Read travel blogs and books before you head out on a major expedition, and you will find as wide a variety of advice on what to bring as there are cultures and climates in the world. One expert swears by bringing only two pairs of underwear for a year’s worth of nomadic living, that the disadvantage of having to wash one daily, drying back at the guesthouse while you’re out and about, is offset by the advantage of a light backpack. Another experienced traveler—one likely without small heads to count—threatens that if you choose to rent a car instead of relying solely on public transportation, you’ll miss out on the real version of the place. Another tribe of travel writers promises that with enough tenacity, you, too, can make a living from anywhere and live the rest of your days location independent, so long as you live out of a backpack.
Research where to begin your round-the-world endeavor, and you’ll find some sane advice: start closest to where you already are and avoid major jet lag on top of the inevitable culture shock. If you’re European, take a bus across the closest border with nary a passport stamp. If you’re from the United States, begin in Canada, Mexico, or Central and South America. (However, as some Canadian friends of ours realized when they started their round-the-world trek in Argentina, eastern South America is still five hours ahead of western North American time. No matter how map savvy you are, the world continues to surprise.)
It’s not standard advice for this new way of life, this living out of the pack on your back for a year with three small kids in tow, to start on the opposite side of the planet amid almost as opposite a cultural worldview. You won’t find many travel experts recommend, “Ah, the heck with it—chuck logic out the window and start your kid-centric trip in a huge Communist country where you can’t even read the alphabet, much less ask for an appropriate place to pee.”
This is how we start anyway.
There are plenty of guidebooks about the fourth-largest county in the world, and there is more to do there than is possible in a life-time. But easy? Ease into a major shift of your family’s daily routine, breakfast options, or sense of privacy? You won’t find a gradual entry by starting in China. Tiptoeing down a gently sloping beach into the waters of world travel would mean starting in Canada. Cannonballing into the deep end of an ice cube–filled pool full of swimmers with no sense of democratically promised personal space—that’s China.
The only real advantage we have to starting our trip in the land of a billion people is that Kyle and I have already been here. Twelve years earlier, we found ourselves newly engaged and schlepping backpacks through China with friends as part of a research project entitled Could We Actually Live Here? That was the question on our minds, combining the stress of choosing the right flowers for a fall wedding with deciding in which foreign culture we should raise a family in a few years’ time.
We grabbed lunch in the Beijing airport on that trip, and I remember the hotel’s breakfast the following morning: fish and rice, and an eggplant-colored hard-boiled egg called a century egg. Ask me what I am least in the mood to eat when I wake up in the throes of jet lag, and I will tell you fish, rice, and a discolored, fermented, weeks-old egg.
We walked up the Great Wall with our friends, dripping with sweat from the humidity, and arrived at the top at closing time, which meant we stole only a few minutes to look around, then rushed back down to our taxi. The vendors taunted us with their Great Wall–emblazoned T-shirts and paperweights, and we joked that if the original Huns somehow made it over the wall today, they’d never pass the elderly women shoving copyright-violating guidebooks in their hands.
Beyond this, I don’t remember much of my first taste of Beijing. Clearer in my mind is our trek outward, into the wild west of China on the other side. There, in ürümqi and Kashgar and the Gobi Desert, near the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, China’s land-scape becomes more like its Central Asian neighbors’. It is here that I had my first and last sip of fermented horse milk tea. This is where I witnessed the extreme geography of Asia: the tallest mountains in the world lying neighbor to one of its biggest deserts. And it is here that I first slept in a yurt.
Our friends decided it would be a cultural experience to spend the night with a traditional Kazakh family in the Tian Shan mountains of western China. We chartered a boat across the Tianchi lake, hiked several miles over moss-encrusted stones, and met our host family for the evening. She was middle-aged with teenage sons, a workhorse of a woman who silently eyed us while we partook of her culinary know-how. She slept that night with her boys in a makeshift shelter nearby while we slept in their dry yurt. The rain began at dusk and didn’t relent till the middle of the night. The heavens poured out so much water that nothing left in my pack could be classically defined as dry.
The yurt was dark but comfortable, and every rug, every bit of the tapestried walls, every teacup and sack of grain was a mystery to me. It resembled a movie set starring an unshaven Brad Pitt wandering the Himalayas. The woodburning stove in the middle kept us toasty through the night, but I shivered with exhaustion as I slept.
The next morning, after tea and breakfast, Kyle strapped on his backpack and trekked up the mountain for a solo walk, searching for quiet apart from the crowd. From my vantage point, mountain goats peeked out from boulders, the green grass shimmered with dew, and below, out and beyond, lay a mirrored-gray lake tucked into the nooks and crannies of lowlying clouds. At the base of the mountain, I sat on a wet log, ignored the group chatter around me, and clicked a mental snapshot, long and slow: this world is huge; it is majestic; it is worth exploring just for the sake of knowing it. Above me, somewhere, wandered a man who felt the same way and who also thought it a good idea to marry me. As I looked up the mountain, I considered it—maybe we’d have kids, and we’d unearth the hidden paths and mysteries of this grand world together.
Robert, our first guesthouse host of the year, picks the five of us up at the airport and drives through Beijing traffic to our apartment, a concrete building planted at the end of a gray alley canopied by a thousand electric wires. This is not his real name, of course, but he gives an English name to his Western guests to make his life easier. The lobby is sparse, and the minuscule elevators lead us to the fifth floor, where ten bikes perch against the scratched, unpainted concrete walls, lined up like delivery boys waiting for their next errand. The apartment door closest to the elevator is wide open, and its innards have been turned into a call center, six dark heads bobbling above makeshift cubicles from which the clattering of keyboards can be heard. The matted office carpet down the hallway is so stained I’m not sure where to step.
Robert unlocks a door. “Here we are.”