The day I finally left
On 15 December, a little after two in the afternoon, a minibus came to the gate of my compound and took me away. It was the first time in 282 days that anything had come to that gate for me.
I counted the days, because I had the time to count them. From the day I came back in March to the day I left in December was nine months, 282 days, and in all of that time I had not left Rushan Silver Beach once. Not to Weihai, the city two hours up the coast. Not even to Rushan town, the county seat twelve kilometres inland. The furthest I had got in nine months was a bicycle ride in April to a fried chicken place in the county town and back, and that took an afternoon. I wrote 282 diary entries in those 282 days. I did not miss one.
Then, on the 283rd day, I left. Nothing had gone wrong. Two things had happened instead: it had got cold, and I had got bored.
The cold I could measure. My flat has no central heating, and by mid-December the indoor temperature in the morning is five or six degrees Celsius. That is survivable — I had survived four winters of it — but it is also the sort of thing you start thinking about in October.
The boredom was harder to measure and worse. Nine months of the same beach, the same market, the same six hundred metres of street, and the mind starts to turn on itself. When I stay too long in one place, I overthink. Not in a poetic sense. In the sense that questions I have already answered come back and ask themselves again, and I sit in a cold room at eleven at night arguing with a version of myself who has nothing new to say.
The cure is always the same. Buy a ticket. Get on something. Go and look at people who are not me.
There was one more reason that December, and it was not philosophical. A friend of mine was about to leave Dali, in the far southwest, and while he was still there he had somewhere I could sleep. If I went before he left, I saved on accommodation. So on 15 December, 282 days after I came back, I packed a rucksack and got into the minibus.
Why I go, and why I could not before
This is not travel in the way most people mean it. I have no list of places I must see before I die.
I go somewhere else and walk around it. That is the whole method. In Xiamen I walked 38,000 steps in a day because I did not know where I was going. In Qingdao I walked 40,000. I walk until my legs hurt, eat something cheap, sleep, and walk again the next day. What I am doing is wearing myself out in unfamiliar streets until I stop thinking about my own life.
There are two reasons I leave, and neither is the reason people give.
The first is weather. This coast has four real seasons and two of them are a test. January in a flat with no heating is cold; July is humid and full of tourists. The beach I came here for — empty, clean, quiet — is not the beach in July.
The second is the head. A person with no job, no appointments and no obligations has a great deal of unused mental capacity, and it does not sit idle. It goes looking for work. Mine goes looking for problems. It finds them — in 2019, in 2015, in things that were settled years ago.
For most of my adult life, leaving was locked twice. Work was the first lock: a job does not take forty hours a week, it takes the two days you are given back, and it decides that the cheap weeks are exactly the weeks you cannot go. I did my travelling inside national holidays, at the worst times, at the highest prices, in the largest crowds.
The pandemic was the second lock. Between 2020 and the end of 2022 you could not simply buy a ticket and go. You needed a green code that said where you had been, a test recent enough to count, a registration at every door. I left Beijing in October 2022 and it took documents to do it.
Then in December 2022 the rules came off, nearly all of them, in about ten days. Three years of machinery, switched off. I had done my part before that — I had quit in September and left the city in October. So the two locks opened within weeks of each other, and I was standing in front of the door.
The first year: learning how to leave
I did not go anywhere for the first three months. From 26 October, when I arrived, to 25 January, I stayed in the strip; I had not even been to the county town. What I had done was get through the coldest part of the winter, alone, in a flat with no heating, and by the end of January I felt I had proved something.
On 25 January I sat in my flat, decided I was bored, opened the ticket app, and found a train that worked. The next morning I was on a bus to Weihai.
I went to Lhasa. If you are making a list of sensible first trips from a small town on the Shandong coast, it is not on it. It is on the other side of the country, it sits at 3,650 metres, and the train takes two nights. But Tibet was the one place I had wanted to see my whole life and had never seen, and the logic that January was simple: if not now, when.
The cost, since this book is partly about costs:
- minibus from my compound to Weihai, 30 yuan (about $4)
- Weihai to Taiyuan, high-speed rail, 384.5 yuan (about $53)
- Taiyuan to Lhasa, hard seat, 323 yuan (about $45) — I got on, discovered I could not sit up for two nights, and paid another 337 yuan (about $47) to move to a sleeper
- Lhasa hostel, five men to a room, 101 yuan a night (about $14)
Total to get there and sleep: about 1,300 yuan, about $180.
I spent six days. I had no altitude sickness in Lhasa at all — I walked the old town and up to the Potala and felt nothing. It was on the day trip to the lakes that it hit me. Yamdrok sits at 4,400 metres; Punyum Tso, next to it, is at 5,000, and in January it was frozen solid, thick enough to walk on, with a warning at the checkpoint that people had gone through the ice during a warm spell. I walked out onto it, and within ten minutes my head was pounding and I could not get my breath. Two men in the group fell over. I did not, which I put down to luck.
After that the year turned into a rhythm I did not know I was setting.
Qingdao, in February, four days — the first time I passed through Rushan town, four months after moving to the county. A private minibus runs from the strip to the airports and stations, 100 yuan a head (about $14), and picks you up at your gate.
Xiamen and Quanzhou, in March, a week, both on the Fujian coast. I wanted to see whether the sea in the south differed from the sea in the north. It does: warmer, wetter, much more built up. Lunch at Yantai airport was a chain curry chicken rice for 43 yuan (about $6), which I noted in my diary as extravagantly expensive.
Beijing and Jiagedaqi, at the end of August, two weeks. This was the trip where I found out something about myself I had not expected.
I had spent the previous five months on the coast without leaving, and I did not want to go. The diary entry from the day I left says so plainly: the place is so comfortable and so free that I do not think anywhere else is better than it, and there is no need for me to go anywhere, to travel or to live. I wrote that, and then got on a bus anyway, because of a vague sense that a person is supposed to move around and see things.
So the trip had a purpose: go and find out whether anywhere else is worth it.
Beijing I did not like. I had lived there for years and had no wish to live there again. The air was bad, the heat was bad, there were too many people, and they were a different species from the people I had spent a year among — pale, indoor, soft in a way that people who work outside in the wind are not. I sat in a subway car and watched a hundred people look at their phones and not at each other. The reason I wrote down for ending that part of the trip was not the heat or the air. It was that nobody there was going to buy me dinner, and I could not afford to buy them dinner.
From Beijing I took a train north to Jiagedaqi, in the Greater Khingan mountains of the far northeast, close to the Russian border: twenty-four hours on the slow line, on a train that sells rice wine from the trolley. The name is Evenki and means the place where there are pine trees.
I had a real reason for going, and it was not sightseeing. I had been seriously considering moving there. It had everything on my list — very few people, clean forest, cheap living in the abstract — until I did the research and found the thing that killed it. The rent is not low, and the winter is long and you pay a great deal for heating. In Rushan Silver Beach the rent is three or four thousand yuan a year (about $420 to $560) and the sea is free. So Jiagedaqi became a two-day visit instead of a life. I walked a town you can cross on foot in two or three hours, then took a night train out, because a bed on the train is cheaper than a bed in the town.
Xinjiang, in October, ten days. This was the pure version of the thing — the trip with no purpose whatsoever. I wrote at the beginning of it: going out is not about going to some particular place, it is just about going out; after you have been in one place a long time, you have to go and look at something else.
I bought the ticket for 1 October, the first day of the national holiday, because it was the cheapest day of the week — everyone else had left on the 29th and 30th. Then Urumqi, then Kashgar on an eighteen-hour sleeper, then the Pamir road south, where the lakes sit at 3,600 metres with a 7,500-metre mountain behind them, then Turpan, where the thermometer read 43°C.
And then I came home, and wrote the sentence that the budget section of this chapter is really about. If I want to save money, I cannot leave again. This year I went out a great many times, and spent a great deal, and earned almost nothing. I also came home to three carrots in the fridge that had sprouted in the ten days I was away.
The last trip that year was the smallest. In mid-December I took a bus ninety minutes up the coast to Weihai — 30 yuan, about $4 — and stayed in a budget hotel at 78 yuan a night (about $11), because I wanted to see the snow. Weihai and Yantai are known in this province as the snow nests; that coast takes the north wind head-on and gets buried. I joined a 68-yuan day tour and stood on a headland where the wind was the strongest I have ever been in, anywhere in my life — off the Yellow Sea, below zero, with nothing between it and me but a railing. The next day a blizzard closed the buses and I stayed an extra night. Six days, a little over 500 yuan (about $70), and I would do it again.
The long one
In October of the second year, my lease ran out. The landlord offered to renew at 3,500 yuan for the year (about $490) — cheaper than the year before, which tells you what the rental market here is like. I said no, packed, and left the coast.
I did not think I was going on holiday. I thought I was going to look at the country properly, for the first time since I had stopped working, and find out whether there was somewhere better. It turned into 135 days.
Beijing first, for a long while. A relative had an empty flat in a village outside the sixth ring road, at the foot of the mountains, with heating. I did very little there: walked the fields, looked at the hills, ate, slept. It is not a bad place to be if your only project is to think.
Yunnan next, because a friend was in Dali and kept telling me to come. I had been once, more than a decade earlier, for three days, and remembered almost nothing except a fireplace in a hostel. This time I stayed properly: ten days in Dali, on the floor of his rented room in a former village; five days in Lijiang; a run up to Shangri-La and the Meili Snow Mountain; five days in Xishuangbanna, on the border with Laos and Myanmar. Then back to Beijing for seventeen days of doing nothing.
Then, at the end of December, a train from Beijing to Lhasa. It takes two nights, and I timed it so that I would cross the Tanggula Pass — 5,231 metres, the source of the Yangtze — in the small hours of New Year’s Day. I had nobody to spend New Year’s Eve with in Beijing, so I spent it on a train, at altitude, in the dark, crossing the roof of the world. I wrote that I wanted to enter the year in a way that was wider and freer than a party.
I was in Tibet for ten days. The plan had included Everest base camp; I dropped it because of the earthquake at Shigatse on 7 January, magnitude 6.7, a few days into the trip.
Guangzhou then, for the Spring Festival. A woman I had never met, who had been reading my writing online, messaged me to say she had two flats in the city and one was empty, and I could have it for a month for nothing. I sat on that message for weeks. I am not a person who trusts easily, and the risk in my head was not that the flat would be bad; it was that the whole thing was a trap and I would end up sold across a border somewhere. In the end I wanted to be somewhere that was not my home town for the holiday, and I wanted it more than I wanted to be safe, so I asked her. She said yes. It was exactly what she said it was.
Hainan after that, in February, on the tropical island in the far south: Bo’ao, Sanya, and the coast between them. I ate in cheap places, walked the beaches, and found the same thing I always find. The sea is fine, the town is fine, everything is fine, and none of it is mine. Two entries from that island: a coconut costs 5 yuan (about 70 cents); and I tried to bargain a pair of shorts from 15 yuan down to 10, and the shopkeeper refused.
Then back to the coast, on 9 March — the end of one hundred and thirty-five days away.
The sentence I wrote about the whole thing, when I got back, was: I went out to wander, and I found that the world outside is not as good as Rushan Silver Beach, so in early March I came back to the ghost town.
Two hundred and eighty-two days
I did not come back to a life of travel. I came back and stopped.
From 9 March to 15 December I did not leave. That is the 282 days. I wrote a diary entry on every single one of them, which means that for nine months the two things I did were walk and write, at the same hours, in the same order, on the same streets.
The beach in that period is better than at any other time of year. The tourists are gone, the sea is clear and dark green, and the light in October and November does something to the water that no photograph of this coast ever shows. I had the whole strip to myself for most of it. If you had asked me in November whether I was going to leave again, I would have said no.
Then December came, and with it the cold, and the friend in Yunnan who had not in fact left Dali yet. I wrote the reason down without dressing it up: one, to get rid of the winter; two, to get rid of the boredom.
Fifty-three days later I had been to thirteen cities.
Yunnan in winter, at a walker’s pace:
- Kunming, then Dali, then Lijiang, where I climbed to a viewpoint at dawn to watch the sun come onto Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.
- Mangshi, in the far southwest, an hour from the Myanmar border. Warm in December, cheap, Dai temples, palm trees, a market where half the signs are in a script I cannot read. It is the only place on that trip I would go back to just to live for six months.
- Ruili, on the border itself, where I spent New Year’s Eve.
- Tengchong, for the hot springs and a war cemetery from the 1940s, in the rain.
- Then out of Yunnan and back in, the way cheap flights go: Mangshi to Chengdu, where I spent a day at the Sanxingdui museum looking at bronze masks more than three thousand years old that do not look like anything else on earth.
- Xishuangbanna, six days of tropical heat in the middle of January.
- Pu’er, Yuxi, then Jianshui, an old walled town whose pace — trains, bicycles, evening markets — suited me.
- Then down to Hekou, on the river that is the border with Vietnam, where a bridge you can walk across connects the two countries. It is the lowest point in the province and it was warm enough for short sleeves in January.
- Mengzi, Mile, back up to Kunming, then back down to Mangshi, where I sat in the same hostel and looked at the same trees for a third time.
The thing I learned on that trip was not about the cities. It was about how quickly I can be done with a place, and how little it takes.
In Mangshi the hostel dormitory was mine alone for twelve days, and I was perfectly happy. On the twelfth day a man came in and woke me from a nap. I lay there for a minute, and then decided to leave the city. Not because of him. Because the room was no longer mine. I packed and went the next day.
That is the mechanism of this whole chapter, compressed into one afternoon. I am not looking for a better place. I am looking for a place I have not worn out yet.
Yunnan, Guizhou, and one county in Guangxi
I came back in February and stayed five months, and then the summer arrived with the same three problems: heat, tourists, humidity. July is the only time the strip is crowded and the only time the sea is ugly — the south wind lifts the sand off the bottom and the water goes cloudy and dull. It is also the rainy season.
And I had never finished the list I had made in the winter. So on 25 June I left again, and went further this time: Yunnan, then Guizhou, then one county in Guangxi. Back on 6 August. Forty-three days.
The diary entry about why is the most honest thing in this chapter, and I am going to put it here without improving it. Roughly: five months without leaving makes me depressed and at a loss and makes my life feel as if it has no meaning; not going out makes me overthink, and only going out gets rid of that; going out also costs money, quite a lot of it, but if spending money can stop the emptiness in my head for a while then it is worth spending; also July is the worst month on the coast; also the friend in Dali was leaving, and I wanted to sleep at his place for a few days first and save on a hotel.
Dali again, then. He lives in a village outside the city where a small courtyard house rents for 100 yuan a month (about $14). No toilet, no water heater, no washing machine, no kitchen. He lives on instant noodles, two eggs and a 10-yuan lunch from a supermarket counter, and he is calmer than anyone I know. I slept on the sofa for two nights because I did not want to share his bed. By the third night the mosquitoes had made the decision for me.
Then north into Guizhou, which I had never seen:
- Liupanshui, which calls itself the cool capital of China and puts the claim on banners outside the railway station. It was built from nothing in the 1960s as an industrial city in the mountains, so it looks planned, unlike the old towns in the province, and the summer temperature sits in the low twenties.
- Anshun and Guiyang, where the karst hills come up out of the fields like teeth.
- The Miao and Dong villages in the southeast: wooden houses on stilts, no lifts, no traffic, and a covered wooden bridge a hundred years old that is still where the village sits in the evening.
- Then west into Guangxi, to Sanjiang, a Dong county on the border.
I came home on 6 August on a flight routed through Xiamen, because the cheap tickets always route through Xiamen. Xiamen was hot and humid in a way that stops you sweating. Qingdao was 35°C and dry, and I preferred it. I got in mid-afternoon and found that my wok had rusted through while I was away, which is one of the small costs of leaving that appears in no budget.
What leaving costs
Now the part a guide is obliged to write, and it is not the part that sells books.
I do not earn a salary. I have not earned one since the year I moved here. What I live on is a fixed pot of savings and a small income from writing, between 6,000 and 9,000 yuan a year (about $830 to $1,250). Against that, a year at home on this coast costs me about 9,730 yuan — call it 10,000 (about $1,390) — and some years cost 12,000 to 15,000 once train tickets and broken phones and shoes that split are counted in.
Travel is not in that budget. Travel is what happens when I decide to break the budget.
So the economics of leaving are not the economics of a holiday. They are the economics of a man on a fixed income who wants to be somewhere else for a month without eating into the capital. What I do:
- I go in the dead season. Everything is cheaper and the crowds are gone. The cheapest flight I ever bought to Xinjiang was on the first day of the October holiday, because everyone else travels the day before.
- I take the flights with a stop, because nobody wants them. Xiamen Airlines has carried me around this country for years for less than a train ticket, because every route goes through Xiamen. Two legs, a long wait in a provincial airport, and a third of the price.
- I stay in hostel dormitories. A bed in a five-man room in Lhasa was 101 yuan (about $14). A bed in a twelve-man room in Kashgar was 100 yuan.
- I stay with people when I can. A relative’s empty flat in Beijing, for nothing. A stranger’s empty flat in Guangzhou, a month for nothing. A friend’s courtyard in Yunnan, 100 yuan a month. Three of the four long trips in this chapter were built around a free bed, which is the biggest line item in travel and the easiest one to remove.
- I eat the way I eat at home. In Dali I ate what my friend ate, partly because it is cheap and partly because eating well in front of a man eating instant noodles is not a thing I am willing to do.
- I walk. A day of walking costs nothing, and it is the actual activity. The museums are cheap, the temples are cheap, the food is cheap, and the transport inside a city is my own legs.
There is a limit, and I hit it and wrote it down after the Xinjiang trip: if I want to save money, I cannot go out. This year I went out a great many times and spent a great deal and earned almost nothing, so for the rest of the autumn and winter I stay put. That is the deal. The travelling is funded by the staying. A year on this coast at 10,000 yuan leaves room, in a good year, for two months on the road. A year with three months on the road eats into the savings, and I am not willing to do that often.
What I found out there
I have come back from four of these trips now, each time to the same place, each time more certain about it.
It is not that the outside is bad. Dali in winter is beautiful. The Pamir is better than anything I have seen anywhere. The Miao villages in Guizhou are the most hospitable places I have been in this country. If I were twenty years younger, with a salary and a different set of wants, I would happily spend a decade moving between those places.
It is that the outside is not better. That is a different sentence, and it took four trips to be able to say it. What I want is a small, quiet, empty, cheap place on the sea, with four seasons and no landlord who cares what I do. Yunnan has three of those five. Guizhou has none of them and a great many mountains, which is not the same thing. Hainan is warm and has a sea and costs more than here. Jiagedaqi is empty and beautiful and the rent will kill you.
And then there are the things I dislike, and they are the same everywhere. Cities. Underground trains full of people looking at their phones. The humidity of the south, which is the air’s and not the sea’s. The noise of hostel dormitories, which I use and hate. And crowds, which I tolerate for about four days and then begin to fear.
The one thing I have genuinely learned on the road is not about places, and it is unflattering: I wear a place out. I arrive, I find the good street, the cheap canteen, the bench with the view, I make it mine — and inside a fortnight it is just where I live again, with the same unanswered questions and a different set of trees outside. Moving does not solve that. It postpones it. Which is, in fairness, exactly what I am buying.
The arrangement
Here is what I have settled on, and I did not invent it. I wrote it down in a hostel room in Mangshi, on a rainy day, with nothing else to do.
Most of the time, in one place. When that place gets dull — when it bores me, when it is too cold or too hot — go out and look at something else. But not for long. A month or two, at most. Come back, rest, get dull again, go out again.
That is the whole system. It requires a base, and the base, for me, is the northern coast: four seasons, a real winter, a summer that is hot but not tropical, and the sea.
The other half of the same idea is this. When I am on the coast I am out of the city, out of the noise, out of the market for other people’s approval. When I travel I go into the city, into crowds, into noise. Both of those are things a person can want, and I have stopped pretending that one of them is the answer and the other is the mistake. Most of the time out of the world, some of the time in it.
So the summary of four years, in numbers. One base, rented, three or four thousand yuan a year. Four winters, minus thirteen at the coldest, no central heating. And between 54 and 135 days a year on the road, depending on the year, spent mostly on foot, mostly staying with people, mostly eating what the people I stay with eat.
I once went 282 days without crossing the county line. I have also crossed the Tanggula Pass at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Both of those were the same decision, taken at different times of the year.