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It was a creaky old place. A once-majestic set of raised wooden cabins that sat stoutly at the base of Haba mountain, guarding the entrance to the gorge. Now it rested beside a highway, collecting the dust spat out by the cement-trucks as they thundered past. Inside the gates, its Tibetan murals were cracked, pot-plants overgrown, prayer flags split and faded. I sat with Jane, the owner, as the autumn rains pattered against the bamboo-tiled roof. It’s just the two of us tonight. She tells me that the journey to the gorge from the fabled Shangri-La had once taken an entire day, and so travelers would rest here before attempting the trek the next morning. She lets out a long sigh, now they just drive past in their air-conditioned vans. She told me she was sick, but that none of it mattered because her son had gone to university, gotten married, and had a child. She led me to my room, a dormitory with ten wooden beds packed in tightly under the low roof. Yellow light shone from a single bulb that dangled from the ceiling, the curtain sagged from its fitting across the small, cracked window. And yet the beds were soft and the blankets warm. Despite the dereliction, I felt safe. What stunned me were the white sheets that hung from the walls, where past travelers had covered them with their words, or art, or both. Fascinating. Most of them had scribbled their names and the dates of their stay, others had drawn the flags of home: Wales, Switzerland, Isreal, Argentina, Thailand, Lyubech Ukraine, Gainesville Florida, Mignon Alabama. Conversations were held across national identities and time itself; lines of prose clashed in disagreement around bold statements such as “MEAT IS MURDER”, “FREE PALESTINE”, and “JE SUIS CHARLIE”. Some of the messages were heartfelt, moving. Others were crass and cringeworthy. “I masturbated in this bed”. “I thew up in this bed” Go figure. I made sure to avoid sleeping in those beds. Poor Jane. Of the more tasteful were professions of love, and of loss, and of lucidity. An intricate beanstalk snaked along the vertical edge of one sheet, in the place of flowers were bulging eyeballs. At its base, the twisting stem morphed into thick curls of wavy hair that sat atop an abstraction of a woman’s face. She was blind. On another sheet, there was an ethereal portrait of an animal holding its infant by the scruff, its limbs long and thin, its eyes drawn as thin psychedelic spirals. Its allure was furthered by the caption - “When I saw the monkey mourn for its child, it was more human than I”. I sat there transfixed, slipping deeper into its mesmerizing swirls. A chill ran down my spine, and I my force my eyes away, fearing where the graphic would take me. Some left clever poems, others left jokes. Many sung praise of Jane for her kindness and warmth. A girl from Brasil left a condom taped to one sheet, along with a spirited message of encouragement. One traveller left a message on behalf of the local yeti, another corrected his spelling mistakes. At some point that night, I entered that rare headspace which tends to appear when traveling alone - a consequence of the barrage of new experiences, unfamiliar diet, and lack of sleep that wrecks havoc on your brain chemistry. Maybe it comes with solitude. It’s a state of consciousness where the realism of history and the stories of people finally dawn on you, where being constantly overwhelmed leaves you passive and unresisting to new perceptions of the world. You feel connected to the essence of it all, where every emotion is more vivid. And so there I was in my asylum, crawling over the empty beds and twisting my body at weird angles to admire the scriptures. I must’ve looked a madman, alone in that room, talking, laughing, crying on my own.