Maoxian Visit

The tale of my Sichuan travels is written as a continuous story and starts on the entry "In Chengdu" on Nov. 5th, 2008. For context and continuity, feel free to start back at that point and read on forward first if you have not already done so.

The next morning, we tried to contact our friends we met at Ruoergai (若爾蓋) without much success. So instead, we decided to take the opportunity to explore Maoxian (茂縣) on our own. We walked around through the fruit and vegetable markets, and then the main square for a bit, where, to our surprise, we met one of the drivers who took us to Diexi (疊溪) yesterday.



We greeted him and chatted with him briefly; it seems Maoxian, while larger than some of the other places we've been at on this trip, is still quite a small world.

We continued exploring, and wandered to the outskirts of the city. Looking back, we marvelled at the view:



Maoxian was also high up in the mountains of Sichuan, and so naturally, clouds hang especially low over the city:



Like I mentioned earlier, the city itself didn't seem to be in bad shape. I had expected, from the road conditions, and what I had heard from Ruoergai (若爾蓋) to see a devastated city in the midst of rebuilding.

On the contrary, the city, for the most part, looked fairly normal:



Though of course there were banners and signs all over the city to encourage the people:



There was one building in the square that seemed to be damaged by the earthquake, and teams of working men were hard at work at the site both this morning as well as last night. The buildling hung a couple banners on the sides:



They roughly translate to:
"We support the unwavering spirit of the Maoxian people in their efforts to rebuild their homes."
"No difficulty is too tough for the heroic Chinese people."

We tried calling our Maoxian friends again with no success.
"Your pack looks like it's falling off again," Baba commented.
I put down the phone on the step to adjust my straps. After they were set, we hailed a taxi - Larry had gone on ahead in the other direction by himself some time back, and we were trying to catch up.

However, after a few minutes on the car, a sudden realization hit me. I called to the driver.
"Sir, can you call my phone?" I gave him my number. He dialed.
"It's ringing," he said. But there was no ring in the car.

I had forgotten my phone back at the square.