans; Cajun food on the Bayou; fried chicken in Nashville; the growing organic food scene in Atlanta; and upscale dining in Oxford, Mississippi. I pictured Southern food as greasy, fried, and heavy fare. While much of it is hearty, the richness in flavor and variety was outstanding. There is something for everyone, and if you go hungry while visiting, it’s your own fault.

Music makes the region go ’round

Music is a way of life here. The sound of live music filled the air everywhere. Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans are famous music haunts, but even the tiniest towns have robust live music scenes. From jazz to country to blues to bluegrass, there’s a music soul to this region. I danced, jammed, and sang, and it was wonderful.

The people really are friendly — There’s a common belief that the South is home to the friendliest people in the country. I’m not sure I believe that, but I would agree that Southerners are certainly friendly. They are cheerful, talkative, and incredibly helpful. Strangers waved hello, inquired about my day, were quick with invites for drinks, and generally made an effort to make me feel welcome. The folks here have hospitality down to an art. Plus, they seem to have an endless supply of sweet tea and I can’t get enough of that stuff!

The landscape is stunning

The Southern landscape is beautiful and diverse. The Smoky Mountains are a vast, dense forest filled with inviting rivers, lakes, and trails. The Louisiana bayou is haunting with moss-covered trees and eerie calm. The hills of Appalachia stretch for wooded miles, and the whole Mississippi Delta, with its swamps, marshes, and biodiversity, is gorgeous. And the beaches of Florida are so white they sparkle. I could spend months hiking and exploring all the parks and rivers in the region. (Mental note to future self: Do that.)

To understand it, you have to understand its past

As a former high school history teacher (I taught right out of college), I was excited to explore the area’s colonial cities and Civil War sites. Cities like Natchez, New Orleans, Vicksburg, Savannah, Memphis, Richmond, and Charleston helped shape the country, and their history and influence are important to the story of America. It was in these cities that many American cultural and political leaders were born, the Civil War began, battles were won and lost, the rise and fall of slavery was sown, and many of the biggest names in American cultural history were born. These cities and their history help explain a lot about Southern pride, culture, and current feelings.

It’s politically conservative — Though the Ashvilles, Nashvilles, Atlantas, Austins, and other big cities of the region have become more liberal (thanks in part to open-minded college students, Northern transplants, and hipsters), the rest of the region has moved more to the right recently. Besides country music, radio options seem to consist only of Christian lectures and music or right-wing talk radio warning of immigrants bringing in polio, evil Muslims, and Obama the antichrist. I overheard many conversations about “that guy” (the President) and “queers.” The big cities may be liberal, but in the rest of the South, it’s as conservative as conservative can be.

It’s racist (but it’s not 1950s violent racist) — I found the racism in the modern South to be more an “off-the-cuff racism” than a deep-seated hatred. It was based on stereotypes that lingered because they simply became habit. From the B&B owner who made an offhand comment about Jews to the guys in Nashville who talked about blacks being workers because “that’s the way it is,” to the folks in Atlanta making fun of gays, to college kids in Mississippi telling me racist jokes (or singing racist songs on buses), most came across simply as unthinking. If asked if their remarks were prejudiced, they would probably say “No, it was just a joke.” But it’s still very offensive. No one seems to question these ideas, which is why these attitudes seem to linger. Does this mean I think everyone is a deep-seated racist? No, not at all. I think the South has made incredible strides towards equality and racism is an issue in many places. While better than it used to be, it’s still very prevalent, and with the move toward the political right, I don’t see it going away anytime soon. I had hoped this stereotype would turn out to be outdated but sadly, it was not.

Despite its flaws, I grow to love the area more with each visit. It’s one of the most culturally rich areas in the country. There’s a reason why its cities are booming.

Go visit the region, get out of the cities, travel through the mountains, and find your way into the small towns. You’ll discover friendly people, heavenly food, amazing music, and an appreciation for a slow pace of life.

Travel breaks down barriers and misconceptions about people and places. The more you travel, the more you understand people (even when you don’t agree with them). The South and I may not agree on a lot of issues, but it’s not the region the negative stereotypes make it out to be. It’s a vibrant, lively, interesting, and friendly part of the United States.

And one more people should get to know.