Exploring world danger zones: Chinese husband and wife attract millions of online views

Zhang Xinyu and his wife Liang Hong have travelled some of the world's most hazardous routes since 2008 - sailing around the world, visiting the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accident, and scrambling 300 metres into the crater of the active Marum volcano, to name just a few. Online footage of their adventures has gathered hundreds of millions of views. After the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, they made a 10-year travel plan and decided to spend all their assets on it. In April, the couple from Beijing started off again, leading a team of nine people across 16 countries in the Middle East - one of the world's most notorious conflict zones - and North Africa.

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I made the itinerary in 2009, merely out of curiosity. Back then the mainland media had scant coverage of Muslims and Islam, and the Western media was quite biased. I'm eager to learn what it is like to live as a Muslim - what they eat, where they live, and how they meet their first love in a single-gender education system. Also I want to see the conflict areas through my own eyes, to look for answers to the questions the media has failed to solve - why the Arab countries and Israel can never end their conflicts. What I've seen is very different from what I learnt from books and the media.

People's attitude towards death. It might be inappropriate to say they are indifferent. But they do treat death as just another ordinary thing in their lives. We visited a family who lost 14 members when their house was bombed by the Iraqi air force by mistake in [the Islamic holy month of] Ramadan. They told me it was Allah that chose to free the departed from all these sufferings during Ramadan.