A family at home on the road

Sunhats, backpacks, sneakers and trekking poles — these are the day-to-day musthaves of the family of William Lindesay and Wu Qi.

This East-meets-West couple started traveling while their younger son was still in nappies in 2003. To many, they are a dazzling sight: a black-haired Chinese wife, a blue-eyed British husband and two mixed-race boys, conversing seamlessly in both Chinese and English.

Most of their trips seem more rigorous than leisurely — heritage study in the Mongolian deserts, a 53-kilometer hiking tour of New Zealand, a one-day climb of three English summits and a six-day train ride from Beijing to Moscow. As modern and cosmopolitan as this family is, it exemplifies one old Chinese saying: It is better to travel 10,000 miles than to read 10,000 books.

The couple's romance began with the Great Wall. Born in 1956 in Liverpool, Lindesay became enamored with China's most famous monument. In 1987, he made headlines by spending 78 days walking the Great Wall across northern China.

Shortly before his departure, he met Wu in his hotel. Though they spoke only briefly, he never forgot her, and on his return, he successfully wooed her, overcoming her parents' hesitation. She became his wife, and they settled in Beijing where he worked first as an editor at China Daily and then Xinhua, later starting WildWall, a Great Wall-themed tour company.

Villagers living at the foot of the heritage site often see the tall, silver-haired foreigner collecting plastic bottles and garbage along the Wall. He has devoted more than 30 years to walking, photographing, studying, and protecting the structure.

For such contributions, he holds the Friendship Award, the highest award given by the People's Republic of China to foreign experts who make a significant contribution to the country's progress. His home country also recognized his contributions in 2006 when Queen Elizabeth II presented him with the Order of the British Empire.

The honors ceremony at Buckingham Palace was another snapshot in the family's off-the-beaten-track travel album. Most of the destinations they visit are far from the hot spots recommended by travel guidebooks; instead, they prefer places such as the Explorers Club in San Francisco, Hadrian's Wall in Britain, or uninhabited stretches of steppe along the China-Mongolia border.

Many assume the Lindesay family must be wealthy in order to afford their globetrotting, but they are not. Lindesay says they just choose to spend money on travel rather than luxuries. Where possible they eschew cars in favor of going by foot, bike or public transport, and they never stay in five-star hotels or dine out lavishly.

"Real travel may be hard, uncertain, uncomfortable, but there's a feel-good factor when you pass a test of some kind," Lindesay wrote in the family's newly published travel memoir Pages of Discovery.

Lindesay cites a trip to Moscow as an example. Instead of taking a taxi from the railway station to the hotel, they took the plunge into the Moscow Metro. "We crossed the city for a few rubles, mingled with ordinary people, and saw they are not 'aliens' but people just like us, everywhere. We arrived at our destination feeling comfortable, confident, and not timid," says Lindesay.

However, their journeys, which can last weeks or months, have sometimes been incompatible with their children's schooling. Wu recalls when Lindesay let their elder son ask for leave from his primary school so they could go to New York for a 45-day Great Wall lecture tour. The son missed his final exam, which upset Wu. "The family had a strong smell of 'gunpowder' at that time," she says.

Lindesay attaches great importance to learning out of the classroom, saying that children might score well on school tests, but that experience of the world outside, in distant lands, with different languages, scripts, political structures, and religious beliefs, is the real testing ground.

"You can only get street-wise out on the street. You can only get worldly wise when seeing the world," he says.

Years ago, such thinking was in stark contrast to that of most Chinese parents, who put their children's classroom study first and worried that too much travel would delay schoolwork and lower grades.

Children in this international family did not have the same pressure to perform on school tests, but they had "homework" on the road.

Wu asked her sons to write travel diaries, collect tickets, draw maps and summarize travel tips. She says such habits, though they might not directly improve test scores, will pay dividends in later life.

These experiences certainly shaped their sons' characters and influenced their chosen study at university. One read world history, the other international relations.

Another obvious payoff of their travels is that their two sons, now adults, also share an interest in historical monuments, and the Great Wall in particular. More than four years after graduating from university, the elder son Jimmy has a portfolio of video work about heritage protection, some of which has been broadcast on the BBC and in Chinese media. He and 21-year-old brother Tommy are now planning to follow in their father's footsteps with a new 4,500-km hike on the Great Wall.

"My parents view the world as a big classroom, and my brother and I are the biggest beneficiaries," Jimmy says.

Xinhua