When the World Shrinks: Amazing Coincidences while Traveling

The world becomes smaller when you travel. I don’t mean that in the proverbial sense, where meeting new people from different countries and learning about their cultures exposes us to the idea that we are all much more similar than we could possibly imagine. This is certainly true, but I mean that the world literally becomes smaller. And I have the stories to prove it.

Bizarre encounters abroad happen so often that I almost no longer get surprised when they occur. Almost… but in truth I am always amazed by the coincidences that add a new level of awe and wonder to traveling.

A Familiar Face

My first solo travel adventure started in September 2017, flying from Germany to Beijing. I had just spent a lonely three months in Stuttgart interning at Mercedes without making many friends. This was mainly because I was always leaving on the weekend, never investing myself in the city for more than the work week.

Before arriving in China, I knew that I needed to take a proactive approach in meeting new people, making the first move at every opportunity to get to know a new friend in Beijing. When I arrived at the hostel (a perfect place for solo travelers to meet others), I approached the first group of people I saw by the entrance.

After a quick hello, they asked me the quintessential hostel question, “Where are you from?”, and told me that another Seattleite was in the hostel. A few minutes later, a tall traveler with a bushy beard and a brow wizened by experience approached us. We made eye contact, paused, and then epiphanized. We knew each other! This was Anthony: my former soccer teammate, my middle school classmate.

I learned that Anthony had been hitchhiking through Southeast Asia for over a year before coming to Beijing. He was gathering supplies for a journey through the Gobi Desert to Urumqi, the Uighur capital of Western China. For the next few days, we caught up with each other, and I listened with fascination to his hitchhiking adventures. Then he was off, while I continued my stay in Beijing.

I spent another week in the ancient capital, taking language classes and slowly immersing myself. This was a dip into the pool of cultural immersion as opposed to a splash off the diving board. Afterwards, I flew to the serene coastal city of Qingdao and continued my solo travel there for the next few weeks. Qingdao was the deep end. I was forced to speak only Mandarin, and my language learning flourished. Those weeks of full immersion felt like months, and by the time I flew to my last destination, I was already a different man than when I had arrived in China.

Dropping my bags in the Shanghai hostel where I would spend the remainder of my trip, I felt a rough clap on my back. Turning around, I saw none other than Anthony again! He had just arrived in Shanghai that same night, fresh off a hitchhiking expedition through the Gobi Desert. While I was living what felt like a lifetime in Qingdao, he had covered 2,000 miles of ground with his thumb. We caught up briefly, and he regaled me with tales of sleeping in tents and catching rides with Chinese truckers.

Before we had time to really contemplate the odds of running into each other in two different hostels in a row, I received a text message from a contact I had met while in Beijing. A night club nearby was offering free entrance and drinks up until 1 AM. It was 12:40 AM.

There was no way I could cover that distance, but I told Anthony anyways. He was eager to join and taught me about the neon yellow Chinese Ofo bikes that were sweeping the nation at the time. Now, they are probably littering dumpsters around the world as the company has since gone out of business. He knew a trick to illegally ride them for free, and so we hopped on some bikes nearby and peddled like mad. We would have given peak steroid Lance Armstrong a run for his money at the speed and intensity we were going. But we made it to the club, just in time.

French Connection

While in Beijing in 2017 (post Anthony encounter), I took Mandarin language classes to improve my speaking skills and meet other language learners, including Pierre: a worldly Parisian with a taste for luxury goods and French Champagne. We became close friends and have kept in touch ever since.

A few weeks later, I met Samuel through similar language classes in Shanghai. He too was from Paris, and we bonded over Mandarin, ping pong, and free Chinese Champagne (the French is obviously preferable).

A year later, Pierre generously invited me to stay with him and his family in Paris. Since both had an interest in China, I thought it would be fun to arrange a get together with the two Parisians: Pierre and Samuel.

When the three of us met in the evening streets of the 15th arrondissement, they looked at each other with a vague sense of familiarity. Before too long, they determined that they both went to the same high school in Paris but never formally met. Who would have thought that I would need to travel across the world to meet each of them individually just to introduce them when they were a few feet away in high school all along?

One out of 26 million

The scene of the next amazing coincidence: The summer of 2016, after a business school study abroad trip and my first journey to the East. A friend of mine recommended getting in touch with their friend who lived in Shanghai, and while we planned to meet at some point during my trip, we never had the opportunity. I prepared to go back to Seattle shortly.

On the last day before my flight back, I realized I had forgotten to book the final night at the hotel I was staying. I made a last-minute change to a different hotel in a different part of the city. While I was in commute, I got a text message from my friend showing a picture of me.

Taken just a few minutes before.

I looked up and spun around suspiciously to see who took that photo of me. In fact, in transit I had passed by my friend’s Shanghai friend, who recognized me from my profile picture on Wechat and snapped a pic to confirm this was the very same dude. The friend happened to live right in the area, and so we grabbed dinner before my flight out. Shanghai has 26 million residents, so the idea of two people bumping into each other, especially having never seen each other before, is mind boggling to me. I might be pretty recognizable in China, but this is still a coincidence of astronomical proportions.

Yellow Mountain Coincidences

I already detailed my chance encounters in the Yellow Mountains here in case you missed them. I’ll leave it at that to avoid being a total windbag.

Encounter by Proximity

Sometimes you just happen to be close to these events, even if you aren’t directly involved. Simon, a German friend who I met in rural Yangshuo, had visited North Korea and Mongolia with a tour group before making his way down south. He told me about the idiosyncrasies and surreal sights in North Korea, such as seeing 1980s-era East Berlin S-Bahn cars in their subway lines. In Mongolia, he took part in traditional yurt rituals, drinking fermented yak milk and being offered the urine of the youngest son of the village leader (he declined to drink that). In his tour group was a Dutch couple, who he spoke of fondly.

On our way back from Yangshuo to Guilin, we checked in to the Wada Hostel again to spend a night before our paths inevitably parted ways. Simon was off to Nepal for a Himalaya voyage, and I would be attempting to hitchhike back to Shanghai. When we entered the six-person hostel room, the other dormers were none other than the Dutch couple Simon was with a month before! He didn’t even know they would be coming to China, let alone stay in the exact hostel room in the same city at the same time. How bizarre!

Zufälle – German Edition

The fact that Germans make it to every nook and cranny of the universe when traveling must explain why these coincidences abroad too often involve us. In another Chinese class in Shanghai in 2019, I met Johannes, who happens to be from Oberstdorf – just a few miles away from my homely birthplace Mindelheim. With under 15 thousand inhabitants, Mindelheim is a cozy respite undisturbed by the world. Johannes knew it well and actually played football against TSV Mindelheim in the same league! The world is small.

I have countless examples. In the lobby of a Guilin hostel, I had a conversation with another German guy from Bavaria on how often travel-related coincidences have happened to both of us. A week later, we run into each other on a hike several hours away from that spot. The funny thing was, I didn’t even recognize him until he flagged me down because it just happens so much.

And not just recently. When I was very young, I remember the tale of my family spending time in southern France. While we were visiting a local museum, ahead of us in the exhibit, we heard German being spoken loudly and enthusiastically. My mom kept saying how rude it was for them to talk so loud in the museum, but she also thought the voice was very familiar. We turned a corner, and there was Onkel Hans and Tante Krabbe! We all shouted together – we couldn’t believe it.