The Yangtze River Courtesy of Burton

Editor's Note: Most of us can only dream of setting off on a world tour. This year, Jake Burton and his family will be living the dream, embarking on a 10-month trip to snowboard all over the globe, covering six continents and following winter the whole way.

Jake, Donna, George(13), Taylor(10), Timmy(7) and niece Victoria (15) set off in July for a year of adventure travel. They will be snowboarding at resorts and in the backcountry of Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Morocco, throughout Europe and in the Himalayas (India). To round out the trip, they will be surfing in the Galapagos Islands, Peru, New Zealand, Tonga, Australia and Hawaii, sea kayaking in Thailand, and touring through China, Tibet, and Vietnam.

From Jake
After two months in New Zealand and Australia, arriving in China introduced a heavy case of culture shock. We went from great snow, waves and skateparks to no snow, no waves and no skateparks. This combined with a language that we don't understand a word of, put us in a very different zone. What you realize here in China very quickly is that this place has people, lots and lots of people. They are very cool, and they work their asses off, but there is no getting away from them. If you like to piss outside, this is not the place for you, as you can be pretty sure that you are in someone's sight at all times, not that Chinese people are nosey, but they are everywhere.

For the first few days most of us just talked about how much we missed OZ, but after a week or so, we settled in to the whole Asian scene. It is a very different lifestyle, and as Donna pointed out, one that Westerners are very quick to judge. Once you adapt to the scene here you realize that it is a very functional approach to life. It wasn't long before we found ourselves laughing at some of our western customs that make absolutely no sense (like just ordering for yourself in a restaurant and not sharing with anyone). The people here are incredibly friendly. In our seven weeks in Asia, we have yet to encounter any negative 'tude'. I can't say that about an afternoon in New York.

Our first stop in China was Shanghai. We stayed in the tallest hotel in the world, the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, which is located on the 53rd - 87th floors of the Jin Mao Tower (the third largest building in the world). Just five years ago the area around this hotel was rice farms. Now it is full of high rise buildings. The growth of this city has to set a record. There are more than 3000 buildings higher than 18 stories, most of which have been built in the last few years. When they decide to build something in China, they don't waste any time. More impressive is the fact that they use bamboo scaffolding when making a building of any size including this one. This is a perfect example of where we found ourselves quick to judge. When you see a skyscraper being built inside of a bamboo and twine scaffolding structure, you just laugh, but after you've seen a hundred of them and they are building them this fast from an organic recyclable scaffolding structure, you start questioning why we can't do the same.

I had some meetings in Shanghai with potential component suppliers while the family checked out the city. On the next day we all visited this nearby town, Zhouzhuang (China's version of Venice), where the only way to get around is by boat. That afternoon, we visited a silk factory. I, for one, never knew that silk is basically the guts of a caterpillar's cocoon. This place showed us the whole operation, which starts with soaking the cocoons in water and then threading the almost invisible filaments onto a weaving machine. After the tour, we hit the factory store and Timmy (7) got his first (of many) Asian outfits. It only cost about $15, but he looked like a little emperor when he wore it. He wouldn't take it off for weeks, even when working the Chinese toilets.

"There is this one matriarchal village where the women live in houses and the men just wander from house to house."

From Shanghai we went on to Xi'an. This is a small city with only 8 million people (yup, it's as big as New York and you've never heard of it). Unlike Shanghai, which had plenty of Westerners, Xi'an was solidly Chinese. This was one of the first stops where we felt like the tourist attraction as people constantly checked us out.

We spent a few days in Xi'an, but the highlight was visiting the tomb of China's Emperor Qin Shihuang, who ruled over 2200 years ago. The existence of this tomb had been known, but it was not discovered until 1974, when a farmer was digging a water well and dug up a life-size soldier made of clay. To make a long story short, it turns out the tomb is pretty big, 20 square miles (33 square kms) to be exact, all buried underground. Back in the day, they started to build the tomb when the Emperor was 13. They had as many as seven hundred and fifty thousand (yes that's 750,000) people working around the clock on the tomb until he died at the age of 49. The objective was to build an entire army of clay soldiers to protect him in his afterlife. This dude had to have felt pretty good in his last days. All the peasants who worked on it weren't quite as stoked on the whole program, and a few years after he was buried (and the tomb was sealed) they broke in and trashed a lot of it. It is now being excavated and fully restored, which they just started (because they didn't have the money to do it in the 70s or 80s) and they have already dug up over 8000 clay soldiers, and each one is totally unique. It's a cool place to check out because every day they are finding new stuff.

Our most interesting meal in Xi'an was at the city's best-known dumpling restaurant. The place was huge, it probably sat about a thousand people. They had every kind of dumpling (just about anything wrapped in dough) you could ever think up: from a combination of squid and pumpkin, to straight walnuts. They even had some called 'monkey face', which did actually look like a monkey's face. I didn't ask what was inside of those.

From Xi'an we went to Wuhan and then to Yichang to check out the dam at the top of the 'Three Gorge Project' on the Yangtze River. This project is the biggest man-made engineering and construction project ever, anywhere. The purpose of the dam is to provide power and control flooding of the Yangtze, which has killed thousands of people in past years. The total cost of the project was budgeted at 22 billion US dollars, but will ultimately be higher. It is a controversial project, mainly because of environmental and cultural concerns (eradicating villages), not to mention the fact that it is being built in an earthquake zone (if a dam this size ever breaks, watch out). Over a million people have had to be relocated because by 2009 their entire villages will be under water once the project is complete. We checked out the dam itself at night, which was pretty cool because it's lit up brightly and huge trucks are all over the place hauling materials around. After checking out the dam, we got on a boat for a three day trip up the Yangtze river with a couple of hundred tourists. I was somewhat skeptical about this leg of the trip, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. The crew was super cool and fun, and the stuff we saw was incredible. They recently used the partially completed dam to raise the water level 40 meters/130 ft. The final stage (another 40 meters) will happen in 2009. We were floating over villages that were now underwater and we could see other towns that will eventually be under water as well. We saw bridge after bridge under construction, and these were not small bridges.

We got off the boat a couple of times; once to check out an old Buddhist temple (Shi Bao Zhai), and once to go check out a village where these half-naked guys take you out on these handmade canoes. The girls loved this one. After three days on the boat, we got off in Chong Qing and checked out some panda bears in the city zoo. We then realized that despite having been in China for ten days we had seen only 10 to 15 animals the entire time here (including the trip to the zoo)! This number includes dogs, cats and even birds. You just don't see ANY animals around here unless they are in a zoo, or on the dinner table (where the head is usually left on). To have a dog you have to pay hundreds of dollars a year to have the necessary license, so pets just don't exist in China.

Our next stop was Kunming, There, we visited a 'live market' where you could buy animals, but just about all of them were to be eaten. They even sold these insects that looked like cockroaches. The deal is you buy a handful of them (alive) and soak them in alcohol for six months. You then drink the alcohol in order to prevent getting cancer. We bought some turtles and gold fish to release in the pond at the local temple. This is something you do for good luck. It was not easy walking around with a live turtle for half an hour. He seemed to be sure I was going to eat him, but when I let him go in the pond, he was pretty happy. We got to thinking that was probably where he came from in the first place (that's recycling).

— Jake Burton, Burton Snowboards