I studied film production at Emerson College in Boston, and I have been travelling more or less continuously ever since. I am based in Australia now, though only loosely — most of my time is spent somewhere else.
China is the place I keep coming back to. My family is Chinese, and I have travelled across most of the country over the years — not the two-week highlights route, but the long way round, repeatedly. That is also how I ran into nearly every problem this site now covers: paying for things when your cards do not work, getting a phone number that actually works, booking trains, finding out at the airport that your power bank is not allowed on the plane. I solved each one the slow way, on the ground.
Offbeat China exists because none of that is genuinely difficult once somebody explains it, and almost nobody does. So I write the explanations I wish I had had, and check them against what is true on the ground rather than what gets repeated online.
I am also building a travel app — not China-specific, but global. It comes from the same frustration: the practical side of travel is still needlessly hard, almost everywhere.
