40 Days Traveling in China (2022): A Dive into the Vlog

In July 2022, after finishing another school year in Ningbo, China and tying up some loose ends, I set out on a backpacking journey in China for the second time. This time, however, I set an intention to film and document as much as I could along the way for the preservation of my own memories and to be able to show people just how incredible China can be (both in good ways and occasionally not so good ways). The result turned into this project titled “40 Days Traveling in China (2022)” which I further broke down into four separate parts. I had well over 128gb of film which I boiled down to an amateur travel documentary just over four hours long. I am very proud of how it turned out and grateful I had the opportunity to experience the journey first hand. I hope it will give others a glimpse of what China has to offer and inspire people to set out on their own adventures wherever that may be. In this post, I want to take a deeper dive into each video to provide some more context as well as what you can expect to find while watching. I would like to thank anyone who takes time out of their day to view or skim through this project.

Part I: Wuhan & Xiangyang

Above is Part I of my backpacking trip around China. It begins as I am exiting the gate of my apartment building and walking out of the complex. Something I did everyday for the year and a half I lived in that apartment. I had taken a covid test at the hospital in Ningbo the day before and was picking up the physical copy to take with me to the airport. This was almost always a requirement for travelers during the last year and a half or so I was in China. They checked all these things at the airport as well as the local green QR codes which were found through the Alipay and WeChat APPs. Wuhan was actually not my first choice to start from. I originally wanted to go to Xi’an (home of the terracotta warriors) as I really wanted to revisit the city but covid cases popped up there a week before I was due to depart (we’re talking like less than two dozen in a city of almost nine million people) so I canceled that flight and then booked a flight to Tianjin. I wanted to revisit the city too and travel up to a “wild” part of the Great Wall. A handful of covid cases popped up there three days before I was due to leave so I canceled that flight and booked one for Wuhan instead. Covid cases being found in the place you were in or were going was a constant risk both summers I traveled in China as you could be tossed in a quarantine facility at any moment. They used another “green arrow” health code which showed epidemic workers the places you had been for the last seven days. It was not detailed, though that information certainly could be found if needed, just overall cities or counties.

Unfortunately, government restrictions became problematic for foreigners especially when it came time to check into hotels. Because of the harsh penalties and problems imposed on places where covid cases were found, many hotels were reluctant to accept foreign nationals as managers and local officials tuned into Chinese news stations and were bombarded with how bad covid was in other countries leading them to treat foreign nationals as if they were disease ridden. This was not exceptionally widespread but it was certainly the case in many places and checking into a hotel was almost never easy as usually they scrutinized over all of your information to find anything possible to deny your stay. This happened at the first hostel I had booked in Wuhan. When I walked in they immediately said they didn’t accept foreigners despite the fact it was listed on the English version of Ctrip (the most popular travel booking platform in China). The next hotel I tried in Wuhan also took nearly an hour before I was finally allowed in. They checked my health codes, travel code, passport stamp when I entered China, personal information, and my covid test from Ningbo which was less than 24 hours old. I waited on a couch next to the desk while they called hotel managers and messaged the local police. Meanwhile, I watched them check-in a local family where the father didn’t bring his ID card and their covid tests were out of the required 48hr range. The benefits of being able to speak Chinese at a proficient level…

However, once the check-in was finally sorted I was able to enjoy Wuhan. The local hot-dry noodles are really something special for a quick bite and the city’s skyline at night along the Yangtze river is an incredible sight. Amazing, really.

From Wuhan I took a short train ride north to a small city called Xiangyang. Xiangyang actually has one of the top ten ancient towns in China which can be debated. It is a very cool spot if you want to get off the beaten path a bit and do some exploring. There is a ton of potential for small sights and hidden gems there. It is also located a short drive away from Wudang Mountain which is the legendary birthplace of Tai Chi. I urge you to take the long walk up the mountain paths to the structures tucked high up in the mountains instead of riding the cable car. I found it very rewarding to make the walk all the way up to the golden pagoda. In mid-July the golden pagoda was entirely shrouded in mist from the mountain and all you could see around you was fog while it was hot and sunny below. I was eating McDonald’s as a joke when I finished the hike as who would expect to find McDonalds at the birthplace of Tai Chi? Anyway, Hubei, like most of China, has plenty of its own specialty noodles which are good. The beef noodles are well-known in Xiangyang and they will eat them along with mijiu (rice wine).

Part II: Zhengzhou to Qingdao

In Part II, after my stay in Xiangyang, I rode the train to meet a good friend who I met randomly in Zhengzhou on one of my earliest travels in China. We stay in touch and continue to this day as he moved to New York to pursue further studies and potentially a career in America. We met in the train station and immediately went back down south, close to Xiangyang actually, to a city in Henan called Nanyang. In Nanyang we stayed around Shedian county which also boasts a very interesting old town. If you are passing nearby I would highly recommend spending the better part of the day exploring Shedian Ancient City. Many ancient cities in China are “new” old whereas this one is real old. The buildings are authentic and well aged on the main strip.

It was here where we had a day of excessive baijiu drinking and where I got to drink with the higher ups and CEO of a huge baijiu company. A local government official even stopped by later on in the meal to drink with us. All went well and it was a fantastic evening spent at a barbecue site in the countryside. They have a very unique drinking culture which was a privilege to experience. The next day, hungover to hell, we made a visit to Danjiangkou which is the biggest reservoir in China. There is a good chance that the Nongfu Spring water bottle you’re drinking in central China was filled there. From the boat, in the reservoir, the water looked incredibly clean and the fish we had at a local restaurant was delicious.

We then returned to Zhengzhou for some shenanigans. Zax BBQ in Zhengzhou is the truth. Thank you for everything you do Zack.

I then met two of my very good friends from Ningbo who arrived in Zhengzhou to have some of the barbecue – which again is one of the best foreign restaurants in China and we were set to embark on a multi-day road trip to Qingdao for beach rugby festival and the famous Qingdao Beer Festival. The Shaolin Temple was the first stop on the tour and we did, in fact, play nothing but Wu Tang Clan for the entire two and a half hour journey there. We perused the complex and got to meet some of the young monks after the show. From there we drove across Henan, into Shandong province to a small town called Qufu which is the birthplace of Confucius. This is a wildly under visited place in China but it is absolutely worth it. The old town is unique, authentic and you can see the Cemetary of Confucius which was a cool experience. From there it was a straight shot all the way to Qingdao. We had an epic Airbnb right down in Huangdao close to the tournament and the main beer festival venue. Unfortunately, that part of Qingdao had a covid scare a week or so before we arrived so there was some tension in the air due to that. The tournament was a ton of fun and the party that night absolutely raged. However, our high note was quickly knocked lower when we tried to enter the beer festival a day or two later.

I had visited that exact venue two years earlier in the summer of 2020 only eight months after the initial lockdowns in China. No covid test was required and they only checked a local health code. It was all fine and fairly normal. We had an absolute blast as well and were met with tables of extremely generous and curious people. It was very different this time around. The controls were very strict and we were flat out denied entry. Upon arriving at the gate everyone must scan a QR code and register for entry. This included uploading your local health code and travel code into the APP. We had taken a covid test the day before and hadn’t come from any declared “risk” areas but our registration still failed. No sweat, it failed for some Chinese people too so we thought it would be okay. They were directed to another part of the entrance to register by hand while we were met with very little help at all. My spoken Chinese is decent so I tried to talk with the guys. The workers simply tried to redo our registration over and over again on the app but the same result came up each time. Insanity. We asked them to call the next person in the chain of command. That person did the same and it didn’t work. They left and came back a few minutes later with someone else. This person just told us sorry, we couldn’t come in – but maybe if we had our passports there we could stand at the entrance and take a picture holding them and maybe that would do it. It was extremely vague and it wasn’t an option for the five other foreigners we had met there who had just taken a cab for over an hour to reach this part of the city. No other answers were provided, we picked up the message and walked away in disbelief. I knew of a speakeasy bar down the road which we enjoyed instead. I think we probably would have been disappointed anyway as things were now stricter than they had even been two years prior in the beginning of it all. We also found out from the older couple hosting us in the Airbnb that they only needed a covid test every seven days and were going to the beer festival each day we were there. The venue in the north was reportedly allowing foreigners in but that was over an hour away. We went to a new location they opened in the city center but it was incredibly disappointing and could hardly be considered a beer festival. We gave ourselves points for effort.

 

part III: Yunnan

From Qingdao I boarded a flight and crossed the country to land in Kunming, Yunnan. Yunnan in my opinion is one of best provinces to travel in China though it’s a close call between there and Sichuan. I continued on alone to check off some of the last destinations on my list. The plan was to reunite with those two friends, from the road trip to Qingdao, ten days later in Xining City, Qinghai. I arrived in Kunming at night and showed you what airports all over the country looked like with their health screenings and covid tests on arrival. The next day I took a walk around Kunming for brunch and then went to the train station where I was off to Lijiang. I cover all the destinations in Yunnan from the video in this post here so I won’t go into detail but what I will mention is that I preferred Baisha to Lijiang and I would be keen to stay there if I would ever return. Also, I could only really tolerate Lijiang Old Town in the morning when there were less people. In the late afternoon and evening the crowds will likely be unbearable the later you go. That being said, if you stay in Lijiang then definitely give the Lijiang International Youth Hostel a thought. The owner was very chill, there is plenty of good space, the rooms were affordable, I met people there and they rented bikes for a good price.

After I stayed in Lijiang I met with a good friend, Mr. Boz, who I performed with quite a bit in Ningbo, in Qiaotou. We started the Upper Hike Trail together in Tiger Leaping Gorge. Tiger Leaping Gorge was definitely the best thing I ever did in China. The views were incredible even though I hiked during the “wet season” which is in July and August. It rained a bit but never hard nor for long. It was misty but that also gave the gorge its own charm. After the first day I pressed on solo as I was in a crunch for time while Mr. Boz was spending a week or two just hanging out in the scenery. The trail from its start to Tina’s Guesthouse is all well trodden and easy to follow. I really enjoyed walking on an actual dirt/rock trail which seemed to be few and far between in a lot of place in China. Naturally, then, I wanted to continue on.

I saw on one map that the trail continued further to Haba Village while most people stop and hike down to Tina’s Guesthouse. I saw that from Haba Village there was also a bus which went to Shangri-la which I planned to be my next destination. I decided to try to make the full hike there on the third day in the gorge. Unfortunateyl, after six hours or so into the hike it started to become apparent that this section was not well maintained. Lo and behold, I lost the trail once and then twice. Then, as I searched a clearing high up on the mountain looking for where the trail might continue, I lost where I had entered the clearing. I doubled down going straight across opposite the side I entered on and ran into a couple grazing cattle. They got startled and followed me out of their space which pushed me even further of course. I knew it would be very late and dark going back the way I came and I couldn’t figure out where to go moving forward to Haba, so I figured the only option was going down. This worried me as the gorge could be steep at points and I had no idea what was below. My only reassurance was that the cows definitely didn’t come the way I had because I hadn’t seen any of their footprints and they likely didn’t come from where I was headed. That meant that they probably came from down the side of the mountain which meant that maybe I could too. It was my only guess.

I started to scan the ground looking for cow prints and shit. I found them and started following what must have been their path up the mountain. It wasn’t always perfect as I lost it at times and went off piste through branches and brush but I would find their marks again which eventually started to resemble a rough path. I followed this, lost it, found it again several times over for three hours hours as I raced down the mountain as fast as its steep and slippery incline would allow. It was raining too and night was fast approaching. I would get to areas sparse with trees but thick with ferns. I scanned the ferns looking for any break in the leaves where a trodden path may lay underneath. Scanning, scanning, spotting what resembled a path and darting right for it. There wasn’t anything on my mind the whole time besides: trail trail trail. That’s all I was looking for. I never had a moment in my entire life where my mind was entirely consumed with only one thing, especially not for a whole three hours. Seriously, almost nothing else came to my mind. Eventually, I was on a trail which was becoming more and more pronounced. Then, in one moment as I looked ahead the trail opened up to the back of a farm. It didn’t look abandoned and there was a new tractor sitting in the field. The relief I felt in my body was euphoric and one of the most amazing feelings I’ve ever had. Tears came to my eyes as I realized I had made it. The trail turned into a gravel road past the barn and I followed that road down to the back of a small village. I sat down against the wall under the overhanging of the roof of an old village school house and stared off at the street light. It was dark now and I was still shaken that I had made it. I took deep breaths to let reality sit in. It was past 8pm then and there was nothing around. There were no guesthouses in this village and the closest was three miles or so away. I booked a room with my phone which almost depleted of battery life, and started for the road which follows the middle of the gorge. I walked that road, which included a tunnel still under construction, all the way to the closest guesthouse.

My things were soaking wet from the rain and brushing against all the wet leaves. My phone had long been dead by the time I reached the area where the next guesthouse was. Somehow, there was a small convenience store still open and an old lady working the night shift there. I walked in and asked her if I could charge my phone so I could pull up a map and buy some things. She let me and I awkwardly waited as my phone turned on. I bought a bunch of snacks as I was hungry as hell and I saw that the guesthouse was actually a short walk away. I thanked the lady, paid for my things and walked down a side road into the area of the guesthouse. A local Naxi woman, Summer, greeted me as she had been expecting me (from my reservation). She saw my condition and offered to make me hot food as by now it was already 10:30 p.m. She checked me in with no questions asked which was a relief in and of itself. I drank tea and ate a plate of potato fried rice then as a new man. The next day her sons took me to the lower trail head so I could see the river up close on the way to Tina’s Guesthouse where I would catch the bus to Shangri-la. Just as planned but in a different way. I barely made it with ten minutes or so to spare. I was quite annoyed having to pay locals to use the lower trail when I had just gotten lost that on the unmaintained upper trail which was just above them. I believe I had reason to be annoyed having to pay.

I caught the bus which was more of a small van to Shangri-la and it was an easy ride. I had been so eager to visit another Tibetan Autonomous Region after exploring some the summer before on a road trip through Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai but this time was a bit different. There were suddenly more controls on covid issues (long story of why) there so that threw off the vibe right away. I had to supply a ton of information for the hotel to let me in in Shangri-la including everywhere I had been and stayed for the last fourteen days or something. I was also really disappointed with the famous monastery there. The ones I had experienced the summer before were much better. I talk about my experience at the ticket office in the video. What saved Shangri-la though were the people I met. On the first night I wandered into the Reggae bar which was right next to Kersang’s Relay Station (the hostel I stayed in). When I walked in I ran into a guy I knew from Ningbo out of the blue. He was sitting at the bar with another guy he had met in – funny enough – Haba Village where I had tried to hike to. I learned that the guy I knew had used a guide to do that whole section of the hike. We hung out for awhile and played pool in the upstairs lounge. When we went back downstairs we found a large group of other foreigners in the bar hanging out. A few of the them were playing around with the instruments left on stage. They saw them there and asked the bartenders if they could play. They started jamming out of nowhere and when the first jam came to a close I went over and offered to freestyle if they laid down a funky beat. They did and we ended up rocking the full bar for almost an hour with freestyles, jams and a few covers. When they stopped and sat down I found out that all of them had just spontaneously met each other while traveling. It was a potpourri of foreigners living in cities all over China. We had a few drinks, exchanged contacts and called it a night.

The next day I planned to go to take a long walk to the monastery but first I stopped at Compass Cafe for breakfast. While I was finishing, a few people from the first night randomly walked in and then more and more. All of a sudden it was almost the whole crew from the night before huddled in the cafe. We made plans for that night and then all went our separate ways. Some of us reconvened for yak hot pot that night and then we had an even bigger group than the night before gathered at one of the local brewery’s bars. It was a good, good time. A few of us made plans to go to Dali together and we hired a driver to pick us up the next day. I only had about 24 hours or so in Dali  before I had to make the train back to Kunming for my flight to Xining. We all met at Compass Cafe the next for one last breakfast together and then four of us went to meet our driver for Dali. That was a fun ride.

In Dali we checked into our hotels and met at a barbecue spot run by a french Canadian guy. We tried to jam again at another bar but they said it was too late for the noise. We played table football upstairs and I show you in the video to random local guys who challenged us and turned out to be the best table football players I will ever see which you see in the video. Afterwards, we got caught in the rain which then in the flooded streets and we wound up in the bar you see in the video with a bunch of guys passing around a guitar. The next day I took a long walk, met up with two of the guys and had some street beers before we all reconvened in a beer garden to play table football until the absolute last minute I could before I had to basically run to pick up my backpack and get a didi to the train station. I barely made it but it was a smooth ride until I had to pass the covid health screening leaving the Kunming Rail Station outside in the rain.

 

Part IV: Journey to Tibet and beyond

Part IV starts in the Kunming Airport after I found out I booked my flight for the wrong month. By some stroke of luck, however, I was able to catch a flight for that evening which would still allow me to make the train to Tibet the next day. Originally, I was hoping that by taking the morning flight, I would be able to spend the afternoon in Xining with the two friends from Part II. But, sometimes you just have to be happy you made it. I arrived to the hotel in Xining around 8pm after spending the whole day in the Kunming Airport. We had some solid local food and the next day had enough time to take a good walk around the city. We then boarded the train to Tibet with a few jugs of beer, snacks and a bottle of gin. The long-distance train on the line to Tibet was interesting to say the least. We snagged a sleeper car but our tour guides were too slow to get us into one of the first class ones so we had to share the cabin with three other people. There was a bench on each side which was one of the beds and then two more overhead beds on each side. The ride was smooth overall and the scenery was incredible as we traveled across the Tibetan plateau. The train line is an engineering marvel by its sheer length and the number of bridges and tunnels. It’s also surprisingly high above sea level and at one point of the journey the train will cross a pass at an altitude of over 5,000 meters. The specially designed train cars will release oxygen to help mitigate altitude sickness for passengers. We were unfortunately asleep at that point of the trip but I believe you should be awake for it if you catch a train with an evening departure from Xining. Ours was around noon. Otherwise, the other amenities typically found on long distant trains in developed countries were non-existent. The dining car was hard to navigate and took a few tries before we could finally get something to eat (and not due to it being busy either). There were squat toilets in the bathroom compartments which were very unpleasant and got pretty disgusting by the end of the trip. The sinks also became pretty gross over the course of the journey from people emptying their instant noodles in them. One of our cabin mates kept bringing two other people whom she knew into our cabin to sit and chat which made it a bit crammed in there at points. Overall, though, the journey was not too painful and didn’t feel like 22 hours or whatever it was. Waking up in the early morning still traveling through Tibet was a cool experience and made it all worthwhile.

As you can imagine the controls entering Lhasa were a bit of a pain for us as foreigners but with a bit of patience and tongue biting we eventually were the very last people to leave the station. We met our guide, which as a foreign visitor you need to have in order to be able to visit Tibet, outside of the station. Take a moment to imagine being a tourist in America and needing to register with a tour group while having to be with a guide at all times when visiting the entire American Southwest and that’s what its like for non-citizens in Tibet. Our guide though was awesome and it was just the three of us on the tour. He took us through the old town to our hotel. Our excitement was sky high and I couldn’t believe that we had finally made it. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. We took an hour or so to rest in our rooms and then we met all in the common area. Our tour guide broke the news that something like five cases had popped up in the province we were going to be in for the second half of the tour – which included Mt. Everest Base Camp. The highlight of the trip. The province had just been locked down the day we arrived. We were a bit crushed but settled to make the most of what we could do. Anyway, we then went to have lunch with our guide and explore the city on our own. After a long walk through the streets we returned to the hotel to find our tour guide together with the other member of his team who broke the news that 18 people from that province had arrived in Lhasa that afternoon and tested positive for covid. The government then declared that the next day all tourist venues were to be closed and people feared that a lockdown was looming. There was absolutely nothing we could do on our tour, nowhere else in Tibet we could go and with a lockdown coming we had to scramble to book flights to leave Lhasa.

All the tourists got the same message so flights were quickly being sold out and prices skyrocketed. We managed to leverage our guides who got us tickets on two different flights departing to Chengdu the next day. Fortunately, while looking for a place to take a covid test the next day, which we ended up skipping because the lines were blocks long everywhere we looked, we managed to take a walk past Potala Palace and then around the old town to buy a few souvenirs. Things quickly got worse when we arrived in Chengdu though.

Our flights were at two different times with one friend’s being two hours earlier than ours. When we landed we contacted him who said that they took the whole flight to a screening facility outside the airport – like directly from plane to bus to facility – but he had registered, taken a covid test and then somehow checked into the hostel we had chosen in the city center. They must not have explained the situation very well as he said people started screaming on the bus when it drove out of the airport.

We had the same scenario and found ourselves from plane to bus driving out of the airport. We then waited on the bus for almost an hour parked outside of the facility where they were registering people by hand and issuing covid tests. When it was finally our turn the lady saw that the address I gave for Chengdu was actually a hotel and when it came out that we did not live there she said we needed to quarantine for three days. We didn’t understand how our friend had somehow made it through a similar screening and checked in to a hotel but there was no option for us. We tried to argue but they were so busy with more people coming in that they ignored us and we were left standing next to the epidemic workers as they registered other people with our questions still not answered. Eventually, after two more waves of people came through the facility, one guy who had studied in the U.S. came over to help explain the situation. He told us that since we had come from Lhasa (remember 18 positive cases were found entering the city from another county in Tibet the day we arrived) that we would need to quarantine for three days since everyone else lived in the city and could do three days of self-monitoring at home. When we tried to explain that our friend was sitting at a bar having a beer right as we spoke he said that it shouldn’t have happened. He said we could either do the three days of quarantine or fly to the city we lived in the next day. If we decided to leave Chengdu within twenty-four hours we could either stay at the facility through the night or we could pay to spend one night in a quarantine facility and be taken to the airport the next day. He mentioned too that we were allowed to order delivery to the facility if we were hungry. It was getting late and we found a flight for Ningbo leaving in the morning and came to terms with the fact that the trip was over. We ordered some snacks and beers to the facility for the night we would spend there as we passed the time waiting in silence. When the delivery arrived, somehow, I able to just walk right out on the street to meet the rider and get our things. We cracked open a beer and took a few big sips. We finally started to talk about the situation after a few moments. Neither one of us wanted to leave and go back. We figured too that in Ningbo, which had historically been pretty strict with their rules, that we would expect a similar treatment with Lhasa on our seven day travel code. We also couldn’t find out exactly whether or not we would be asked to home quarantine or would be sent to a facility on arrival in Ningbo. In that moment we decided that maybe going to quarantine there in Chengdu was the best option as we could do the three days and still make it out in time to celebrate our friend’s birthday.

So, we called Joey over (the worker who studied in the U.S.) to ask him a few questions (most of which he ended up getting wrong). We asked to be taken to the quarantine facility. It was around 1 a.m. at this point. We waited and waited until almost 4 a.m. until the bus finally arrived to take us. Luckily, we were able to order another, bigger round of delivery which came in very clutch during our quarantine stay as we had snacks, beers and jingjiu. We didn’t get into our rooms in the facility until after 5 a.m. Those three days weren’t great or all that bad. The food was not very good and it was annoying being woken up in the early morning to take a covid test. The rooms were decent though with ample space and a TV. We could see the arrival of new guests from our windows which I show you in the video. The whole thing was just one big, bad joke. Meanwhile, our friend was roaming free in Chengdu. On our last night in the facility, our friend tried to go to a nice hotel to make a reservation for all of us so we could have a real good time over his birthday. They saw Lhasa on his travel code and let him in but later told him that they had called the epidemic hotline to pick him up and take him to quarantine. No one arrived that night but it got scheduled for the next day which was the same day we were getting out (which was on his birthday). We met up for lunch but then he had to get to the hotel to pack his things for when he would be taken to quarantine. We then tried to check-in to the same hotel but found that we were completely denied because we had Lhasa on our seven-day travel code. We showed the receptionists our stamped paper from quarantine facility stating that we had completed the mandated three days of quarantine but that still didn’t cut it. They also told us that no hotel in Chengdu would let us in and that we should just go back to quarantine. We didn’t consider that a very good option so as they hauled off our friend we decided to at least try the hostel he had stayed at the previous three days which was only a short walk away. A young girl checked our codes and information and then let us in. We felt relieved but it also seemed a little precarious which turned out to be justified because ten minutes later I got a message telling us that actually we couldn’t stay there due to the city’s policies.

At this point we really didn’t know what to do. The last flight to Ningbo would be leaving too soon to catch and we couldn’t check into a hotel. Our fall back option was sleeping at a friend of friend’s apartment who our friend had drank with while we were in quarantine. The apartment was apparently mostly unfurnished and we didn’t want to intrude so it seemed like a last resort. We went to a Korean fried chicken joint at the end of the street to have some food and a few beers. Suddenly, it occurred to us that although Airbnb was no longer operating in China, there were still  homestays you could find through the Chinese CTrip app. I navigated it and found a decent one right around the corner from the restaurant. The host messaged me right away, I sent her our information and she sent us the pass code for the door. That was that. The community was a little odd with their local gatekeepers but we made it in well enough and the apartment was all we needed. The relief was slowly lifted day by day as we realized the host was going to let us stay. We then got to cruise around Chengdu for a few days while our friend was stuck in quarantine. How the tables turned.

We planned to take a road trip around western Sichuan when he got out but that day, after we had picked up the car and he was on the way into the city to meet us, we found out that a handful of cases had popped up along our route and we wouldn’t be able to go. I mean like one or two cases in two or three locations along the route which would have made it impossible to enter those areas or would likely see us tossed in quarantine again. We pivoted to visit the Giant Buddha in Leshan and the pandas in Dujiangyan while being based in downtown Chengdu with the car rental. Chengdu is a fantastic city to experience and the rest of our stay there was seamless. However, our homestay was too small for three people and we found that others of a higher tier all seemed to use a third party registration APP to receive the passcodes to unlock the doors. I explained to one host that I didn’t have a Chinese ID card so I couldn’t complete the registration and I was promptly told that we were not welcome in the community. When I encountered the same registration on the next homestay we tried booking I looked closer and saw that my driving license might work to complete it. It did and we got in no questions asked. That was the final homestay you see in the video with a rooftop terrace overlooking the bar area in downtown Chengdu.

The journey ends with a surprise party we organized for our friend in his apartment back in Ningbo. A perfect ending to 40 Days Traveling in China.