Throughout his life his interest in spirituality, religion and culture have inspired Nichols to travel the world and in doing so to attain many notable firsts. Among these, in 1978 when China opened the Tibet Autonomous Region for tourism he was the first Westerner to have permission to make pilgrimages to the sacred Tibetan sites of Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar. He has bicycled the entire 10,300 miles of the Silk Road from Istanbul to Xi'an, a journey completed in four legs beginning in 1989 and concluding in 2005. In 2010 and 2012 he was the first to lead expeditions into little traveled areas of Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and China in search of the tomb of the great Mongol emperor Genghis Khan.