A fine way to explore the countryside

Naimon (second from left) poses with the villagers in Xinjiang.Photo provided to China Daily

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 says, sitting at a coffee table in China Daily's offices in Beijing. "They were very interested in me and my stories about being on the road."

All people but one in the village were Uyghurs, he says, 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 says, 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 says, 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.