Last week, I was at the bookstore and came across China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford. This book, based on a series of NPR stories Gifford filed in 2004, chronicles his trip across China on Route 312, a highway stretching across the country from Shanghai to the border with Kazakhstan in the far northwest.

After I read the book, it occurred to me that I had tools for following his journey that did not exist at the time–namely, Google Earth and Panoramio. So I fired up Google Earth to see what I could find.

For those who aren’t familiar with Panoramio, it’s a photo-sharing site, owned by Google, that allows photos to be stored with geotagging information–either added automatically by the camera, or created by hand afterward. The site is loaded with millions of images from all over the world, mostly created and shared by amateurs. And many of them also find their way into Google Earth and Google Maps. So this is a marvelous way to get an idea of what a given place looks like.

Now, I wasn’t expecting to find many images outside of China’s major cities; not too many Westerners find their way into the back country, and I assumed that few Chinese out there would have the motivation and ability to share their photos. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only had some Chinese (mostly cyclists) visited these areas and posted pictures, but a few foreigners had also traveled the long and slow way.

In particular, there was a German fellow that I had already known about, who walked across China in 2007 in a project called The Longest Way. (I found out about him through an awesome video self-portrait he had posted.) So imagine my delight when I found that he had taken lots of photos all along his route–over 7000 in all–and that all of them were geotagged and placed in Panoramio.

So I got to spend several hours over three days virtually traveling Route 312, through his and others’ eyes.

It’s difficult to express how it felt to see all of these places that I probably will never visit in person. I’m not just talking about major landmarks, though those are definitely interesting. I’m much more interested in the little places.

Dusty towns in the desert. Strange sculptures and spectacular monuments. Brown hills in southern Gansu province (which, by the way, looks just like Nevada). Major cities that few Americans even know exist. Cartoonish murals painted on decaying ruins in the middle of nowhere. And amazing, wonderful sights that I’ll never see with my own eyes.

They say that nothing feeds the mind and broadens the soul like travel. What about virtual travel?