(CNN) -- Exploring China can rattle even veteran travelers. <br /> <br />And understandably so. <br /> <br />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. <br /> <br />But traveling away from the big cities isn't scary, and it's not unmanageable. <br /> <br />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.
