An Intrepid Traveller

About the Book

China is an amazing country. A place that needs time and complete immersion to be able to understand. I took a job as a tour leader, and instantly I was out of my depth. I experienced places and situations that I could never have been prepared for and all with a group of paying tourists who were looking to me for guidance. However, this was a steep learning curve covering language, culture, and history. It was not long before I saw that the people who had saved up for their holiday of a lifetime were far less prepared than I was. For over two and a half years, I visited many parts of China and also took groups to Vietnam, Nepal, Mongolia, and Russia. All this time sampling the culture and learning as much as I could about China and this part of Asia. I had some sticky situations and a lot of laughs with friends that I will keep forever. Would you let me be your tour leader?

About the Author

Mark Jackson was born in the North of England in 1969. He moved to London in 1987 for three reasons. There was no work in the north, he had a chance of going to university, and the music and nightlife scene were the best in the world. He studied town planning to postgraduate level, with the intention of helping build better lives for people, whether it was in the United Kingdom or abroad. He got involved with the music and nightclub scene in London. With planning being a dirty word under the Thatcher government, he had no employment opportunities once he left uni, other than bar management work. He took a year to travel and got the travel bug; the things that he had read about in his geography and social policy textbooks were alive in front of him. But he couldn’t think of any way of sustaining the lifestyle abroad. Back in the UK and back as a bar manager at different universities, he had long summer holidays in which he took the opportunity to travel some more. This continued as he changed jobs and gained promotions, most summers going to far-flung places, much to the puzzlement of his friends and everyone else. Girlfriends didn’t understand it either, so they came and went. In his early thirties, he decided that backpacking was not for him anymore and took an organised tour. That had him hooked, and he dreamed that if he could ever have the balls to quit the well-paid job, he would want to be a tour leader. By 2006, he was being offered a voluntary redundancy in a restructuring. It wasn’t long before the application form was on its way, and in 2007, he became a tour leader in China.