I must make a pass of 5000 metres over to a Ali town. I squat beside the road to shit while smoking a cigarette.

I feel very weak and hungry against the wind. The pass crosses a major watershed, and the Indus basin lies beyond. I have to stop and eat. I take out what's left of my walnut and raisin square. Then, I gobble up the bean powder porridge. It's dry and cold. I swallow it with a few gulps of water.

A jeep zooms by. A whim possesses the driver, and he turns around. The driver tumbles out with a fair-haired Brit who calls himself Paul. He's going to Ali after four days coming from Kashgar. Do I need anything? Nothing, I'm okay. I say that I forget to eat, which isn't true. I think I've been eating enough. Paul says, "See you in Ali." "Tonight," says the driver, "There's only 30 kilometres to go." Ha. I feel like kicking the driver in the nuts; what does he know about cycling a 5000 metre pass, still seven kilometres away? I mumble to Paul, "Probably see you tomorrow. I'll stay a couple of days in Ali." Stick-thin Paul runs back to the impatient jeep and bounces off, a load of empty red fuel cans clanking precariously on the roof.

I press on, my enthusiasm renewed by the encounter. This road is empty, I never meet anyone like that. Then only ten minutes later, two white guys are riding bicycles at me. Westerners, twice in a day! Martin and Klaus stop for a chat. They look hardened by the road, their legs are bulging. We trade information about the road. They tell me about meeting by chance on a bus from Kathmandu, and deciding to ride across Tibet together from Lhasa. They are still strong and haven't been sick at all. We agree about how changeable the winds are up here, first opposing, then pushing you on... Ali sounds encouraging. Then we leave each other behind.

The summit looks like a foot-racing track, strung with victory streamers. I am relieved to descend at high speed. I camp in the brilliant rays of a setting sun. Happy. Tomorrow, it's Ali. Here it's really cold, at least 6 degrees below freezing. In the morning, I pack-up quickly. It's 4 degrees Celsius as 36 big army trucks trundle past in rapid succession. Those Steyrs double as troop transports and supply carriers. The other convoys are smaller Chinese tankers carrying fuel.

Then I'm stranded in sand again. It's hard to make the last 25 kilometres. But I do. The road falls into a hodgepodge amalgam of people, commerce and administration, Ali. The town is also called Shiquanhe in Chinese, or Senge Tsangpo in Tibetan.

As I ride into town, I see a huge crane-truck parked by the road. An army truck sits in front of the crane and slams into a reverse race with me, downhill. (A memory of general Pao, asshole husband of Han Suyin, occurs to me. Why? Because - I'm riding alongside a truck that's trying to beat me down a hill in reverse; that hardly inspires any joy.) Thrown into a sudden rage, I imagine the soldiers are trying to race against my idiotic exhaustion. So I shout a few angry insults at them. (Sure, I may be too cheap, but my spirit isn't impoverished, yet.) Onward.

The first thing I see is a Tibetan shrine made of stones and bones. Below, Ali is a built-up town, and in the goddamn middle of nothing but sand and the muddy Indus. It looks like a very Chinese place. I don't want to be here, but I have to be here. I don't care if you understand me or not.

But this shrine on my right is a Tibetan statement. It's almost defiant, the last cry of a lost soul. We from the West may find Tibetan shrines a trifle fixated on morbid imagery. This one is decorated with yak skulls and pieces of animal hide; the fur clings to the bone. A modest stupa, which is a symbolic monument to the creative elements and the memory of great saints, is surrounded by hundreds of stone slices, each one deeply etched with prayers and bits of devotion lifted from the scriptures of Tibetan Buddhism. This shrine is the place for anyone who wants a moment of quiet contemplation, set as it is, above the main thoroughfares of the busy town. And upon the hilltops around Ali, you can see prayer flags and poles. The wind never ceases and the flags are frayed and bled of color.

I'm hungry and tired. Some Tibetans repair a broken axle beside the road. Their teeth are bared in utter delight and bewilderment. The main intersection of town is two minutes from the outskirts of town. Finding a restaurant is my only object in life.

Small trees with slender, shady leaves line up on the main drag all the way down to the fanciful PLA (Peoples' Liberation Army) headquarters at the far-end... Oh but am I hungry - and here she is. What a cutie - inviting me to eat! Does she look more Tibetan than Chinese? Where's the husband for that boy-child of hers? I don't think he will show up tomorrow, either. Maybe her suitors are too many and too poor, since she's so good-looking and rich herself. Anyway, she knows how to cook Sichuan-style pork and spinach. I eat like a glutton who deserves hell for it...

A few street urchins come inside the cafe, begging for money and food, and they were probably ordered onto the streets by their poor parents. Put it this way, work if you like it, but I wouldn't work a day if I didn't have to. Because I just don't have any respect in my soul for what's left of Puritan ethics: it's all been changed into a modern mischief - a liar's argument to work for the enrichment of somebody else wealthier than yourself. In the beginning the Puritans worked for each other and for nobody else, brother.

Then my restaurant cutie comes over to shoo out the poor kids. A moment later two silent and peaceful beggar men appear in the doorway. But their gentleness is suspect, a loosely wound skein of consciousness, redundant with the familiar sin and the squalor of their abject lives. It's too easy to see just how impossible it is for them to improve at all. They live to beg - so they can drink, gamble and fuck everything else... I can see that written on their lazy grins, trying for that beatific grace.

My reply is the classic and all-American look of the perfect dummy, as I carefully pretend not to know what everyone really wants. Yet, I sense these two beggars have seen through my look of not knowing enough. They're standing right in front of me, so I can't really hide behind my peculiar Western obliviousness. I almost waver. But I'm not leaving yet, it appears. These guys can't be guilty. Curiously, they're not asking me for anything. Maybe they aren't beggars after all. One of them holds his palms together in an attitude of devout respect. ...Okay, so they smile peacefully. Those aren't lazy grins after all. They're free, for being the lowest of human nothings.

It's truly strange, how the false value of material longing and achievement gets glued onto our sense of identity and capacity for self-respect. Oh I know, nobody bothers with such passed-by "big" issues anymore. For example: the sensation that these bums are trying to project, that they want to feel akin to me, I guess that means, through their dreamy glaze, they see me as a species of bum, too... As if I'm their cousin or something. But I'm not really, that's why I can't help but return their stares, and that's why they fail to leave. What do they see? A splash of dice lost against the sideboard of midnight? A dream for Tibet's tomorrow? But I know I'm not a Dalai Lama, and I'm not feeling at all like a compassionate Buddha. I'm just a grizzly looking foreigner with faint sympathy. So, maybe the world has rolled over me, buddies. I wish I could achieve your blissful, lonely state of carefree, irretrievable vagrancy. I suppose that I'm afraid of their hunger - without thinking about it.

I have little to give. I want to give, but I have little to give. "I don't have much," is all I say to them. I'm not the kind of bum they really need. They need a rich bum, like the real Dalai Lama, one in whom the displacement of their revoked destinies and stolen infant dreams can be wished for again and again... They really need someone who has faith in humanity. What am I good for? Nothing but reducing things to complicated, yet vegetable, excuses. Give me food, because I have money! I can't be afraid of anything - unless I lose all my money. Nerves get jolted by momentary needs throughout life, and life is given us by that clever fellow whom we constantly recreate: god isn't willing to share its plans for us.

Don't you know that bums? Maybe the Chinese have no plan for you! Maybe they don't care, except to rationalize their presence here on your soil. I see you watching me bums; you're just a beautiful wish that I can't fulfill. They're frozen with watching me, beyond their hunger. I'm eating. The beggars are so innocent: perhaps they don't really expect to con money from me so much as imagining what it must be like to enjoy pork and spinach and exotic Chinese rice... I haven't any solution to this problem but awkward, silent guilt... I leave them alone with their wishes. They're dirty and don't know where their children are.

Who's to know who is who today, in this world of lost trajectories - implacable designs - too personal, too infrequently spoken. To wish for knowledge isn't always the beginning of getting it. Wishing leads to truth and falsehood both. We ought to refresh ourselves with new ideas.

Ali town is busy! The street's crowded with tiny shops selling all manner of goodies, food to sundries. Many Tibetan folk on the street seem to be itinerant, as if visiting town. Some are unemployed and don't know where to go. Others travel a long way for a look. On the street most people are Tibetan, but many Chinese fellows live inside the army compounds beyond town. It's really a huge garrison. Word has it, over 6000 soldiers are stationed here. That could be nonsense, since I don't see so many Chinese guys. Maybe there are only 600. But I'm told most of them stay inside the base.

Oblivious as I feel, nevertheless, I run into the first strange non-local I see. His name is Oscar, seems wrapped up in his own thoughts, and says he comes from Bolivia but makes his home in Montreal. He shows me back to the hotel. How many foreigners like taciturn Oscar could actually be in this out of the way place? He's waiting with his girlfriend for a ride to central Tibet. So, tourism happens in Western Tibet, despite official decrees against it.

The hotel sits on the corner. It doesn't even have any signs. There he is: Englishman Paul sits on the cement, waiting. He tests a smile on me, as if he isn't sure anyone could be happy in a place quite like this. The two giggly and yet mysteriously quiet Tibetan girls who manage the hotel agree to put me in with Paul. Stepping in, I smell the previous occupant's piss on the floor of a bathroom bereft of fixtures, and the aroma is still prickly.

The post office is across the street, and the police station for foreigners is half-a-block up. She'll come to get me later, Paul says. Everyone has to pay the 350 yuan fine. This cop finds everyone. She's a Tibetan PSB officer, good-looking: all the travellers meet her.

The first thing I do is talk too much. It's the solitude surrounding me with thoughts I'd sooner forget. Paul doesn't mind my unchecked babble about the desert, how long it took, the animals, people, the rock carvings. Paul travels heavy although he's lost weight in China; he carries sketch pads and books he insists on keeping. Like me, he's playing at exile. He lives in India now and claims he finds it more comfortable than his home. I'm feeling warm, relaxed and cheerful to meet someone who enjoys living far away from home. Paul is keen about India and not so happy with China. But he's hardly seen anything of China. I guess, it's his disposition. I half-suspect that most people who love India only say so because so many Indians speak English... I've never been, so what do I know?

Paul lies on the bed and after getting a handle on my nervous energy, I finally relax and smoke a cigarette. Paul practices idleness, lies back to tell stories. But he won't tell them without being asked first. He's like me, sedentary and quiet, introspective, and not too concerned about the practical ways of the world. He's disillusioned without having to say so. He's resigned while pursuing freedom. He has nothing left to fight for. My kind of guy.

Paul and I spend the next two days talking, walking and doing nothing but look at the world together. He has a cropped mop of carrot hair. Somehow, he has clambered on top of his redbrick background. He escaped from home, I suppose, because England is such a small place. He can't fit in where he doesn't know anyone. It's a likely story for anybody who finds himself living in another part of the world, and realizes why later on. Expectations. Who we know and what we do to get what we want, as well as how rebelliously or naturally we accept the slots others make for us - all of this and more - drive people into the life which gradually seems most inevitable for them. I'm not much concerned for arguing about whether or not who you know has anything to do with what you can do - if you have talent... But where you are born, and when, has a lot to do with what you'll think yourself capable of doing.

Today, let's say your aptitude for social success reflects your disposition to perform a bankable act. Some people presume that you must also be willing to compete; but having to compete reflects the fact that a whole lot of people with more or less the same talent are trying to do the same thing... Competition does not come into play when you create original poetry or write a novel, if you are not calculating about how to sell it. A bankable act isn't always the same thing as genius or talent. But now, the most bankable acts almost always reflect the artiste's individual capacity for exteriorizing his or her inner drives and energies - and so - communicating them directly to others. So, the entertainer was born because people now have more leisure than ever to deal with their boredom. We really need to cultivate the vanities. Technological liberation beckons us, makes us crave excitement, yet entices us to sleep, too. The technology and commerce of the mass media supply formulae and creed for acceptable work. I'm sorry to say that that social world of approbation, and respect bought and sold, has made cowards of many writers and artists. We know the creators of wonderful poetry have always numbered very few... But today the hard-sell reigns supreme: everyone who is anyone is convinced that you have to "market" your aims, or quit. Artists who are born to make what they purely feel are often unknown. Well-trained mimicry gets much further ahead today, in the schools and in the shops. Maybe I'm wrong and overlook some of the true greats, alive and dead. But ask them if they don't feel trapped by genre, deadline and publisher-audience expectation, and then see if they remember how to be honest... Since a kid I always thought so many have danced the popular song this past half-century, while so few individuals have written what they feel... Originality and profundity have been knocked down by know-it-alls and pompous "career writers." But I suppose, with so many geniuses and sore losers like me around, we don't have shelves enough to hold all the wonderful tomes!

Since neither Paul nor I are much attracted to the perfectly appealing social dance, we can't help but feel it inside... I'll be content with being graceful and kind - with other individuals - maybe not the spectators. Paul is sketching whatever he sees and comes up with a beautiful rendition of the defiant shrine on top of Ali hill, captivating the eye with a bovine skull, grinning shrilly.