Jamie Bettles7000 Steps … that doesn’t sound that much to you? It definitely didn’t sound that much to me either until I had to climb all of them up the make it to the top of Tai’Shan.
Due to the Mid-Autumn Festival we all got three days off. While all the Chinese Families gathered together to enjoy the holidays we thought it be a great opportunity for a 2-day trip. We already heard a lot about Tai’Shan, one of the “Five Great Mountains” of China.
While organizing, we also found out that close to Mount Tai is also another interesting sight, Qufu, the hometown of Confucius. Therefore we combined these both trips; in Qufu we went to see the three most famous cultural sites of the city, collectively known as San Kong, “The Three Confucian sites”, which are the Temple of Confucius, the Cemetery of Confucius, and the Kong Family. Together, these three sites have been listed as aUNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994.
Visiting temples, sounds pretty great doesn’t it?! 😛 Well we definitely made the best out of it, rented a little carriage to do a horse ride from one site to the other to save our strength for the way up the mountain in the evening. 🙂
At about 7pm we took our next train to Tai’Shan. It was already dark and all of us were very excited about climbing up the mountain. Arrival in Tai’Shan; Be careful, there are a lot of taxi drivers who want to convince you that you need to buy water, food and lamps at a local store, pretty overpriced, before getting to the mountain…this is not necessary! There are tons of little stands on the bottom and also on the way up you can buy water, food and souvenirs every few meters.
Then we started hiking, or walking steps…and we were walking…and walking…and walking…1,5 hours later we arrived at a bigger site with some restaurants…yes! Finally close to the top!…Not…It was the middle! Haha…OMG how can we hike up to this tiny little lights on the top in the distance? 🙂 Well, no excuses, we should keep on climbing up the stairs…so we climbed and climbed…more and more stairs…and finally after a lot of swears and OMGs, we arrived pretty exhausted at the top of the mountain!
Finally on the top it was freezing, so we rented some huge parkas, and played some games until the morning, to see the famous sunrise on top of the mountain. Sadly we couldn’t see it because it was too foggy, epic fail! 😛 But we still had a great time and we’re really proud of ourselves to have made it to the top.
We walked all the way back down, which was also more exhausting than expected, and were all really happy when we were finally lying, after 30 hours, in our beds on the train back to Qingdao. For those who don’t like stairs, the mountain also has a cable car to take people up and down the mountain so now you have no reason not to visit this great mountain and see if you can catch the sunrise and tell us about it!
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