November 9th 2007 - November 13th 2008

one year on foot - 4646km through China

unlimited beard & hair growth

thelongestway.com

musical score by the kingpins ( myspace.com/theoneandonlykingpins ) and zhu fengbo

Additional info:

- I never finished my original goal of walking to Germany. Instead, I walked for a year and roughly 4500km, passed the desert of Gobi, and then decided to stop walking for now.

- All of the distance from Beijing to Ürümqi has been completed solely on foot, straight good old walking. There are instances where you can see me in the video sitting on a plane or riding a boat, but those are during breaks I had to take from walking, either to sort out bureaucracy issues or to take care of some personal things.

- I had been planning this trip for over a year before I even started, and getting as far as I got was an experience for which I am very grateful.

- Obtaining the necessary visa for a trip like this was not very easy, hence I had to go back to Beijing a few times to resolve some issues.

- The songs I used in the video are 1) Zhu Fengbo - "Olive Tree" and 2) The Kingpins - "L'aventurier" - visit the Kingpins website if you want to know more, they are very cool I think.

- This is not a strict "1 pic a day" video, because I wanted to make it a bit more alive by adding some additional movement. Sometimes during the film you would follow me turn around, or something would happen in the background. I tried to capture these moments to make the video more interesting.

- The core of this project is in fact my website "www.thelongestway.com" where I have posted my extensive travel diary, starting from day 1 (Nov 9th 2007) and describing every single day until the end one year later.

based on multiple users’ GPS trajectories, we aim to mine interesting locations and classical travel sequences in a given geospatial region. Here, interesting locations mean the culturally important places, such as Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and frequented public areas, like shopping malls and restaurants, etc. Such information can help users understand surrounding locations, and would enable travel recommendation.

During the 1960’s, faced with an unstable foreign policy as well as a high demand for resources, the People’s Republic of China was forced to delocalise most of its heavy industry and armament factories. Originally situated on China’s coasts and in the North East close to the Russian border, these factories were obliged to relocate in the countries heartlands, hidden away and better protected...

This is part one of the trip to Beijing: Moscow to Irkutsk (with a trip to St. Petersburg).

his is part two of my Trans-Siberian/Mongolian trip from Moscow to Beijing: Ikrutsk to Beijing, with stops in Ulaan Batur and Da Tong.

Together with my colleague Henny Swan I've been working in the China Beijing office for the last few weeks which has been really interesting both in terms of getting to know the country and also the state of web standards in China.

In Beijing, the authorities have worked hard to prevent Olympic crowds from being too one-sided in their support for the home team. Volunteer spectators have even been drafted in at some half-full Olympic venues to cheer for both sides.

For visitors, coming to an Olympic city where so many aspects of life — clothing, conversation, food, everything — are staged is only going to cause more confusion about China when the returning waiguoren tell their stories about Beijing. Expats burn when travel writers and foreign journalists make simplistic generalization, but, with half the Beijing story hidden, I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of it. And this will only reinforce the commonly-held belief that Westerners just can’t understand China. (Or the commonly-held belief that China’s all ancient temples and KFCs. Either or!)

Beijing Airport Express (机场快轨; jichang kuaigui) opens up to the public today at 14:00. CNReviews reported on the Beijing Airport Express back on 6/27, when the inservice date was originally 7/1, but the launch date has been in flux ever since.