The Plan That Nearly Fell Apart Before It Started
I arrived in Beijing with a fever, a craving for xiao long bao, and absolutely no sensible itinerary. Global Hobo's ethos is to chase the experience, not the itinerary, but even I knew 10 days to cover three of China's most geographically dramatic destinations was ambitious. My notebook had three words scrawled on the first page: terracotta, forest, dumplings. Everything else was to be improvised.
The fever broke by day two. Coincidentally, that's when I committed to something properly reckless.
Speed Dating with History (And 8,000 Terracotta Soldiers)
Beijing felt like it was eating me alive. Smog, construction, the sheer gravitational pull of a city of 21 million people. I'd spent two days wandering the Forbidden City in a daze, more interested in the street food vendors outside than the imperial palaces within. My body was telling me to slow down. My itinerary was screaming the opposite.
I booked the Beijing to Xi'an See Terracotta Warriors with Bullet Train Round Trip Transfer Beijing to Xi'an See Terracotta Warriors with Bullet Train Round Trip Transfer almost as an act of defiance. A day trip. Six hours of train time. Two hours to see one of humanity's most extraordinary archaeological sites. On paper, it was the opposite of my travel philosophy. In practice, it was exactly what I needed.
The pickup came at 6:45 AM from my hotel in Chaoyang. My driver, Mr. Wang, didn't speak much English, but he had excellent taste in podcasts—he was listening to something about Chinese industrial history when I climbed in. The bullet train station was already heaving. Thousands of people moving with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine. I felt my anxiety dissolve. This is China's superpower: the infrastructure to move people fast enough that you forget to overthink.
The journey to Xi'an is smooth, almost meditative. Modern train, power outlets, a woman selling tea and instant noodles. I ate three packages of instant noodles and watched the landscape shift from urban sprawl to farmland to something wilder. By the time we pulled into Xi'an, I'd already mentally committed to coming back for a proper visit.
The Terracotta Army hit me like a physical thing. Not just visually—though standing in front of thousands of life-sized soldiers, each with a distinct face, each crafted 2,000 years ago, will absolutely wreck you—but spiritually. An emperor so convinced of his importance that he commissioned an entire underground army. The hubris. The artistry. The absolute bonkers scale of it.
I had roughly 90 minutes inside the main pit. Sounds stingy until you realise that's exactly enough time to feel awe without succumbing to museum fatigue. I took photos like everyone else. I also spent 20 minutes just sitting on a bench, watching a British pensioner ask his wife detailed questions about manufacturing techniques. The drive back, the train ride home, Mr. Wang waiting with my name on a sign—it all felt dreamlike. By 9 PM, I was back in Beijing, unpacking my bag, still half-convinced I'd imagined the whole thing.
Shanghai: The Breakfast That Changed Everything
I'd eaten a lot of Chinese breakfast before Shanghai. Youtiao (fried dough). Congee. The occasional bao. But I'd never had breakfast as a sport.
Enter the Shanghai Breakfast Walking Tour of Former French Concession Shanghai Breakfast Walking Tour of Former French Concession. Three hours. Fifteen breakfast spots. A neighbourhood that felt like it existed in a different century than the one outside its borders.
My guide was a woman named Jade who'd lived in the French Concession her entire life. She moved through those tree-lined streets like she was navigating her own memory. She knew which bakery did the best egg tart (crispy base, creamy filling that somehow didn't slump), which hole-in-the-wall did sheng jian bao with pork so tender it fell apart on the tongue, which vendor at the wet market made jianbing crepes that would make you believe in reincarnation.
What struck me most wasn't the food itself—though Christ, the food—but the intimacy of it. Jade knew the owners. They knew her. She'd been eating at some of these places for forty years. We'd arrive somewhere, she'd order for the table without asking what we wanted, and inevitably, she'd be right. A woman who'd mastered the art of understanding what her body needed at 7 AM.
There was one moment, about two hours in, where I was standing in a cramped shop eating my fourth dumpling variety, jotting notes, photographing everything, when Jade gently suggested I just eat for a bit. No pictures. No notes. Just taste.
I did. The dumpling was pork and chive. Nothing revolutionary. Everything revolutionary.
The Peaks That Swallowed Me Whole
Zhangjiajie hit different.
I'd seen the photos. Everyone's seen the photos. Those towering sandstone pillars, the mist, the sense that you're walking through another planet. Avatar was filmed here. I expected a theme park. I got a cathedral.
The 1-Day Private Tour to ZJJ National Forest Park & Avatar Mountain 1-Day Private Tour to ZJJ National Forest Park & Avatar Mountain picked me up from my hotel in Zhangjiajie city at 8 AM. My guide was a man named Chen who'd grown up in the region and moved back specifically to do this work. He had a theory—which he explained while we hiked—about why Westerners fell in love with these mountains while many Chinese tourists rushed through them.
"You come expecting magic," he said. "You are not disappointed. Chinese people come expecting to see the place their ancestors saw. Sometimes that is disappointing because ancestors are just ancestors."
I considered this while scrambling up a stone staircase that felt vertical. My thighs considered it too. They did not enjoy the consideration.
But Chen was right. The hike wasn't just a hike—it was a negotiation with something that had been there for millions of years. The mist rolled in around noon, turning the world grey and featureless. You could be anywhere. You could be nowhere. I understood why people built temples here. Why they came to meditate. Why the mountains called to them.
We ate lunch at a small pavilion overlooking a valley. Instant noodles. A hard-boiled egg. Exactly what I needed. Chen told me stories about tourists who'd proposed at these viewpoints, children who'd run screaming with joy, elderly people who'd hiked all this way just to stand in silence. The mountains, he said, were good at bringing out what was true in people.
The Brush, The Ink, The Moment Everything Stopped
Back in Beijing, on my last full day, I booked something I initially resisted: the Noon Calligraphy Class Noon Calligraphy Class.
Calligraphy felt like the opposite of my travel style—too controlled, too precious, too likely to be set in a studio with other tourists and a guide with a rehearsed speech. But I'd just spent nine days moving at sprint speed. Bullet trains, nature hikes, breakfast expeditions. My nervous system was fried.
I showed up at the studio expecting the worst. Got the opposite.
My teacher was a woman named Professor Liu who was roughly 400 years old and absolutely did not care that I was a tourist. She cared that I was holding my brush wrong. She cared that I wasn't thinking about the stroke before I made it. She cared that I was trying to rush.
For 90 minutes, I made mistakes. Basic strokes. Character compositions. My attempt at a landscape poem looked like a drunk person's fever dream. But something happened around the second hour—I stopped thinking about the outcome. I just focused on the movement. The pressure of the brush. The relationship between my hand and the paper and the ink and the intention.
It's hard to overstate how rare that feels, for a travel writer. I'm always observing, always thinking about the narrative, always performing in my head. The calligraphy stripped all that away. There was just the moment, repeating itself over and over, until I got a single stroke right and Professor Liu nodded her approval.
She didn't charge extra when I stayed 20 minutes late, trying to perfect one character.
The Lesson in the Chaos
I left China with the fever back, my notebook full, my body exhausted, my mind somehow quieter.
The formula sounds like it shouldn't work: bullet trains and breakfast walks and mountain hikes and calligraphy classes. Too scattered. Too American in its consumption. But what I learnt—what China itself taught me—is that you don't have to choose between speed and depth. You can rush toward experiences and still be present inside them. You can eat your way across a city and still taste something real. You can see 8,000-year-old soldiers in a single afternoon and still feel haunted by them.
I spent ten days chasing. I ended up finding something quieter: the understanding that the real adventure isn't in the distance you cover. It's in the moments you actually stop.
