Chinese tourism is 95% domestic making China feel like the only foreigner there
🇨🇳 Chinese tourism is 95% domestic: this means most of the tourists you see in China are not foreigners but just other Chinese
Even if we'd visit the most tourist places in China, we'd see maybe 1 Westerner (if we're lucky) vs. 10,000 Chinese
Which honestly makes it a more fun place to visit to
Maybe the most fun place I visited since I became a digital nomad in 2013
I thought about WHY I liked this so much, and I think one of the reasons traveling for me as a digital nomad starting 10+ years ago was so magical, was because it was NEW and there was barely anyone doing it, like there'd be 20 other digital nomads in Chiang Mai
You felt a lot like Ernest Hemmingway, traveling to far away countries, interacting with people and observing the differences in culture and learning from them
But things have changed a bit. There's now 2x more people traveling in the world than 15 years ago (from 900 million to now 1.8 tourist trips per year). By 2035, that'll be 3x more
Now that everyone can travel anywhere (and also bring their laptop), travel has boomed, and there's a lot less places where you're still the only foreigner visiting
Even if you go to some remote non-tourist place, you're bound to run into another Dutch, German, Brit, Spanish or American traveler every 5 minutes
China feels like you are the only one there, and due to geopolitics it's more isolated from the West than ever, and many Westerners are scared to visit (whether that's valid or not)
This makes people also really super super nice, because you're the odd one out, and they know that, so they'll do everything to help you and be very pragmatic at that too. And they're not tired of tourists/foreigners yet, more like excited to see you (because there simply is barely any)
This video is obviously a very tourist spot, but most of the non-touristy things you see in China are not crowded like this, actually more like very spacious and not busy, which also makes it a very comfortable place to visit, because other places have become so crowded with tourism and just general travel, that they're overcapacity, and it's not fun
China is generally under capacity, and that makes it generally smooth to travel here (okay maybe except this tourist spot :D)
This spot btw is the Hongya Cave famous for being built into the rocks and full of lights, it actually looks sick from inside too, imagine building a house in Minecraft into the rocks, very cool and full of food and shops inside the rocks (it's where I took the food video from below)
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