Hello everyone, in the town of Zoige at the moment, on the northern edge of Sichuan province. Feeling rather ill - I think an one and off stomach upset has gathered its forces and finally attacked. Need to see a doctor soon, once I arrive in Langmusi where there are English speakers. Zoige is a great town, the dark Golok people dress wildly.

I've been travelling for almost eight months now, I wanted to write something about what it feels like, and about some general things that make up my life as a traveller.

It's strange, my old life does feel very distant now. Some things seem much clearer with time - there are projects that I struggled with at the Bank of England that now, looking back, it occurrs to me that I should have approached completely differently, that with distance comes greater clarity. Things in my personal life, dealings with people, many actions I took make me smile with their oddness to my current eyes.

I feel very much like a traveller at the moment, in the sense of it being my occupation (it's admittedly not a very well paying position). It isn't really possible to view this as a break from something, as I don't know how or when it's going to end. I think switching continents has played a massive part in making me see myself as this travelling person - the last place I was familiar with is no longer England. It also has been very helpful, I think, in maturing me as a traveller. It's easier to disbelieve hype and scary stories, once you've heard them on two utterly different continents.

I feel frequently disconnected from the rest of the world. I remember powerfully, on my last night in Costa Rica, sitting at a pedestrian crossroads, feeling so totally apart from the night-time strolling crowds around me. I look at my hotel room some nights, my stuff spread out if as if my rucksack has hatched unruly children, and realise these are all my material possessions - soon to be packed back in as I head on. It's also always amazing to me how much rubbish I get rid of in each city.
Quickly the traveller has been to more places in a country than its typical native has - I show Chinese students photos of their own country, they tell me they would love to be able to do what I am doing (in China that is, let alone travelling the world). It perhaps sounds odd, but I often find sailors very easy people to talk to about what I am doing. My list of visited cities, to many people a list marvelous and fearsome, are just dots their ship might have stopped at.

There are things one gets better at with time, as with all jobs. I think I've got better at finding things out about the places I visit. I tend, for example, to store up questions and riddles and when I find someone with good English, I politely drill them for answers. I think I'm getting better at being memorable - by that I mean I spend less time being the typical backpacker or foreigner to people, less time hiding myself. The traveller doesn't have the luxury of time to come out of one's shell - otherwise, it's a pale diet of the standard questions, "so where in England are you from"? There are also techniques, I think, that help build connections in a place quickly. Going to the same restaurant a few times over a couple of days and the staff start to greet me like a friend; walking the streets of an area each day and people get used to seeing me. There's no way to say this without sounding cheesy, but politeness and a big smile are far more valuable than any phrasebook.

There are things I wish I was better at, however. I am quite disorganised and bad at keeping my stuff together. Various possessions have departed from my rucksack, possibly stolen, but more likely just left forgotten in a hostel room. Usually it is things not used in ages, as if they got fed up of being ignored and went back to England in search of a better owner. I wish them well. I wish I had a better attitude towards money, either caring about it less, so I didn't worry about it, or caring about it more, so I didn't spend as much. More on the money topic later.
People often talk about becoming "a hardened traveller" - this has certainly happened with changing my clothes. I now have little problem (in cold climes) with sleeping fully dressed and rising the next morning unchanged, merely checking my hair isn't too messy before heading out. Something I've become less hardcore about, however, are my bowels. Early in Mexico, I just waited a bad stomach out, never even thinking of going to a doctor. But in southern Mexico and Guatemala, I met enough people whose stomach problems weren't going away after weeks, and I had my own forceful upset too, which I was told by a doctor wouldn't have got better on its own. As a result, I've found I'm a lot more cautious now.

Bertha and I work out where to go next:

Two thorny issues

I think one of the hardest things to do as a traveller is to balance protecting oneself with being open to the countries one is visiting. Clearly, one doesn't want to put oneself in physical danger, risk losing possesions or get ripped off - but if one starts to see a journey as "them vs us", then the colour and brightness of travel starts to fade. Occasionally I meet travellers so cynical or world weary that I wonder how they ever talk to locals - too sure of being conned or food poisoned or insulted. Equally, one meets travellers who when I meet their gaze immediately look away from me - I wonder what they expect the risk of looking at me will be? As a traveller, one is frequently not in control of as many aspects of one's life as one would like. I think a large part of dealing with this is to just relax and accept it: in a crowded market I walk where the push sends me, on a packed bus I just keep possessions close and share a grin with the old man wedged up against me, faced with a bizarre looking meal, try to smile and count this as an experiement,

Another difficult thing for the traveller, and to do it well is perhaps the holy grail, is how to have deep and memorable experiences in the places one goes to. It is certainly possible to travel around experiencing little, remembering only the vague similarity of one place to the previous. I met a German traveller just before I went to the Mexican city of Durango - he warned me, "it's just another city". But I was meeting an friend of a friend, so had a fantastic time chatting to University students and going to a truly unique and truly crazy rodeo nightclub.
Equally, this works in the other direction: I went to the monastery in Zhongdian and found it much like a museum, only able to describe the art on the walls; my friend Nurit went and became a confidant and abettor to a doomed romance between a Chinese girl and a local monk.
Part of this is I suppose luck, being in the right place, coming across the right person. But I think one has to believe that it is mainly about being a certain type of person. The traveller who remains open to people and weird circumstances, who gives off an air of welcome, who is flexible enough to say, "let's follow this strange development for a while", who doesn't judge people too quickly - this holy grail may be their reward. The truely memorable experiences, the stories that make me stiffen with envy when I am told them, always seem to be stories involving experiences with people one meets on one's travels, or internal experiences when something genuinely challenged the person. Hence, I dislike doing many set backpacker activities, because the likelihood of meeting local people not numbed by the river of tourists seems low, and what self challenge is there, if you are going to follow everyone else to look at a volcano or do a set hiking trail?

Looking at maps and talking to people

What is travelling without a guidebook like? I should say immediately that I am not shunning guidebooks - I read a bit about my next few destinations if my hostel has a copy on the shelf. But, if only on a day to day basis, I am not carrying or consulting one. I just got to the point back in Central America where I got sick of everyone, including myself, moaning about their Book but remaining utterly tied to it. I decided that I would try and travel around without one - people must have done that once, after all.

It is nowhere near as difficult as one might imagine, even in China. The key is finding information from other sources. A good map is very nice and it also indicates the ridiculousness of limiting oneself to a tourist trail. I find myself getting better, as a result of being LPless, at finding local people with good English and asking all the questions I can think of from them. You perhaps think that seems a lot of work, but the fruits are worth it. It was, for example, ego swelling in Songpan when travellers ask me, "Which company did you chose for the horse trek?", relying on the info from their LP published back in 2002, and I reply, "Actually, I've been told they've merged, so it doesn't really matter which office you book in".
The additional benefit of not having a guidebook in your rucksack is that it really does break their magical authority, as though I've stepped to the side of the stage and can see the wires. When I actually do leaf through, it feels far more like consulting a information source to answer a question, rather than consulting an oracle to find a destiny. The absurdity of the Lonely Planet advising travellers on which of the free breakfasts to choose in Chengdu's Traffic Hotel made me laugh out loud - I'd hate to think people are using a visit by the LP from back in 2002 (or quite possibly even earlier) to help them navigate whatever food the Traffic Hotel is serving in early 2004.

Now, something specifically on the Bible

You may have got the impression over some of my diary entries I don't especially like the Lonely Planet. That would be a correct impression, but I don't just want to cast snide aspersions groundlessly, so here is a little bit about the LP China's advice for Li Jiang and why I think it is an good example of the LP often being A Bad Thing.

The LP China's section on Li Jiang reads: "Your initial response when you pull into town and roar towards the bus station may well be: "Get me out of here!". It's not until you get into the old town - a delightful maze of cobbled streets, rickety old wooden buildings, gushing canals and the hurly-burly of market life - that you realise Lijiang is more than a boring urban sprawl in the middle of nowhere".
Just to quickly take another example, the paragraph on the nearby Dr Ho is wonderfully caustic and snide. Now, that may well be true, he may just be a doddering old boy with crap tea, and Li Jiang's old town may well be delightful, but LP presents its opinion pretty much as fact, so on some level is the traveller arriving with an viewpoint already contructed? This isn't guiding travellers or protecting them from risky situations, this is doing the trip for us.
Perhaps there isn't a necessarily a problem with strong opionions, but the LP China doesn't seem to be updated that frequently. My Chengdu hostel had some back issues of the LP, and the 2000 edition says, bar slightly less emotive wording, exactly the same thing about Li Jiang. Now, maybe four years ago, Li Jiang old town could well have been a lovely and authentic Naxi town, but really, it isn't any more, and a Naxi girl we met in LuGu Hu lamented this very transformation when I asked her what she thought of her home.
My second problem is how the LP, more than any other guide book I've read, encourages the whole backpacker trail mentality. Going back to that section I quoted, at least since the 1991 edition, the LP China has been dismissing Li Jiang's new town as "a boring Chinese town in the middle of nowhere". Myself and Tim wandered around the new town wondering why it deserved such slander - it isn't crowded or dirty, there are lovely people, useful shops, good restaurants. It certainly doesn't have the Champs Elysses or the lost city of Petra, but this is China, why does the LP assume travellers spend all day wanting to escape from China to tourist bars with banana pancakes and Bob Marley?
Perhaps a Chinese town in the middle of nowhere is exactly what some travellers might remember most from their trip, perhaps visiting a boring urban sprawl is an essential part of visiting China?

To run on with this theme in a more general sense: If a traveller said to me, "I've been everywhere in England! I've slept in a thatched cottage in the Cotswolds, I've gone walking on Dartmoor, I spent a day in Brighton to see the Royal Pavillion, I've done the London Eye, the British Museum and seen Tony Blair talk in the House of Commons", I think I would not be cruel to muse silently, well, no, you haven't actually seen ANYTHING of England. The Royal Pavillion and Dartmoor may be wonderful, but that (and this is of course me at my most opinionated) isn't travelling in a country. How are you going to get the taste and the smell of a country? How are you going to have some understanding of the drunken violence in English towns after 11pm? How will you understand why so many people find Jamie Oliver annoying? How are you going to notice that English people would far happier scream down a mobile phone their hatred of someone while sitting in the middle of a packed bus, than, while sitting at home, ring an old friend and discover they'd interrupted them when they were in the bath? "Oh God I'm sorry, can I call you back"?
How are you going to sense that indescribable intoxicating uniqueness that places in the world have? Words fail the travelling diarist trying to describe what a place is really like, how it feels so different to what home is, everything written is just approximations and crudities, pebbles thrown at the moon. How is that Honduras just feels so totally different to Guatemala, and feels more subtly but no less in essence different to Nicaragua? How can you soak up a place so that if a spaceship suddenly dropped you somewhere on the Earth, you'd look around, observe the people, the weather, the surrounding, and then maybe say, "I think I'm in Honduras"? These are questions and I'm well aware I don't have the answers, but one thing I'm pretty sure of is that following the Lonely Planet's opinions from "recommended unique site" to "backpacker hangout" and back again is not it.

Ok, now on a less polemical note

Now I've cleared that off my chest, I'm like to talk about money. And anyway, I sometimes wonder if there is a huge benevolent conspiracy at the Lonely Planet: encouraging travellers to stay in the same few spots in order to save the rest of the world from tourism...?
Anyway, money. Money is one of the stranger things about being a long term traveller. In one sense, you desperately hoard it, stay in the cheapest countries, decide not to pay to see things you will never have the chance to see again - but, equally, you are so incredibly rich it defies comparison. I find it rather awkward to describe myself as a budget traveller, knowing I am walking among thousands, nay, billions of people that would love to have that budget.
Even among the fellow rich, the "budget traveller" is surely richer. If part of wealth is to be free from the chains of money, then the backpacker, who takes a half or whole year off work, in order to see more than many people born in their country will see in their lifetime - are they not the wealthiest? A large part of my feeling of separation from all those people during that last night in Costa Rica was my sudden sensing that everyone was tied to things, tied to money - and I wasn't. To boast about how "hard core" one is, how deeply "roughing it" one went, is to obscure how incredibly privileged we travellers are. China seems a society that thinks a lot about money and about how to get rich, and people ask me endlessly, "How can you afford to travel for so long"? (They usually think I'm merely travelling around China for perhaps several months, I rarely have the heart to tell them the full, unbelievable horror.) I tell them, well, I lived with my parents for over a year and saved as much as I could - they look at me as if to say, "And"? I try then to convey how fantastically expensive London is compared to Chengdu - the cheapest Chinese meal is around 75 yuan (as opposed to 2) - but this only a reinforcement of what different planet Earths we come from.

But, having talked about how rich I feel being a traveller, equally, there is no doubt that this wealth comes from a relatively finite pool of savings, one which is inexorably and indeniably running out. Don't be alarmed, I can still afford to travel for quite some time - but this life cannot last forever. To say I spend between 300 and 600 pounds a month, compared to what I guess many of us spend on a two week holiday, it seems pretty frugal. But that means each couple of months, I look at my bank account and it's shrunk by several hundred pounds - it's hard to laugh that off and not worry about money. Equally, although I could find work, what kind of job will allow me to save travelling-level money - eg 300 pounds a month? So the length of time I can travel for, rather than being a nomadic working type person, does seem kind of fixed.

I'm finding it very hard to be a generous person at the moment. I don't think generosity was ever one of my biggest virtues, but it's been hard not to instinctively see anything given to me as just a contribution to the difficult task of staying within the day's budget. There are so few days where I go significantly under budget, so many where a relatively big purchase is needed, that it's hard to feel money is ever available to give anything back. I give money to beggars occasionally, usually to disabled adults, I offer people help where I can and share my possessions with other travellers - but it's hard to restrain a grimace when fellow travellers start passing my sun cream around and smear it on generously.

Some books I read before this trip began talked about what the traveller should give up in order to keep costs low. Indeed, the traveller who could give up coffee, tea, beer, cigarettes (tobacco and the other kind) and ate only staple cheap meals, would unquestionably save a fortune. However, I've met few people who have approached that. I met an English guy in Mexico who prepared every meal in his hostel room with a portable cooker - his girlfriend had travelled with him for five weeks and had never tasted a Mexican dish. Although I was very impressed with his discipline, he also liked to drink beer every night - so this was maybe more about allocation of funds than avoiding expenditure.
I would also ask the monk traveller what they do all day. I personally love to relax with a cup of coffee or tea, try local dishes, sit and write in somewhere like a teahouse - these take up money, but I see them as firstly essentials to maintain sanity, and secondly as valuable experiences in their own right. If you never go to a Tibetan restaurant in China, how will you discover Tibetan restaurants and tea houses absolutely insist on loud music playing on a big tv, frequently with the lyrics scrolling kareoke style at the bottom?
How much of those 16 odd hours not sleeping can be spent sitting on benches watching the world go by?

Beyond those luxuries like nice food, the traveller is also limited on how truly they is able to take advantage of local low prices. Are you going to buy cheap sunglasses that may not protect your eyes at all - or are you going to splurge on expensive ones that only rich people in that country wear? If you get ill, will you go to a pill dispensing cornershop, where they will give you a fistful of anonymous tablets - or go to a private doctor who speaks English?
Money is just something you spend - as much as I am always wishing I could make do on three or four pounds a day, one has to be realistic with the kind of lifestyle one is willing to make do with.

With my financial well slowly evaporating, the current plan goes as follows. There are countries I desperately want to visit, and countries I feel I really want to see as possible new places to live for a while. These two groups include: Kashgar and its Central Asian bazaar on the westmost border of China, Thailand, India, the Philippines, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. So: Travel to Kashgar on the edge of China, over one or two more months and then turnaround and probably fly back to Chengdu. Travel down to Laos and then into Thailand. Take courses on cooking and massage in the northern Thai town of Chiang Mai, apparently an IKEA of short courses for travellers. Then after Thailand, perhaps fly to Manila, and go to the "summer capital" of the Philippines in the north. The Phippines sound one of the most fascinating countries in Asia - I suspect I may not want to leave for a while. But assuming I do, with autumn beckoning, fly back to Bangkok and on to that chaotic and serene giant, India, and spent autumn and winter, several months, slowly exploring and immersing. By early 2005, my money will be rather low, so it will be a choice of one final journey somewhere, or find work. My plan is to go to Japan and teach English, then go on to Australia, and see what the standard destination for the disatisfied English person (other than the Spanish coast, of course) is really like. However, as those of you who have been following my travels so far will realise, these plans are not worth the paper they're typed on, but then having flexible plans is half the point of this adventure, anyway.

Writing

One of the most unexpected and enjoyable developments of this RTW travelling is how big a part writing has become of it. I started off with a relatively vague idea that I would write home and tell people about my travels. Over a talk in Ken Wood, my friend (and literary mentor) Gari essentially asked me if I was going to write something standard and probably rather forgettable, or try to really capture what it was all like, both for myself and others. I replied I wanted to do it properly - to which he warned me I was taking on a big commitment.
It is a big time commitment, but, as it is something I enjoy intensely and time is something I have lots of, that is the mildest of problems. It's strange, back in London I kept a diary in a thick blue bound book. I wrote in it maybe twice a month, recording major events, dilemmas, in a rather prosaic tone. I just found the urge to write all but impossible to locate in London, wheareas when travelling, it is now almost painful not to compose accounts of what has occurred. I don't write every day, and some days little comes forth, but on enough occasions, it feels as though I have a carafe of dark wine in my hand and I need only to pour it over paper for the pages to fill with words. I also imagine my solitude helps fuel the writing: words meant to be born from my mouth find life through my fingers.

In my last days in Costa Rica, I bought a portable typewriter, and I compose most of my articles with it now. I got tired of spending hours in internet cafes typing, when I figured I could be spending hours in real cafes typing. It's an AlphaSmart 3000, a very simple device with a small screen that remembers what I write, and when cabled up to a computer, types it all out at high speed on to Word or a similar program. It doesn't do anything else, but it's light, sturdy and runs off a few batteries for ages. Its dark green colour prompted me to call it George, not sure why, and there's no relation to the Bush family, I can assure you. Some travellers carry a guitar along with them, I'm carrying a child's typewriter.

From what I've posted to Bootsnall, I've been getting about one email a week from a new internet reader (plus the people that leave comments on the site itself), saying they are enjoying reading or asking for travel advice, which is very nice. I've had two negative emails, one very early on, lambasting me for promoting alcoholism and one more recently, saying I sound like a spoiled brat. I don't mind the criticism as much as the name calling - I wonder whether these two expected me to reply, but they left me so little to work with, I didn't know where to start. I've tried to reply to everyone else who's emailed me. I often get the feeling it's all a big hoax, my friends from home making up email addresses and pretending to be from South Dakota, Dublin etc. I toy with setting tests for any new internet emailer: "If you say you're from Toronto, then I guess you'll be very familiar with..."

It's kind of challenging writing for two audiences. Although I would write all this were no one reading it, I am aware of the sorts of things the two groups like to hear about. My internet readers say things, "Wow, I can't wait for the next one", or, "Do I have to change buses in Tuxtla to get to San Christobal"? My friends say things like, "Bloody hell Daniel, that email was even longer than the last one!" or, "I save your emails up till I have time somewhere to read them". My Bootsnall readers love the introspective articles, the doubts, the ruminations - when I send those kind of emails home I get comments from friends such as, "ENOUGH navel gazing!", or alternatively, that I sound like someone suffering from solitary confinement disorder. What my friends from home seem to like are amusing incidents, highly detailed exotic escapades, but above all, smut. From very early on, they were insistent that they wanted an account of every salacious encounter my school boy charms were able to generate. Every mention of an attractive woman, no matter how vague or brief, brings call for details and demands for more action in later emails. Attempting, with the very limited material that my life actually contains at present, to satisfy these slavering dogs, then creates problems over on the internet side. Such as when a certain blonde English girl who teaches in China reads about young women that, entirely coincidentally, came along a bit later after she and I parted company.
Both groups are, in all seriousness, extremely encouraging, which is incredibly appreciated by me. Although, I notice that my ex-work colleagues tend to phrase this in terms such as, "If only your Bank of England notes had possessed such clarity"...

I am really enjoying writing at the moment, wondering from time to time if it will be possible to make some money from telling these stories. Not sure how to go about it, and quite conscious that every backpacker and their slavering dog wants to become a travel writer. We will see, but for certain, a writing commission would probably alter the above described route plan completely.

Best wishes and thanks for reading

Daniel, Zoige, 18 March