My personal mantra even way before I ever started traveling has been: “Always go where the action is.”

Love it or hate it, China is by far the place to find some serious action for your vagabonding buck right now….and if you have a little travel money jingling around in an account and are staring at a map for answers – I highly recommend it.

I was lucky enough to spend 3 adventurous months there in 2007 and left roughly around this time last year. As my wheels left the ground for the last time in Beijing, my feelings were so mixed up that I didn’t know what to write in my journal. All at the same time I felt joy, stress relief (China can honestly wear on you after a few months), sadness at leaving a mystery I had spent so much time trying to figure out, and a loss of something.

Like an ugly, air pollution induced tumor – China had started to grow on me and I hated to see it go.

Despite telling him USA - this man keeps writing "CCCP" He thinks I am Russian.

Just for fun, here are some of my personal notes from this impossible culture:

Communication. Forget about it! Never have I been somewhere that was such a challenge to communicate. Because of the tones and the Chinese refusal to take context into consideration, even if the pronunciation sounds perfect to your Western ears – you will likely receive a blank stare.

Despite my studious efforts, the only place my Chinese was remotely useful was around Beijing or in tourist places where they are used to hearing foreigners butcher their language. Even traveler’s charades don’t work. Mimic a spoon in mid air and you will probably be brought a cigarette. Flap your wings trying to describe chicken in a restaurant and they will probably call an airport taxi for you.

A typical sun and sky in Beijing

Pollution. Breath taking. Eye watering. Apocalyptic. I wish I were exaggerating! The air is so poisonous that many times you literally cannot even see the sun in the middle of the afternoon….you have to assume that the brightest point in the glowing white sky is the source of all life in our solar system. I was actually advised to stay inside while in Tianjin on certain days.

Sometimes it literally looks like fog and you can only see a few meters in front of you. To give some sense of how dire the situation truly is, anything above 50 micrograms of particulate matter (little pieces of unwanted stuff that get stuck in your lungs) per cubic meter is considered unsafe in the United States. A sample in Beijing taken on any random day will average around 140 micrograms! Which leads to the next note:

The area behind the CAFETERIA at our Kung Fu school

Cleanliness. If you want to travel China, you have to learn to clear your sinuses and spit. Or at least get used to other people doing it around you. On sidewalks, trains, buses, even around street food carts, it is a common site to see someone bend over, cover one nostril and empty green mucus onto the floor. I refused for 1 month to cave in and join the sticky side, but thanks to all the happy little particulates lodging themselves in the deepest crevices of my lungs, I was hacking and spitting yellow stuff with the best of them.

Not just spitting either. Public urination is common, and to avoid having to buy (and dispose of) diapers, young children wear split pants and simply do their business on sidewalks and streets like nasty little animals. People of all ages simply drop their rubbish and plastic bags onto the streets on a whim – it is a litterbug’s paradise. There is no wonder this was the birthplace of SARS and there is no doubt in my mind that the next great supervirus is quietly cooking away in some dark Chinese market somewhere as we speak.

Still, despite everything listed above that sounds like a complaint, I couldn’t get enough of this place! It was like being glued to some gruesome, brain chomping zombie flick that you just can’t turn off despite the gore. Every day was a new discovery, a new adventure, and a tiny, ever-so-small glimpse into a place that is about to have a huge impact on the world as we know it.

Kung Fu. I spent 1 month of my time there studying Kung Fu at the famous Xiao Long Shaolin Temple school in Henan province. This place was so bizarre, so inhumanly disgusting, so interesting that I have still yet to figure out how to write about my experiences there. An entire book could be put together just with what I lived for 1 month in this place, but every time I start to it, my fingers cease to move around the keyboard and I find myself drooling unproductively.

Tiger Leaping Gorge in China

Tiger Leaping Gorge. The next 2 months of my visit were spent recovering from my various Shaolin injuries, exploring Beijing, and traveling around the Southwest near Tibet. I wore the same frozen pants literally for several weeks because it never stopped raining sleet and no one could dry their clothes (dryers have not found their way to this part of the world yet.) I teamed up with some friends in Lijiang and we hiked the famous Tiger Leaping Gorge, which was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. The mountains were so breathtaking (both with beauty and high altitude), so snow-covered and magical that sometimes I felt like I was standing on the set of some fantasy movie. But this wasn’t fake – China does it big and it does it beautiful.

A frightening government. Walking through this fascinating place where I watched melting snow give birth to the Yangtze river (a huge source of life throughout Asia) I also felt a terrible sense of dread. At the time, the Chinese government was planning to dam up this majestic gorge which is about the equivalent of the US damming up the Colorado River and sinking the Grand Canyon. Devastating.

He looks so uptight - maybe he should go vagabonding?

They were planning to do this to provide more power to the factories busily producing lead-based toys, poisonous toothpaste, and cranking out the cheap export fodder that we just love snatching off of Walmart’s shelves. As we hiked, gravel trucks rumbled by on the road a thousand feet below us. Work had already begun at displacing thousands of minority (mostly Bai and Naxi) residents who were simply told to leave their ancient homelands or drown. Luckily, due to such tremendous public outcry, the government has halted the project for now.

This was monumental (and in my opinion had something to do with the Olympics and being in the world spotlight) because public outcry does not usually go over very well in China. Think June 4th, 1989 when around 3000 students were gunned down or run over by tanks in Tianamen Square for protesting government corruption. This wasn’t very long ago, yet it cannot be found in a single book, on the internet, or mentioned in China.

The Olympics. As I sat on the curb in front of a small bus stop in the south of China, a white unmarked bus rolled to a stop in a belch of diesel smoke. Two men in uniforms began unloading dozens of scrappy looking passengers with green duffel bags. I found out later that these were homeless people from Beijing being forcefully relocated before the Olympics. After all, the world would be watching, right? Never mind the fact that it was nearly winter and most of these guys were going to be screwed in this part of rural China without a job or home. I still wonder if the Olympic Committee can sleep at night.

The Mao-ster himself.

Chairman Mao. I spent a lot of time walking around that same enormous square in Beijing under the watchful eyes of a giant Chairman Mao portrait hanging on the forbidden city. You have to give it to Chairman Mao. Most guys that are responsible for the butchering of an estimated 10 million human beings would probably be less than popular with the locals, but for some obscene reason he is still worshiped! Despite his death way back in 1976, I would say on an average travel day you will see his face 20x in China. His bald head graces the money, calendars, shirts, and can be found in any public square. The Chinese even line up for hours to view his preserved body in his tomb in Tiananmen Square and shed actual tears for him! He is a madman that simple won’t go away.

The pollution hasn't quite reached Lijiang yet - thank goodness!

In conclusion. Many things have changed in China – some thanks to the awareness created by the Olympics and some because of the new surge of relentless capitalism that is now tolerated in a communist government. There is a buzz in the air (no, its not just the particulate matter) and you can feel that this is a place of energy, change, and momentum. Standing in a large provincial city in China you feel like you are on an out of control ride that is exhilarating to be a part of but bound to explode at any minute.

Luckily, China is still extremely cheap for budget travelers and you can certainly get a lot of adventure, culture, and excitement for your vagabonding dollar. I highly recommend it – go spend a few months eating the dumplings, hiking the mountains, spitting on Beijing sidewalks, and savoring the pollution…..you will never forget it.

(and if you can figure out how to put this place into proper words, tell me!)