The East is Gold
Trip Start
Oct 19, 2007
1
18
70
Trip End
Ongoing
Tai'an,
Shandong,
China
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Golden Week (other than Chinese New Year, quite possibly the busiest period of travel in China and thus a time to avoid travelling like the plague if one dislikes crowds as much as I do) was approaching and I was rather at a loss for what to do with myself because my passport had been taken to the police station where it would most likely stay for the duration of the week. That obviously trashed my plans to zip over to Taiwan for the week. Probably a good thing since Ally, one of the people I most wanted to catch up with, happened to be in Thailand that week! It is an extremely lucky thing she advertised/bragged the fact on Facebook the week before, otherwise I was planning on calling another friend, Candy, to organise a dinner in Kaohsiung without telling anybody why so that I'd be able to turn up and scare half my friends to death (an idea borrowed from the book of Petra ;) Given this probably would have required bribing the police to give my passport back early, I might have spent the week in prison! Instead, I went to Taishan.
Taishan is totally famous. Everybody who is anybody in China has climbed it... Mao, Confucius and oodles of emperors. The crème de la crème of the Taishan experience is supposed to be the sunrise which, if one is extremely lucky includes both a clear view of the sun (hey, not something to be taken for granted in China) and a sea of clouds (note, clouds are not the same as fog or smog and thus also rare). Indeed, on a good day the sunrise is said to be so specky, some lunatics even climb up the mountain in the middle of the night, just to see it. Given that there are 6600 steep, stony steps to the top and that it is freezing bloody cold on the peak, I have to assume anybody who does this must be extremely masochistic. Not for the likes of me. I booked a room in a guesthouse a few days before.
I was unable to convince my students of my credentials as a competent and fiercely independent lone traveller. Much to my chagrin, despite my language skills and the fact that I have more travel experience than the lot of them put together, they remained fearful that I would be a) unable to find the bus station b) unable to buy my own ticket c) unable to find the right platform and d) definitely too polite to shove my way onto the right bus through the hoards of other travellers. So, they took it upon themselves to nominate 2 students who got up at an unholy hour of the morning to escort me to the bus station and make sure I got on the right bus. Actually, despite finding the situation a tad undignified, I was extremely touched and also relieved... I had also been doubting my ability to shove my way onto the bus when it came. My students took their duties extremely seriously, even to the point of accompanying me onto the Taian (small city at the bottom of the mountain) bus and making sure I was comfy. They were so busy interrogating locals for information about how to get to the mountain, the price of tickets and hotels...etc, that they forgot to get off the bus when it left the station!!! After some squawking and squealing at the driver, they said their goodbyes and went back to uni.
Once we arrived, I found out the locals had also decided between themselves to take me under their wings. One guy was delegated the responsibility of walking me to the bus stop where I could take the bus to the trail entrance. This was extremely decent of him considering it happened to be more than 10 minutes walk, through hideous traffic, in the opposite direction of where he was going. He delivered me onto the bus, told the bus driver to make sure I got off at the park entrance, then gave me his business card with stern instructions to call him if I ran into any trouble while in town. Once I got on the bus, a local student then took over and told me which stop to get off at. So, I was pretty much babysat from my front door, all the way to the bottom of the mountain!
I don't remember much of the ascent except that it rained a fair bit and smelled of pine. I managed to get to the top in 3.5 hours feeling not particularly pooped. I would have been much quicker too had it not been for the decision to bring my big back pack with me. I was worried it would be freezing cold at the top, so I brought lots of layers with me (seriously, I even brought my long catsuit/granny underwear with me, I was so determined not to get cold). Nobody else that day hiked up there with a load as big as mine, except for the guys who lug supplies up to the restaurants on bamboo poles. I felt like a great wally, but despite the extra weight I still managed to plod my way up faster than a lot of others on the path (except for one old grandpa who jogged up in his running gear leaving people a quarter of his age gasping in his wake).
However, once I got to the top I began to feel quite smug about having brought all those extra layers because it was damn cold up there! I changed clothes (was necessary as they were drenched in sweat and starting to freeze), consumed a mountain of dumplings and washed them down with a huge bowl of soup, then went out to explore a whole lot of temples, before retiring to bed early. I was disturbed by a phone call from Mum shortly after, who was busy laughing her head of at a text message I'd sent her about freezing my butt off at the top of a holy mountain despite going to bed with all my clothes on, being covered by two quilts, plus a great big PLA army coat and a scarf wrapped around my head. Seriously, I could barely breathe, there was so much weight on top of me, but I still almost froze to death. I had to pour boiled water into a plastic bottle and press my toes against it in order not to freeze while I was drying myself off after a shower!!!
The next morning I followed a guide from the guesthouse up to the sunrise viewing point. We had to run most of the way to get there in time because some silly git slept in too late. The silly git was not me! Indeed we almost missed it. We got there just in time, as hundreds of people sitting on rocks at the point started exclaiming "Ah!" It was a magical moment. I've always been a big fan of sunsets, the sight of which always leaves me feeling at peace. But the sunrise at Taishan won me over. 5 seconds of that sunrise made 6600 steps in the rain, almost dying from both hypothermia and suffocation (from burying my head under dusty quilts), and (worst of all) waking up at 5:15 in the morning all worth it. I stayed up there for about an hour, long after everybody else had left, staring at the sun, the clouds and the mountain in awe with tears of happiness in my eyes. The world really is a wonderful place. Not really sure why I was moved to tears. Perhaps because, like most people I guess, I spend a lot of my time stressing about all kinds of mundane things. And then there are moments of striking clarity, like that sunrise, where the world and life in general seem terribly simple.
I wandered my way down the mountain in a contented daze, until about half way when my legs started to protest. By the time I headed back to Jinan I was exhausted. I wasn't the only one either. The girl who sat next to me on the bus was so tired she ended up falling asleep with her head on my shoulder. I was at a bit of a loss for what to do, after I tried unsuccessfully to move her head only to have it fall back onto my shoulder. So I put my head on the window and fell asleep, much to the amusement of her friends her were sitting in the row behind us. Chuh.
My legs, which had done a darn fine job the 2 days I was at Taishan, finally went on strike the day after I got back to Jinan. One of the problems with Chinese mountains is that they have regular stone steps all the way up which tends to wreak havoc on the old leg muscles. If trails were natural, your whole leg would ache nice (?! well, nicer) and evenly because every step would require work from different muscles. Instead, the muscle groups that you use to climb steps (and all of the same size at that) end up feeling like someone stuck a knife in them. I was pretty much crippled for the next couple of days, restricted to limping about the house. And then I caught a cold, putting further trips I'd planned, to Qufu and Yantai, on hold. Was it still worth it? You bet!
