Life on Nanchang Lu: 2012. My Year of Maximum China.

Firstly, a big smiling Happy New Year to every single one of you! My hope is that 2012 will bring all of us a year of good friends, good food, and a lot of laughter!

2012 will likely be my last year in China, a situation I have very mixed feelings about - I miss home and family, I miss the breathable quality of overseas air, and the Australian wilderness, but I have an extraordinarily interesting and colourful life here in China that will be hard to let go. Not to mention the noodles.

There's no escaping it though - our older daughter begins high school in Australia at the start of 2013, and we promised we would return home before that date, although we never imagined we would be living in China right up until then!

As a way of fending off any imagined future regrets, I plan to pack as much of China - its food, its countryside, its people - into the coming twelve months as possible. The major manifestation of this plan is a crazy scheme that first gripped me some six months ago and I haven't been able to shake it off since. You know it's a good idea when it gives you a sick, terrifying feeling in the guts every time you think about it.

So here it is. We will take a Chinese truck, or a minibus, or some kind of campervan-like vehicle, and transform it into a fully-equipped home on wheels, replete with sleeping, cooking and coffee-making facilities, then spend the last six months of 2012 roaming around the remoter backroads of China. What do you think?

Personally, I think it's a bloody crazy idea but you can't deny it has enormous appeal. Even crazier, the rest of the family has come on board with it, after some initial misgivings about whether there would be Western-style breakfast cereal and the capability of recharging electronic devices on the road.

It will be a hugely HUGE undertaking, mostly because we are breaking relatively new ground - recreational vehicles don't really exist in China, necessitating making a sort of custom-built home-made frankencampervan of our own, complete with comfortable bedding and privacy curtains.

Camping of any kind is pretty much unheard of, and the last time I saw anyone in a tent in China, it had been erected by the staff of a three star hotel on the adjacent concrete basketball court, with use of hotel facilities included in the tent price. There are no camping grounds, no trailer parks, and no laybys with nearby toilet facilities.

So I'm calling 2012 our year of Maximum China, a fully immersive experience of seeing and eating our way through as much of China as possible, with our own twist. As 2012 looms excitingly ahead, instead of looking back on the year in review as I've done before, I'm looking to the year ahead and what it might hold, both in the short term and the long term, in travel planning terms.

Here's what I predict for the coming year of Maximum China:

1. I will pass my Chinese exams next week, motivated by the desire to avoid being the first student over forty to fail and the need to speak enough Chinese to cover vehicle breakdowns and other minor emergencies. Although I wish the teachers had given me a lot more warning about the 100 word written essay at the end of the Chinese test, because my essay will consist of twenty characters I can write from memory, and a lot of blank spaces. (But - I have a cunning plan to copy any vocabulary that might be useful from the rest of the exam paper and paste it into my essay, although this may not work out so well:

On my holidays, my family and I visited the...bank to make a credit card application. At the...bank...was a lot of...lovely scenery...and we...completed the application form...while...climbing a mountain. That day the...weather report predicted rain...but we...waited for the application to be approved. The End.)

2. The ratio of Chinese:Western meals my family is willing to eat will decrease from 1:3 to 1:10 by year's end, decreasing exponentially with time spent on the road away from supermarkets full of Western food in Shanghai. I will be forced to resort to making them congee for breakfast when we run out of cereal. They will hate this.

3. I will pass my Chinese driver's license test without having to bribe any officials, or have a Chinese stand-in named 'Fay-ah-na' sit the test on my behalf, for a pre-arranged fee.

4. We will finaly get to visit Tibet, provided there are no more monk self-immolations in 2012.

5. My iphone app, the Shanghai Xiaolongbao Tour for Crimson Bamboo, despite being extremely niche, will go totally viral on release causing the entire Chinese internet to collapse and making me an overnight app millionaire. (The first part of this prediction is entirely true - I've been working on this exciting project with Crimson Bamboo, authors of cool travel apps for history lovers, for the launch of a new range of travel apps for food lovers. It's released in two weeks, and I'll tell you more closer to the time. The latter part of the prediction? Well, dreaming's OK, isn't it?)

6. The hare-brained travelling campervan scheme will take more money, wits, patience and cunning than I currently possess, but because I'm not a quitter I will make everyone's life hell as I try to source solar-powered portable water heating and a compostible travelling toilet in a country that hasn't yet heard of camping.

7. Eighteen will be the number of times my husband will tell me we can just hire a car and sleep in hotels with actual beds instead of campervanning our way around the country.

8. Eighteen will be the number of times I reply something along the lines of 'bugger off' to his very sensible suggestion. Although sometimes I will really, really want to give in.

9. China will finally get high-speed internet just as I leave the country, and I'll be really pissed off because I never got to experience the thrill of uploading a photo in under ten minutes.

10. After six months of travelling rough crammed into a home-made campervan my children will probably hate me, but when they're forty-five they'll tell their kids it was the best holiday they ever had. I hope.