Day 51:

Okay, so I visited, for a few hours, the town of Shizahuang (spelling?). That translates, literally, as "Asbestos Mine." The town contains little other than some housing, a couple of eateries, and also the biggest asbestos mining operation in the whole world. Apparently most of the miners have serious lung disease.

Who the fuck uses asbestos in this day and age?

It's a pretty grim town. The guys who work in the mine look pretty sad - and all used up. There was one guy at the "restaurant" I ate at who seemed completely apart from the world around him. Not simply zoned out, but really somewhere else... he had the saddest eyes I've ever seen. Most tragic of all, perhaps, is the fact that Shizahuang is not just a mining operation but rather a little frontier town - many of the miners are here with wives who work in small shops, and also with their children.

Getting to this desolate outpost was tricky. Working my way across the southern "silk road," Shizahuang was a necessary stop to get to a place called Golmud which acts as an entrance to Tibet. Of course, there aren't any roads to the mine, so I crammed myself into some guy's SUV (14 souls in a car meant for 8) for the generous fee of 10 bucks. We made a harrowing passage through rocky terrain and some inches of river, around the side of a mountain (high enough to reach a snow cap), and along some desert. We suffered one blown tire during the trip, and I suffered some really horrible neck pains. It took eight hours to reach the mine.

When we arrived, I stayed only long enough to get a bite to eat and find a car heading further east. A couple of engineers were en route to the next town, so we shared a cab for the remaining seventy kilometres. And then? Drinking with Asian people! Korea redux!

I don't know what it is about the continent... maybe it's the lack of a US styled protestant church, or maybe it's all the hardships of the twentieth century, but people really love to drink. And they are pretty good at it, too. Yeah, I've got a few stories to fill this space someday...

Anyways, so I arrived in the second town with two engineers who were sent 3000 kilometres (one way) from Shanghai to fix some sort of mining tool in the mountains to the north. One of the pair spoke a bit of English and later when having dinner and drinks with him, his buddy and three "customers" he asked what I would like to drink. I said that I was flexible, so he said to me "I think that foreigners like whisky, would you like some whiskey?" I told him that maybe that was a little bit strong, so he offered wine. The idea of a nice glass of wine got me excited, so he went to the store to find some. Of course, wine to this fellow is some some sort of clear liquid, with about 50 percent alcohol content. Oy....

So, I learned that the dude works for CAT, and that the device he was travelling to fix was used to mine for iron in the mountains.

Eventually, my engineer and his friends got very drunk and went whoring in the back streets of the town. I went to the supermarket for a candy bar and hit the sack. An eventful day.

It's now the NEXT day... about 3:15 in the morning. I'm at the Golmud hotel, having reached my final destination before going to Tibet. I'm in the lobby trying not to wake the counter attendant, who is asleep at his post. If I hold out until 10:00 am I can check into a room and keep it for 26 hours and avoid paying for tonight's sleep. My neck is KILLING ME... fucking SUV.