day 201: 天祝藏族自治县 (Tibetan self-governed township of Tianzhu) – 打柴沟 (dachaigou) = 20,6km

I put on my jacket today.

Unfortunately I had to, first of all because it was cold, and second because it was raining:

Rain can be a pain. But it can also be quite cozy to shake off the water and sit down in a small restaurant with a stove heating up the room:

When I went back outside, the rain had turned into a mere drizzle, and I easily walked off a couple of hours.

Once I came past a small shrine:

There weren’t that many people around outside, so I was happy to bump into this old dude hugging his zucchini:

What a spectacular beard, I thought. And then I wondered: was that really zucchini?

But he was already gone.

…

The later the day, the nicer the weather:

Ok, on this picture you can’t really see the blue sky with all the trees.

So here:

I got to 打柴沟 (dachaigou) around six in the evening, and one thing struck me immediately:

This place didn’t look poor; it had a hotel, several restaurants and even a fairly large bookstore.

But it just seemed so…

…deserted.

The hotel owner later explained this to me: 打柴沟 used to have an own train station before, but a while back the authorities figured that the settlement was really to small, so the station was discarded and a lot of work places and people left.

Same old story.

Oh, and another thing that I found special around here:

“毛泽东思想万岁!” – “Long live Mao Zedong thought!” (10.000 years to be exact).

Up until today, I haven’t seen this anywhere on a wall before.

Soundtrack: NOFX – “The Brews”

—total: 2472,8km