(CNN) -- Exploring China can rattle even veteran travelers.
And understandably so.
It's a huge country with enough languages and dialects to leave even many native Chinese flummoxed at the thought of communicating away from home.
But traveling away from the big cities isn't scary, and it's not unmanageable.
Traveling for the past few years from my home base in Shanghai, I've picked up a lot of tips -- both from my own experiences and from others -- that make life on the road in China a little bit easier and a lot more rewarding.
