Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
(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.
Here are 20 of them to get you started.
1. Score extra beds the easy way
Chinese hotels aren't too fussy when it comes to matching the number of beds to the number of people, particularly when the extra bodies are children.
For families, this can save a lot of cash. Rather than needing two rooms, a family of four can get cozy in a twin room, where both beds are the same size as a regular double bed...