The Twilight zone-Tibet (Continued)

We backtracked for most of the day.  We got back out to the main road and followed the bus route toward Jiang Zi.  It was an amazing drive the whole way.  We drove for 200km and didn't see a gas station.  We hadn't planned for this and we were running really low on fuel.  We pulled over to a small town by a river hoping for fuel.  We drove slowly down the little road through the town.  All the houses looked empty and were falling apart.  We left the bikes in the middle of the street and Yuan and I walked until we found life.  We peered into a building through an open door.  There was a women sitting in the middle of the room watching tv.  The only furnuture in the whole place was a table for a tv and a chair for her.  Yuan asked if there was gas down the main road.  Without looking away from the t.v. she told us that if we go 9 km more up the road that we were on, that we would find gas.  We continued on and exactly 9 kilometers later we came up on a town.  There was an awesome old monestery pearched on the top of a rocky mountain.  It looked like something you would see crawling with tourists, but no one in the town seemed to even notice that it was there.  We asked a man on the street if there was a gas station in town.  He said yes and pointed us down a side walk.  Yuan told me to follow it.  "Uh, it's a side walk...and there's a ditch in front of it.  There can't possibly be gas down there."  She asked another guy and he confirmed.  We drove through the ditch and down the side walk.  The side walk ended into a few different dirt paths.  We asked again: "Fuel?"  An old man pointed up the dirt path that went up and to the right.  We followed it.  When we got to the top there was only a few shacks and a building made out of clay.  A man opened the window to this clay building and you could see two shiney new red fuel pumps labeled "Petro-China" inside.  He was super excited to see us and I got the feeling that it might have been because no one ever goes up there.  After fueling up Rodger noticed another clue to the explaination of this strange place.  You could see perfectly painted new apartment building right next to the town.  They had their own street system which was perfectly paved.  The odd thing is that they were all empty and they had no streets connecting them to anything else.  Whenever you see something so out of place like this there is only one answer.  It was the government.  The Chinese government, in an effort to get people out of the over crowded east and into the not populated west, decided to follow the "if you build it they will come" theory.  They made this picture perfect little town and probably offered it up for very little money.  The town would need fuel, so they turned an old man's clay hut into a gas station.  I hope the tax payers are happy that the government is putting there money to such good use. 

-J.