A Voyage of Discovery Across China, Where Weibo Followers Are Your Guides, Hosts

(Image source: Xinhua)

If you thought the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Weibo, is only for super-enthusiastic fans of superstars (such as the gorgeous actress Yao Chen), think again. An increasing number of Weibo people are in the travel business, or just love traveling, and are using the microblogging platform to help shape their journeys.

I’ve encountered one such person who has been to 40+ countries. And I myself, being an enthusiastic tweeting traveller on trains, have to say that tweeting your journey on Weibo makes it even more worthwhile. At times I even got offers from rail staff who just want to meet you. There’s the human factor.

And it is exactly on that very human factor that the Nanjing-based Yangtse Evening News recently reported. In its regular over-the-weekend insert (PDF link), Weibo user Yilu Xiang Dong was featured with his story of finishing the entire Chinese mainland (that’s 31 provinces, autonomous regions and centrally-governed municipalities) in the span of 108 days, traveling 35,159 kilometers using just 14,940RMB.

How did he do this? He decided to get out of the office on June 27, 2011, with a Weibo post announcing his trip to get the most mileage in China, meeting friends using the power of Weibo while spending the least amount of money possible. His followers and the Weibosphere decided to be accommodating, and Yilu Xiang Dong set out on July 12 with nothing more than a mobile phone, a camera, a laptop, a backpack and an item of luggage.

Yilu Xiang Dong (that’s his online nickname), a 30-something native of Gansu in western China, left Beijing, where he worked in the media industry, on this trip; it came in the wake of two of his friends dying due to immense work pressure. He was inspired to do this Weibo-powered trip because of the “stranger factor” he once encountered in Beijing — the fact that strangers were willing to help him out.

And they did. Strangers — his followers on Weibo — helped him spend nights for free at their homes, being warm hosts. This in itself is quite amazing — a somewhat-familiar line from a Lee Hom song still rings fresh in my mind, where the pop diva bemoans that technology’s keeping us further apart in real life. The Weibo trip around China seems to have done the opposite.

Of course, seasoned tweeps might have experienced it before: those tweet-ups are full of engaging first encounters with fellow followers, and I myself have let followers and online buddies decide a small part of my day. But what has happened lately shows that the more wired up you are on Weibo, the closer you can actually get to people in real life.