How To Do China Right

Hey Laowinners!

How's everyone doing? I've recently been helping a friend plan a motorcycle trip through west-central China, and I wanted to talk about me and Winston's strategy on how we got such cool content for our shows etc.

Everyone has heard of "off the beaten path", and this overused phrase doesn't hold a lot of weight in the context of China, because that simply means everything outside of the 1st tier cities and tourist areas like the Forbidden Kingdom in Beijing, the bund in Shanghai, or the Terracotta warriors in Xi'an (all of which are worth seeing by the way). 

Hell, even my city of Huizhou, with 5 million people could be considered adventure travel for a lot of people due to the lack of information about most places in China. When I moved there, I found a 2 line blurb in Lonely Planet saying it was a random small city with a lake, when it was obviously so much more.

But the real enjoyment, the real adventure and discovery comes from not only choosing a place with little to no information about it, but getting off the main roads and heading into the myriad of towns and villages in the middle of nowhere. Let's use an example from Conquering Southern China. 

If you look at Guizhou province (one of the poorest but most ethnically diverse and beautiful provinces in China) on Google maps, you see a few big industrial cities. 

If you were to follow these spaghetti looking lines around the main routes, highways, and even provincial roads, you'd see a lot of this.

Unfortunately, a lot of the dirtier and more polluting industries have moved away from the richer areas, and have sprung up in central and western China; far from the prying eyes of tourists and journalists. It'd leave you with a pretty grim image of the country.

Winston and I know that if we are going to discover something beautiful, it's not going to be on these main roads. So without knowing ANYTHING about a place, we look at a map, zoom in, and we start to see indication that main highways and transport roads stop, and start spidering out into highly populated villages that dot the countryside.

You can see when we zoomed in on a random place on the map of Guizhou province, we see that the S35 (a highway) just stops dead in a city called Weng An. Did we know anything about this place? Absolutely not, but from looking at the map, we know it will be ripe with nature and untouched villages, 9 times out of 10 with awesome people who will go out of their way to show us around.

So in this case, we set out for Weng An knowing nothing about it, and surely enough, when we zoomed in, we found that it was absolutely chock full of strangely named villages on snaking dirt roads through the mountains.

As we rode through the rough terrain, we were greeted with the stuff you only see in movies. The stuff of ancient paintings. No one has made a guide for the areas we were seeing. It was spectacular, like almost every random trip we do with no plan.

The more we delved in, the more remote we got, the more people came out of their homes to greet us. Horse drawn carriages replaced the trucks, and kids ran around the hills, far from cheap Chinese tablets and TV dramas. Coal fired huts filled the air with the unmistakable smell of corn and home distilled alcohol. 

So let's zoom in a bit more. Languanxiang. 

Sure... why not?

Well, just by getting lost and chatting to the friendly and curious locals, we ended up in one of the most the most truly, off the beaten path villages we'd ever seen. The deep and calm river snaked past gorgeous wooden houses, and the sense that China was so much more than the concrete jungles of the cookie cutter cities you can find everywhere felt so real.

Because we took a risk, and threw ourselves into the absolute middle of nowhere, we met some of the coolest people we'd met on that (one of many) trips. And that's how we got one of the best scenes in that particular show - the homemade corn Baijiu distillery. 

There was a bit of "movie magic" in the documentary to push the storyline of how our subscribers told us about this place, but now you know how we really found it. 

We got lost.