About Pieter Neele

My urge to travel must be innate. I cherish early memories of train rides at age four. The bad part was getting off the train: I always wanted to ride on. I bought youth rail passes for the national and then the European railways as soon as I qualified at age 15 and 19.

I picked up a masters in Dutch Linguistics and Literature – I am from Holland. But while studying I travelled whenever I had the opportunity (and the money). First set foot outside Europe in the Middle East. Long Asian trips followed, the first one in 1988-89. Didn’t feel at home in the backpack scene. But I came to see a lot of places, learned a lot.

I became a tour leader and guided about a hundred group tours, mostly in China, its Tibetan area’s and Southeast Asia, for several well-known Dutch tour operators.

After more than a decade of experience in China, I got seriously annoyed with myself for still only speaking rudimentary Chinese. So I studied Chinese at Lanzhou University (a beginner’s semester, during the Sars-spring of 2003) and Yunnan Normal University in Kunming (for two years in 2006 and 2007), in China’s Northwest and Southwest respectively.

Since 2010 I concentrate solely on off the beaten track travel and exploration of unknown untouched routes and places.