It was the blue of the truck, like scrubbed denim, that made it stand out against the velvet-green hills and the endless yellow rapeseed blooms blanketing everything from one horizon to the other, save for the black snake of pitted asphalt road on which we were driving. As we passed the truck, we slowed to a crawl; slow enough to see the brighter blue plastic awning shading one side of the truck, and the makeshift table and chairs set up outside.

“That’s not a truck!” I said to my husband Matt, “That’s a homemade campervan! They’re camping there!”

You never know what you’ll find when you travel on the road. Some people embark on road trips to taste adventure, to test their endurance, to experience novelty; some leave to get away – whether from their troubles or in an attempt to get away from themselves, and whether to put something off, or simply to pretend for a while there are no responsibilities; still others use a road trip as a time to think deeply, the road serving as an outer manifestation of an inner journey to find answers to the ‘big questions’. I took road trips for all of these reasons at different times in my life, but no matter the reason I set out, what I always remembered most were the people I met along the way, the sense of solidarity with other road-trippers – truckers, travellers, tearaways – and their unique reasons for being on the move.

“We were pulled by the lure of the freedom of our own wheels and our own agenda”

When we came across the homemade campervan amidst the rapeseed fields of Inner Mongolia, we were travelling in a campervan ourselves, one of only a handful of such vehicles on the road in China at any given time. We – my husband, our two girls, and me – were less than a month into a six-month odyssey by road to discover the remoter, wilder parts of China, pulled by the lure of the freedom of our own wheels and our own agenda. Along the way we had hoped to run into others, like-minded Chinese travellers with whom we could strike up interesting conversations. But despite having covered more than three thousand miles, we hadn’t met anyone on a similar adventure – let alone seen another vehicle even remotely like ours. This blue truck, as such, was something special, so we hooked a U-turn and drove back to investigate.

Lin Mingde and his wife Wang Guiqin kept bees in that remote field of brilliant yellow rapeseed right on the border of Inner Mongolia and Mongolia proper, a region of rolling grasslands of emerald and jade covered with wildflowers. We had seen many itinerant beekeepers since arriving in Inner Mongolia, but these were the first we stopped to meet. Lin, in his sixties and with the deep brown skin of a farmer, met us in his beekeepers’ straw hat, the net rolled up over the brim. His over-large spectacles reflected the sunlight; his cream shirt was tucked into oversized cream trousers that, though tightly belted, nevertheless swamped his tiny waist. He waved us in to sit on tiny stools under the outside awning, took off his hat and set to rolling a cigarette from a little pink and white cardboard box full of locally grown flaky fragrant tobacco.

Wang Guiqin was small and spry, and seemed glad of company other than bees and her husband. She fussed over our children and made us a glass of honey water – half hot water and half freshly harvested flower honey – and brought us small sweet melons to eat.

She told us this was their first summer in the fields, though Lin’s family had been looking after bees since 1959 in far off Ulanhot. He had learned the trade from his father, and when a farmer had invited them to camp for the summer next to these fields of rapeseed in order to help fertilize the flowers with their bees, they had jumped at the chance. As they had no place to stay, Lin had decided to build their own fangche – a house on wheels – for them to live in. He had taken a regular old two-ton truck, replaced all the wall panels with wooden sheets and installed heavy plastic ‘windows’ that could be propped open, then painted the whole thing pale blue.

“There was but the slimmest thread connecting us, a bond formed by the fact that we had chosen to live temporarily in houses on wheels, but it was enough and we parted friends, nomads of different kinds, travelling in different directions and for different reasons”

Inside, there was a comfortable double bed, as well as a small kitchen with a gas cooker. There were small signs of their personal lives – a few photographs of their grandchildren taped to the walls, a tiny mirror rimmed in bright pink plastic, a cardboard box cut down to the perfect size for Lin’s reading glasses taped to the side of the bed. Wang showed me a photo album full of her greatest pride – a trip she had taken with her four sisters to Beijing ten years before, the five of them standing stiffly below Mao’s portrait facing Tiananmen Square.

Whatever didn’t fit inside, including two caged birds, was stored outside or underneath the truck and guarded by the dog. Lin told me the truck conversion had taken him one month. He was very proud of it.

So far, they said, they were enjoying this more relaxing life. It was midsummer, warm and pleasant, and their days were easy and slow. Wang Guiqin felt so good she had given up taking her blood pressure tablets, although she did ask me to check her blood pressure with an old sphygmomanometer she kept inside the truck (140/90. Not bad).

Wang Guiqin made delicious egg noodles for lunch, and we drank more glasses of sweet honey water. She pressed two bottles of their wonderful honey into my hands as we left.

There was but the slimmest thread connecting us, a bond formed by the fact that we had chosen to live temporarily in houses on wheels, but it was enough and we parted friends, nomads of different kinds, travelling in different directions and for different reasons. Their story was more straightforward than most stories encountered on the road- they weren’t running from anything, or trying to prove anything, or hoping to find answers to those same big questions  asked by all of us the world over.  They were just trying to make a living and be happy the best way they knew. And for us, this happiness, this enjoyment of the absolute simplicity of living on the road, was an important lesson to learn.  I hoped one day we might cross paths again, and share a glass of hot sweet honey water.