This is [Fawn interview] the 10th real people stories
My screen name is "red dust" @L a ride red dust wave eight, I am a Fujianese, 37 years old, not yet married.
Once, I had a successful career, annual income of a million. But overnight, I failed in business and hit the bottom.
To escape the status quo, I decided to go on a bike trip.
I traveled to Lhasa, Tibet via the 318 Sichuan-Tibet route, which lasted 27 days, from Chengdu, Sichuan Province.
From then on, I simply gave up all my jobs and modified an electric tricycle by myself to ride around the whole China.
Now, I don't have any job.
After spending more than $300,000 of my savings on travel, I began to live a minimalist life, spending only $10 a day on living expenses.
There are 34 provincial administrations in the country, and in the past few years, I have been to more than half of them.
In the future, I will continue to walk on the road and go to more places.
In 1985, I was born in Zhangzhou City, Fujian Province.
When I was young, I always did well in school. It's just that I was rebellious and preferred freedom.
Fortunately, my parents are more open-minded, they don't interfere with my lifestyle, and they basically don't care when it comes to my studies, and they respect my opinions very much.
When I graduated from high school, I chose to study art and design, and they showed their support.
Only travel, my parents have never been able to understand.
They wanted me to find a stable job and make something of myself.
Instead of traveling and vagabonding, living in a place like this, being a hobo.
Including the fact that I am now traveling outside and they don't know it and think I am working outside and I am not actively telling them the truth.
Because for me, this way of life now, makes me feel comfortable and happy.
At the beginning, I got into the "985 key university" Xiamen University, and chose the major is interior design.
After my undergraduate degree, I went on to graduate school at Xiamen University, where I studied design psychology.
Because I am a free-spirited person by nature, I have not attended many classes since my sophomore year and spent most of my time outside doing things with my teachers.
When I was in graduate school, I was the same way and didn't like to read seriously.
After graduating from graduate school, I chose to stay on as a teacher and happened to lead a graduating undergraduate class.
I had just brought my students to the end of their graduation creative work when I resigned.
Because my classmates were already working in the society, they reflected to me that what they learned in school was useless in the workplace.
I think I may just have a higher diploma than others, but my real professionalism is not as good as a secondary school student.
Also, I taught everything in school by the book.
Feeling little sense of accomplishment myself, I resigned from the school.
After I resigned, I got a job as a designer in a design company.
The so-called designer, in fact, is a soulless draughtsman, every day is constantly drawing.
At that time, I lived next to University Park, where there were a total of six universities nearby, and almost the entire street was filled with schools.
There are many deliveries at the courier station every day, and they are all picked up by the students themselves.
I think this is a business opportunity, I contracted all the nearby courier, responsible for the collection and delivery of goods.
Maybe my heart is bigger, I think this is good to do, do not need to spend too much time and energy, while working part-time to do courier.
The courier is mainly paid to take care of it, and it is done smoothly in advance.
At most, you can earn more than 10,000 yuan a day, the courier business is expanding rapidly.
But I was just too big-hearted and unsatisfied, and later entered into e-commerce and made various investments.
I do courier, do e-commerce, in the process of sending their own courier, I came into contact with warehousing, and began to do warehousing again.
In my first year of business, after all expenses were deducted, I had a net profit of over $110,000.
The next year's profit was even bigger, probably more than 600,000 yuan.
Later, I networked more widely and made more than a million dollars in profits each year.
In my twenties, I really did "make a million dollars a year".
But after 2014, there is a lot of competition in the courier industry.
Lost items, express delays, company fines these problems are particularly numerous, the performance of the decline, the express can no longer continue to do.
I did not do it myself after the courier, storage costs are too high, not only can not make money, but lost a lot of money.
I scraped together, tearing down the east wall to make up for the west wall, and brought myself down.
In 2015, I also had a rough year doing my job.
I have my own interior design studio and those large decorators have joined forces to suppress me.
My studio gradually ran out of clients and had to close.
By the end of the day, the money I earned up front was basically lost.
Finally, after paying off the debt, I was left with a small apartment of about 30 square meters in Xiamen, and more than 100,000 in savings.
Originally, I left this house with the intention of starting up again and redoing my design studio.
But I gave up on that idea when I was introduced to motorcycle travel.
The last few years, I've spent most of my time traveling and running out of money.
At that time, my career was not going well, I was very depressed, always in a state of muddle, drinking every day.
One day, I happened to see a post on the website about riding the 318 Sichuan-Tibet route.
It has always been my dream to ride to Tibet. When I was in junior high school, I read the travel diary of Chinese explorer Yu Chunshun and always aspired to travel life.
I went on a trip back in about 2003.
At that time, I was in my second year of high school and went to Pingtan Island, the first big island in Fujian Province, with a classmate during the holidays.
I met a backpacker and always thought backpacking was such a cool way to live!
In 2013, I took the second trip of my life, driving to the West Lake in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, and also to Wuyi Mountain in our Fujian Province.
Over the years, I have been to many places, very much like to travel, and always aspire to a life of simple travel.
After the failure of my business, I was in a terrible state.
After seeing this post, I decided to change my lifestyle in order to cheer up.
It just so happens that I have a mountain bike, so I decided to go on a ride to Tibet with my online friends.
On May 27, 2015, I packed the bike and sent it by courier to Chengdu, Sichuan Province.
On May 31, I bought a plane ticket and flew to Chengdu to meet up with a few of my online pals.
On June 3, we organized a total of nine people to ride bicycles and travel along the 318 Sichuan-Tibet route.
The ride from Chengdu, Sichuan Province to Lhasa, Tibet took me a total of 27 days, and I encountered many interesting people and events along the way.
At that time, the network information was not as developed as now.
We all like to stay in youth hostels and exchange information about the road together, including road conditions, tickets to attractions and other information.
At the beginning, we set off from the starting point at a famous attraction in Chengdu: the Wuhou Temple.
There were nine of us, each with his or her own personality.
On the first day, we walked to Ya'an, Sichuan Province, also known as the Rain City, where it rains constantly throughout the year.
When we arrived in Ya'an, it happened to be raining heavily there.
We noticed a sculpture on the side of the road into Ya'an City in the shape of a horse standing on a ball.
At that time, we bought a watermelon and shared it, and joked that we should name our team "Get the hell out of here".
I didn't think that after eating that watermelon, it really rolled right away.
The next day, nine of us departed from Ya'an City and the team was disbanded when we arrived at Erlang Mountain, the rift valley of the Sichuan-Tibet route.
Some people could not ride, some people were injured, they simply took the car and moved on, and only four of us were left to continue the ride.
On the third day, as we continued on past Erlang Mountain, the group became smaller and smaller, with only two people left.
The two of us supported each other all the way forward, and when we reached the attraction of Zhedotang in Kangding City on the Sichuan-Tibet route, the nine people in the group miraculously came together again.
Fodotang is the first high mountain on the Sichuan-Tibet route, with an altitude of more than 3,200 meters.
At the bottom of the mountain, we wore short sleeves, but when we got to the top, we found that it was snowing heavily, so we changed into cotton jackets again.
Nine of us had altitude sickness, some vomited non-stop, some had more than a headache, and the rest of us couldn't ride anymore.
We had no choice but to temporarily break our trip and stay in a local youth hostel.
The old folks told us that soaking in hot springs can relieve plateau reaction, and several of us went to soak in hot springs again.
The next day, over the high mountain of Zedotang, we arrived at Xinduqiao town of Kangding city on the Sichuan-Tibet route.
In Xinduqiao town, I got to know the local Tibetan hometown Zhaxi family.
The most touching point for me was the hospitality of the Zhazi family despite their special poverty.
Zhaxi family is so poor that even the most basic food is not available, such as rice, vegetables and these things are almost not available, only some potatoes and barley noodles.
That day, we had a nice chat with Zazie.
He invited us to stay at his house for dinner, and the only thing on the table was barley noodles, buns made with potatoes as filling, and ghee tea.
Zhaxi told us that their family was so poor that he had to leave his hometown and go out to work.
However, he met with an accident while working outside and was unable to continue working, so he had to go home and dig up cordyceps in the mountains to sell.
After we heard about this, we bought all of their cordyceps, a total of a dozen of them, one for only $20.
He had two small children, and when we left, each of us gave his children a $50 red envelope.
Zhaxi pulled us hard and wouldn't let us go.
He also called his father-in-law and told him that he had some Han Chinese friends coming to the house and asked his father-in-law to bring some dried yak meat for us to eat.
When his father-in-law heard about it, he hiked six kilometers out of the mountains to send us dried yak meat to eat.
We were especially touched, and after this time, I was attracted by the hospitality of my fellow Tibetans and especially enjoyed traveling to Tibetan areas.
After 2018, I will go to Tibet once a year to visit Zhaxi inside their home.
The year before, their house collapsed due to a mudslide and an earthquake.
After I arrived at his house, for about five months, I have been helping his family build a house and collect barley.
After leaving Zhaxi's house, we went all the way to Dongda Mountain, located in Zogong County, Tibet.
It was snowy and windy that day, and we couldn't find a place to stay.
When we met a Tibetan yak herder, we asked him if we could go to their house to pitch a tent.
We speak Chinese he does not understand, he speaks Tibetan we also do not understand, can only use body language to communicate.
Later, we stayed in this big brother's house for a week.
He took us up to the mountains to dig for wormwood, herd yaks, pick mushrooms, and dig for wild mussels.
This was one of my most memorable experiences of the Tibetan way of life.
What we eat every day is tsampa (zān), barley cakes, air-dried yak meat, and sometimes a little pork.
Pork is cooked first like backpot meat, but after it is cooked, it is not fried in the pan, but directly cooled, cut into pieces, without any flavor, and eaten directly with barley cake.
Continuing on, we arrived at Linzhi, Tibet.
When I arrived in Linzhi, I met a big brother traveling on a motorcycle, who was in his 50s and from Baoji, Shaanxi Province.
My brother invited us to eat the cold skin he brought from his hometown, which I thought was especially delicious, and from then on, I had to eat it every day at every meal.
Later, I purposely set out from Lhasa, Tibet, and took a train to Baoji, Shaanxi Province to eat cold skin.
It's one of the craziest things I've ever done.
At that time, we went to a park called "Fujian Park" in Linzhi and danced with the Tibetan folks in the park.
Because Fujian Province and Guangdong Province have assisted in the construction of Linzhi, I have a Fujian ID card, into the Fujian Park can not buy tickets, other small partners are very envious.
From Linzhi, we continued on, riding exceptionally fast along the way.
Two days later, we arrived in Lhasa, Tibet.
Lhasa is the end of the ride, and after this, everyone will be disbanded.
There were four of us who traveled to Lhasa, and because we were to be dismissed the next day, we were going to go around the Potala Palace and take pictures.
In the evening, we planned to go for yak beef hot pot.
Previously, none of us had ever eaten yak beef hot pot and thought it was particularly expensive.
When you get to this place, simply luxuriate in it for a while.
So, we chipped in two hundred dollars each and told the hot pot restaurant owner to probably arrange a hundred dollars of yak meat for each of us.
The boss was straightforwardly silly and advised us, "One hundred dollars of yak meat per person, you will definitely not be able to eat it all."
But we made up our minds that we had to eat yak meat and have enough of it and not eat anything else.
The boss couldn't persuade us, so he brought up a big plate of yak meat for each of us.
When we saw the quantity, we were also confused and hurriedly asked the boss how much the yak meat cost per catty and how there was so much of it.
It turns out that the local yak meat is only thirty dollars a pound, and the amount of one hundred dollars for each of us is equal to three pounds of yak meat for each of us, which we simply cannot finish.
After the yak meat was sliced, there was no way to return it, so we thought, "How can we fix this?
In the end, we had to pack it up and take it with us, intending to see how those air-dried yak meat is made and learn how to make some air-dried yak meat.
Later, we came across a family using cow dung to bake cakes over a fire, which we found particularly interesting.
They gave them yak meat and exchanged it with them for cakes, which they baked in the oven with cow dung.
The next day, we went our separate ways and went home.
When they all left, I felt very upset and especially lost, and played in Lhasa for another 3 days.
Then I sold my bike and took a train from Lhasa to Xining, the capital city of Qinghai Province.
Arriving in Xining City, I started hiking and went around Qinghai Lake.
I remembered the cold skin in Baoji, Shaanxi Province, and took the train to eat it.
That was the end of my first bicycle trip.
After experiencing this travel atmosphere, I can't get over it, I don't want to work properly at all, and I have to spend at least two months a year to travel.
I've tried all kinds of travel, self-driving, motorcycling, and sometimes even hiking.
I always wanted to live this life now, wander the world, the four seas as home.
I even dream of being a wandering artist, going where I want to go and seeing the sights I want to see.
In 2015, my first ride ended.
Through this time in 2018, I took some interior design orders off and on to do.
Every time I spend my travel expenses, I stop traveling and work for a while.
For every interior design job I take, I can basically earn 50,000 to 80,000 yuan after I'm done, which can sustain my travel expenses for two to three months.
It's safe to say that I never fully let go of my material pursuits until 2018.
But I also do not think I lack of money, I travel while working, before starting a business to earn more than 100,000 yuan of savings not spent, but also saved more than 200,000 yuan of savings.
However, I am a non-maritalist and a committed dink.
In 2018, I broke up with my girlfriend because of misconceptions, and the loss of my love hit me hard.
I turned off my phone and went out for a trip for more than twenty days before returning, I felt that everything was not so important and completely let go of the pursuit of material things.
After that, I changed my cell phone number, quit all social software, forget everyone's contact information, and then good friends I do not contact.
I wrote down my parents' phone numbers and went on a motorcycle trip with a real heart.
However, after I changed my contact information, I lost my previous contacts and could only take some orders from the Internet to do, with little or no income.
But I have not changed my spending habits, still spend a lot, so I can only eat the old money.
So, in the period between 2018 and 2020, I spent over $300,000 of my saved savings.
The place where I spend most of my money is eating, I like to go to every place to hit the local Netflix restaurant, in fact, the meal is not good.
And I drink a lot, just to go to a variety of bars inside the money to drink, at least a few hundred dollars a day.
The most money spent on drinking was when we went to a Netflix store to drink beer and eat kebabs.
The two of us drank three cases of beer, almost all day, and continued to drink when we were drunk, resulting in a lot of open and unfinished drinks.
Another place to spend money indiscriminately is to buy equipment, such as drones, computers, solar panels, cameras.
A drone 20,000 to 30,000 yuan, I also buy, after buying feel bad to use, sell cheap.
Buy equipment spent about 70,000 to 80,000 yuan, however, I now only keep a sports camera, all other equipment sold at a loss.
For example, there is a camera, I bought at the time for more than 3,000 yuan, only used less than three months, 900 yuan I sold it.
It also took a lot of money to buy a motorcycle. At the earliest, I spent more than 30,000 yuan to buy a domestic motorcycle and rode it for more than 20,000 kilometers in five months.
I think that car is too bad, often out of order, a lot of small problems, on 7000 yuan to sell it.
The second motorcycle, which I bought for more than $80,000 in 2020, was ridden for more than a month and I sold it for more than $60,000.
I lost a lot of money in this process of buying a car.
Later, I started to travel by bicycle, and I spent a lot of money on bicycles.
It costs almost seven to eight thousand to ten thousand dollars to modify a bike.
The bike I'm riding now also cost a lot of money to buy batteries and equipment.
At the beginning of the modification, there is always dissatisfaction after the change, wasting a lot of materials, labor, and a variety of accessories, and finally spent almost 30,000 to 40,000 yuan.
Not only the parts on the car, east to repair some, and west to repair some, but also the transmission system cost several thousand.
In addition there are shock absorbers, the beginning of the shock absorbers bought a few dozen dollars, the back to buy a shock absorber several hundred dollars, the best once spent more than 700 dollars.
My money is slowly squandered in this way, the back of the savings spent, only 40,000 to 50,000 yuan left.
I didn't work much, I didn't have much income, and I finally realized I couldn't spend so much anymore and started to save money slowly.
When I was in Lijiang last year, I stayed inside an inn and cooked every day and ate some big fish and meat.
After getting familiar with the owner, she told me not to cook so many dishes every day, there is no need to waste money.
The owner talked to me a lot about her experience, about how she made money after arriving in Lijiang in 2014, and how she saved money to buy a room for her inn and do business.
I thought she had a good point and started to save money.
Now, I am especially frugal every day, 10 or 20 dollars a day is completely enough to live on.
At the end of 2021, I do not want to spend the original savings, I want to keep the money for emergencies, on doing self-publishing to earn living expenses, I earn how much money a day to spend.
Many people may not believe that I only spend more than 100 dollars a week.
For almost a half-dozen months, I spent just over $300.
For meals, I basically buy the rice, oil, and seasonings and leave everything else out.
I buy some meat when I want to eat it, and live on wild vegetables the rest of the time.
Sometimes on the way to meet good people, people will also give some supplies.
During that time, I didn't take much video, basically, it was all over.
Now, I earn travel expenses by self-publishing videos.
During this recent period, several platforms combined can yield about $100 a day.
But I still adhere to that relatively simple lifestyle and do not want to overspend.
I think it's okay to have ten dollars a day income and be able to eat.
I no longer feel like I have to make as much money as I used to.
Without this desire, the mental aspect is easier and less burdensome.
So, many people can't understand me, why do not do self-publishing seriously, always break.
In fact, sometimes I go to my favorite places, a stay is a long time, even do not want to take video.
Moreover, I have done live before and started to be quite popular.
But there are always people who ask me how to do it, and I don't think it's meaningful, and I just came out to travel in order to get rid of this kind of life.
I do self-publishing, just want to shoot my own want to shoot the video, record my most real life every day.
And not what others want to see, I will shoot.
If I have income from self-publishing, I use it to buy food. If I don't have income, I use it as a form of recording my life.
The purpose of my trip is to try to live a little more at ease.
As it is now, it makes me feel comfortable to go around and live in no fixed place.
I will always go on like this and never think of stopping.
In 2018, I traveled to Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan Province.
At that time, I was traveling on a motorcycle and was preparing to camp and rest by Dianchi at night when I met a man named Xiao Meng.
He also likes outdoor travel, so he took the initiative to chat with me and invited me to stay at his house.
Meng's parents divorced when he was very young.
He lives with his mother, but she has intermittent mental illness.
Growing up, his mother took him to a stall to sell and raised him, and the family built a new house.
I think this mother is particularly great, and Meng is also very filial, very good to his mother.
At dinner that day, we talked a lot about Meng's experience and I was very touched.
Later, when I went to Kunming again, I stayed at Xiao Meng's house for a long time.
I am now riding this electric tricycle, you can lie down, and also installed with solar electric panels, is modified in the home of small Meng.
There is another person I admire, a Hubei lad.
His dream was to ride a bicycle to Xinjiang. After he graduated from secondary school, he set off on his bicycle from Huanggang City, Hubei Province to Yunnan Province, and then from the Yunnan-Tibet route to Tibet.
He was only 19 years old and went on a bicycle trip alone, with only 2,000 yuan on him. After buying equipment, bicycles, etc., only a few hundred yuan remained.
He lived on only three dollars a day, a bunch of noodles to eat for three days, could not afford to buy any food, household items, just to fulfill his dream.
I thought he was particularly impressive, admired him and decided to walk with him.
In order to save money, we did not stay in hostels on the road, all tenting.
For dinner, we collect some wild vegetables on the roadside together and cook a bowl of noodles.
Living this minimalist life with him makes me feel that travel has a different meaning again.
Many of the outdoor living skills I know now were learned at that time, such as collecting wild vegetables, bathing in public toilets, and finding outlets for charging.
Once, we couldn't cook, so we ate an egg fried rice for one person in the restaurant for fifteen yuan each, which we thought was particularly expensive.
Before leaving, we intend to go to the local scenic spot to see, but the results of an inquiry to more than 200 yuan entrance fees, so we had to give up.
During this time of travel, I have encountered many moving people and things, there is absolutely no way to share all at once, I can only pick part to say.
One time, I happened to run into a mudslide, and after I passed safely, I stopped the car to take pictures.
Unexpectedly, I just parked the car and picked up the phone, the mountain rolled down many large rocks.
I was thinking, if I ride a little slower, I guess I will be washed under the cliff.
Another time, I was on the road for three or four days and I didn't meet anyone at all.
At night, I was going to find a place to camp with the wind at my back.
I happened to meet a group of herders who told me to go on ahead and stay overnight at a local's house where there are wolves at night.
I thought they were lying to me and didn't want to continue the rush and climb, so I didn't take their words seriously.
That day, just after setting up the tent, a large flock of crows flew over my head, which I thought was very strange.
Later, when a dead yak was found not far away, crows flew over to eat the meat.
But I still didn't take it seriously. As a result, in the evening, I saw several wolves on the hillside from afar.
I hurriedly put the tent away and ran down the hill for about two or three kilometers, hiding in a public toilet that had just been repaired, to spend the night safely.
Another time, it was after 11:00 p.m., and I was still spinning around on my motorcycle in the wild primeval forest.
The roads inside the forest are not good, they are gravel roads, and motorcycles cannot ride fast.
Previously, the locals told me that there were bears inside the primeval forest.
I was especially afraid that if I really encountered a bear, I would be in big trouble.
Fortunately, I brought two cases of spare gasoline, and there were no accidents along the way.
By the time I was safely out of the primeval forest, it was after one in the morning.
All three of these experiences were relatively thrilling, but otherwise, I basically never ran into too much trouble.
Because I am not willing to take risks, if the road conditions do not work, I will turn back, I am not willing to play with their lives.
I've traveled a lot from 2018 to now and can probably list them all.
Since my departure from Fujian Province, I have traveled to Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan Province, Tibet, Sichuan Province, Shaanxi Province, Gansu Province, Qinghai Province, Hunan Province, Hubei Province, as well as Zhejiang Province, Jiangxi Province, and Anhui Province.
Almost half of China has been traveled.
Huangshan, Sanqing Mountain, Wuyi Mountain, Hangzhou West Lake, Lingyin Temple, Zhangjiajie ...... I have been to all these famous attractions.
I have been to many famous tourist cities in China, such as Dali, Lijiang, and the section of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway inside Pinchaca, where the Dulong people live along the Dulong River.
Because there are too many places to go, some routes I can no longer remember clearly.
I have traveled 318 Sichuan-Tibet South Route, 214 Xining-Lancang Highway, 109 Beijing-Lhasa Highway, 317 Sichuan-Tibet North Route, 320 Yunnan-Myanmar Highway.
Last year, I traveled the famous 332 Laobei-Ebudurg highway.
This road in the highland pasture, belong to a relatively dangerous road, few people walk.
I tried walking it last year and it took about four or five days.
More than 300 km of them are in no-man's land and there is no place to buy supplies.
In early 2022, I arrived in Guangxi.
Next, I'm probably headed in the direction of northwest China, probably from Hunan Province to Hubei Province.
Then it goes into Shaanxi Province, then to Ningxia City in Gansu Province, and finally to Qinghai and Inner Mongolia.
But I don't necessarily go to the places I mentioned above.
Because I take the route more arbitrary, if you want to go, go, do not want to go, stop.
But my approximate direction won't change, so I'll head northwest next.
After this year of walking, and depending on the situation, I would love to find a place in Yunnan Province, do something, stabilize and live an idyllic life for a while.
I don't like living in a big city, and I won't go to work, I just want to do something I like to do.
Life is short, is to live a little bit of self, life is free and unfettered, better than anything else.
Editor: Fawn & July
This is the 10th real-life story recorded by [Fawn Interviews].
I feel that truth has the power to move and warm the heart with a thousand pounds.
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