Zhongdian. City of thousands, but one man prowls these streets alone, rooting through the lost and found box at the pizza restaurant near the movie theater in the mall, chasing the dogs away from your precious garbage bins late at night to protect those repositories of forgotten knowlege for his own sake, looking under the obviously fake rocks by the doors of sinners for the spare keys to their souls. One man. Alone. On a mission from God.

...with a spare hour to kill before his bus leaves for some lake or another, he forgets which exactly. He came into town two days ago on a bus heading from nowhere, his bags thrown to the curb in a pile which would have been dusty except for the rain. No one was waiting for him, but someone came to meet him just the same. The touts. They were always there to meet you. They just know.

Normally dismissive of this ilk he found himself giving ear to the lone woman with the flyers that said, next to a few pictures depicting various bar room scenes including those of a pool table and a rustic, almost cave-like room, "The Cow Pub". Sometimes you listen to your instincts, and just then they told him to go. Or maybe that was his bladder.

Whatever the motivations, he found himself not long after at Hazel's Hotel, where he payed 25 yuan for an appearantly unused four person dorm room, of which he was to remain the only occupant for some three days. He never would have found the place alone, it can be assumed, as it remains hidden behind a forest of construction. Workers in ant-like frenzy are reconstructing an antique town. Tearing it's ancient wooden walls down and rebuilding them in their own image. A mining town of the old west, iteslf being mined for that most precious of resources, history. The heavily cobbled streets, now alive with women carrying mountains of bricks on their backs, bicycles with tons of tin piled high on their frames, workmen trundling to and from their next and last jobs, do not even meet the main street yet, and this ancient place, molting and moldering away in the back alleys of the new town, remains unseen to the drivers-by.

Tomorrow he leaves for Deqin, the Tibetan border town, and its glacier, a site of pilgrimage for millennia. He figures it to be a good place to turn around at, as when he was younger, and would pick some arbitrary tree on the mountainside to climb to, touch, and turn away from to go home.