Near the peak of summer in mid July, Zach Naimon, 19, was riding his motorcycle on the highway from Akzu to Kashgarin in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Before him, a newly completed highway stretched 430 kilometers into the desert. Beneath him was a fuel tank that was full, enough to take him 300 km.

After passing two service stations he started thinking about having to refuel, but the next two service stations on the just completed highway were yet to open, and his fuel gauge told him he had enough for only about another 80 km, with the next service station just within reach, 70 km away.

Just as he arrived at the service station, the motorcycle sputtered to a halt, but that station was closed, too. The driver of a truck that happened to be pulling up told him he would have to walk 3 km down the highway to the next village, where he could refuel.

Pushing his motorcycle weighing 200 kilograms in the hot desert for four hours, Naimon had finished all his water and was hungry and exhausted when he finally reached the village at 4 pm.

Relieved that he had managed to have his tank refilled, the service station workers asked him whether he was hungry and offered him something to eat.

It was a village with a population of about 400. The news that a young American riding a motorcycle and speaking good Mandarin had come to dine at the village’s only restaurant next door to the service station spread through the village. Naimon’s mother is from Afghanistan and his father is from Israel, and he said he felt his physical looks played a role in drawing the villagers to him.

In the end, 75 people, young and old, turned up at the restaurant even though it was during the holy month of Ramadan and sat with him as he ate his vegetarian meal.

“They were very hospitable,” he told China Daily. “They were very interested in me and my stories about being on the road.”

All people but one in the village were Uygurs, he said, the children spoke better Mandarin than the adults and the elderly could communicate with him only with body language.

“It’s a fantastic experience. When I came across a difficulty, people helped me out. Nothing was better than making friends with the local people in that village. I realized one of the goals for this motorbike trip.”

Another goal he realized was to ride a motorcycle from East China to the most western city of Kashgar.

He is attracted to China’s countryside, he said, given that “big cities ... look similar to each other”.

It all started four years ago when Naimon, then 15, who could not speak a word of Chinese, came to study at a high school in Beijing.

For more than a year he stayed with a Chinese family and studied at a high school, and soon he spoke better Mandarin than most foreign Chinese learners. In June he won the Jiangsu Cup, a Chinese-language speech contest in Nanjing.

When he was studying in Beijing four years ago, he said, he lacked the money to travel to big Chinese cities, and preferred to spend his holidays in the countryside around Beijing and in Yunnan province in the south and Gansu province in the west.

The country’s rural areas are much more intriguing than its big cities, he said.

“China’s very big and the places are very different from each other.”

Four years later, before going to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville as a second-year student, Naimon decided to realize one of his dreams to travel around China.

“A train trip is good but you can’t see the views between railway stations. So it’s much better to ride through the country. But it’s very hard for a foreigner to get a license plate in China.”

In early May in the United States, Naimon learned how to ride a motorcycle, and the following month he bought a motorcycle in Beijing, later riding to Nanjing to attend the Jiangsu Cup awards ceremony.

At a crossroads in the suburbs of Nanjing as he was waiting for traffic lights to turn green, he noticed a man was riding a motorcycle similar to his.

“I talked to him and we became friends. Later, we rode together with his friends to Dunhuang in Gansu province.”

After Dunhuang, Naimon rode on to Kashgar, 2,200 km away. One of the most remarkable things on the road is the stretch of about 1,200 km from Qinghai Lake to Turpan, he said, because of the weather extremes.

“It was awesome. When I set out from Qinghai Lake it was about 0 C, but when I arrived in Turpan in Xinjiang it was so hot, above 40 C.”

In 45 days, he said, he covered more than 16,000 kilometers, traveling through 13 provinces and autonomous regions and 28 cities, including Hebei, Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang. When he passed through Lanzhou in Gansu province, where he had been four years earlier, he found the city had greatly changed, he said.

“In 2011 it was a very poor place, but now it’s rich. There are quite a few multinationals and famous international hotels, as well as luxurious cars. The high-speed train has brought many development opportunities to the province.”

He immensely enjoyed the scenery along the way and made friends, he said, but when he posted photos on Facebook his friends “thought it was dangerous to ride a motorbike in a foreign country”, particularly after he had an accident and broke his left leg.

“It was on July 24 when I had almost finished the trip. Usually I did not ride on highways because in China that’s not allowed. So I took national roads. But after I had just passed the provincial boundary between Inner Mongolia and Hebei provinces the wheels slipped on the gravel (and) I fell down and broke my leg.”

Lying on the road, he could not move enough to reach his mobile phone, and he yelled for help, but more than 40 vehicles passed without stopping, he said.

“Some slowed down to take a photo of me,” he said, adding: “I’m no swindler.”

Help eventually arrived and after being taken to a local hospital that had no pain killers he was taken by ambulance to Beijing, an excruciatingly painful journey through traffic jams that took five hours.

“I chewed a lot of biscuits,” he said.

“My friends think it was dangerous ... but I think it’s great fun. Next year I plan to ride from Beijing to London, and I will change to another route, going down to Guangdong and Guangxi, entering Tibet and going to Pakistan.”

Contact the writer at

yangyang.com.cn