The town I used as my base of operations, Zhongdian, was recently officially recognized by the Chinese government as the location of the mythical "Shangri-La". While I'm not sure exactly how they came to this conclusion, I can personally vouch for the fact that the entire area is a truly amazing place.

The picture above is a stock-photo of one of the major Tibetan Buddhist temples in the area, Songzhanlin Monastery (it was pouring rain the day I was there, so I decided to give you a nice sunny picture).

There were rumors of some highly-skilled meditation masters in the region, and of course I had to go check them out for myself! More on that later ...

In the process of "hoofing it" all over the countryside, I got to explore some amazing temples, eat great (and dirt cheap!) food, and meet a lot of fantastic people.

Without the skills gained from my practice of HARDCORE STRESS MANAGEMENT™, I never could have made this trip a reality. And my experiences in China led me to do a lot of thinking about the differences between tourism and travel.

Travel can be a powerful technique in your extreme stress management arsenal. Tourism, on the other hand, is often quite the opposite!

Most of us on vacation are tourists. When we finally get around to taking a vacation, we pack as much into those few days as we possible can: sprinting through museums, churches, and restaurants at breakneck pace, snapping a few pictures along the way.

We return home a few days later and collapse, exhausted, before returning to the weekday grind. When most of us flee the 9-to-5 for a vacation, this is the kind of "break" we give ourselves.

"Work hard, play hard," right?

When I began making plans for my recent trip to China, I made the decision to take my entire year's worth of vacation allowance to go. That's right, I spent all of 2007's vacation on this one trip.

My friends and family thought I was crazy! Why would someone do a thing like that?

Because I wanted to travel, not tour.

Travel, real travel, is about immersing yourself in a place and culture other than your own. It's about taking yourself out of your everyday, habitual life and genuinely experiencing a different way of living.

Most people say that they need a vacation to relax, or get some relief from the daily stress in their lives, but you simply can not accomplish that goal while hustling through your 5-day sprint of a guided tour.

Taking yourself out of the mindset of a tourist, and putting yourself into the mindset of a traveller will completely change the way you experience your vacation.

How do you do that?

FIRST of all, throw away your itinerary! Keep a list of a few big things you want to accomplish, of course (like seeing the Eiffel Tower, or hiking along the Great Wall) but leave yourself enough time to slow down and experience the simple joy of sipping an espresso outside an Italian cafe, or dodging the random yak in the middle of the road of a rural Chinese town (easier said than done!).

Most of the memories I most treasure about my recent trip came from circumstances that I literally stumbled upon - something that would never have happened if I had scheduled myself into a frenzy.

SECOND, take some real time to explore a place. I don't know how many of my friends and family have returned from vacations in Europe, with stories of spending merely a single day in a given city like Florence, or Vienna, or Prague. You could spend an entire month in one of those places and barely begin to scratch the surface!

I consider a full week, that's 7 days, to be the absolute minimum amount of time to spend in a given city before you can really consider yourself to have travelled there.

THIRD, give yourself a reason to interact with the local population.

I had heard rumors of some highly-accomplished meditation masters in the area where I travelled that I specifically wanted to investigate. Some of them I found while I was there, some of them I didn't. But having a purpose for being there put me in constant interaction with the local population, which was incredibly rewarding.

It doesn't matter what your purpose is: you can be a student of the language, or searching for a particular kind of local cuisine or craft, or tracking down a branch of your family tree. The key is simply to have a reason to interact, which will take you out of your everyday self in a way that you have to experience in order to fully appreciate.

More often than not, tourism causes more stress than it relieves! But true travel can be a genuine balm for the soul.

When you return from your vacation, check out my new book THE STRESS VACCINE™. It will blow your mind!

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