Tai Shan
Trip Start
Jun 04, 2008
1
26
79
Trip End
Feb 20, 2009
Tai'an,
Shandong,
China
Monday, November 24, 2008
We got to the city at the foothills around 1:30 pm, found a place to stay, hit the showers, and just started wandering around the city. We started heading towards the Dai Miao, or Dai Temple, meandering into lots of little shops along the way. We picked up trinkets for ourselves and also to send home. Seeing as we'd either over overestimated our Minnesotan tolerance to winter or underestimated China's winter (there are palm trees in Xi'an) we hadn't actually packed any real winter clothes from home. It was actually getting cold though, and the mountian tops would only be colder than the low-land cities
arriving to tai'an city
. Eric picked up a winter jacket at one of the shops, and I got a hat and scarf. We finally made it to the Dai Temple-a half hour after it closed! Argh! I guess we should have gone straight to the temple, then shopped, rather than vice versa. Ooops.We got up the next day around 6:30, and caught a city bus to the the foot of the mountain. Tai Shan, according to Lonely Planet, is "the most revered of China's five sacred Taoist Peaks, with imperial sacrifices to heavan and earth offered from its summit. Tai Shan is a unique experience with its supernatural allure. Tribes of wiry grandmothers-it's said that if you climb the mountain you will live to see 100-trot up the mountaiin with suprising ease, their target a cluster of temples at the summit where they burn money and insence, praying for their progeny."
Another legend says that a female foxed lived on the mountain, and by living a purely Taoist lifestyle, she converted into Bixia, or the Princess of Azure Clouds. She is regarded as the protector of peasant women and as the bringer of dawn. Many temples on top are dedicated to her.
This mountain was also climbed by lots of emporors/leaders, since "heaven would never allow an unworthy ruler to ascend."
Anyway, those are some of the Lonely Planet stories of Tai Shan, and it would probably be boring if I typed any more out
arriving to taishan mt
. Basically, it's an old mountain with lots of stories behind it. The mountain is 1500 m above sea level, with a carved stone staircase the whole way up. It has 7,000 stairs, making it significantly shorter than Emei Shan and Huang Shan, and an easy day hiking trip. Up we went, taking pictures along the way. There are multiple temples that are along the way, each one with a fire pit and insence burning in front. Some of the insence sticks are huge. They are as thick as my leg, and they are taller than me. The small insence sticks are pretty cheap, but as the size goes up to monsterous, they cost 1,000 RMB, or over $150! Now that's money to burn!
At the top of the mountain we went into the Confucius (he was from a city just outside of Tai Shan, and he spent some time on the Mt) Temple. This one was a three building complex, and it looked kind of neat. There was snow (the first we've seen in China) in a small pile in the shade, and I actually had to walk up to it to realize what it was. Eric and I got into a snowball fight, entertaining a handfull of Chinese onlookers, and walked the rest of the way to the top.
All mountain tops have magnificent views, and this one is no different
inscence
. You look down on mountains, valleys, forests. This was slightly different, though, since you could see the city of Tai Shan below. That was kind of cool too, except you could also see the haze above it. There was a distict separation of blue sky above gray haze, and the color difference was so strong it even turned out well in the pictures Eric and I took of it. By merely living in China, we must have become second-hand smokers. We spent some time on the peaks, walking along the mt ridge from one temple to another. After an hour or two, we finally headed back down. The descent is always faster than the ascent, and we made it down in 1/3 rd the time. We bought tickets for the night train, and headed to KFC for a warm place to sit for 2 hours while we waited for the train. We changed clothes in the bathroom, ate dinner, and brushed teeth. We just sat there and read a bit about Tsingtao, the next destination, when my bag started moving! I looked up and a man had picked up my backpack! "Hey!" I just started yelling at him in English. Eric (larger than average on China terms) and I both stood up. The guy's eye's opened wide, he put the bag bag, and muttered sorry, sorry in drunken Chinese. Everyone in KFC was staring at us by this point. We picked up our stuff, and the guy kept muttering things in drunken Chinese. Everyone stared. We headed off to the train station, went past security, and sat in the train station until our night train arrived
inscence burning
. It was a bad way to end our stay in TaiShan, since everything was good up to that point. I feel the city of TaiShan is still safe, despite the last incident, as drunken idiots can be anywhere. Nothing was taken, all said and done, and I think we scared him as much as he scared us. We talked to a random Chinese guy about our age when we were at KFC, who was also waiting for a train. In our KFC rapid exit, we kind of ditched him and left him with the drunkard, so we were glad to see him again at the train station and we talked to him until our train left. So the city has good people, moreso than bad. I feel the city is safe, and I wouldn't worry about any bodily harm. If the drunken moron would have gotten anything anyway, the joke would have been on him. That bag (Eric and I now had four, thanks to shopping) was full of dirty laundry, and mostly mine. Unless he wants used women's dirty socks and mountain clothes, he did himself a favor by handing the bag back when we yelled at him.
