Taishan & Jinan, Shandong

Summer trip to Taishan & Jinan in Shandong

Took a weekend camping and hiking trip to Shandong during the Dragon-boat festival break to climb Taishan and spend a day in Jinan.

Like any other "famous mountains" and "must-see" attractions in China (e.g. Huangshan), the main "Imperial" route up the mountain was bustling. Tourist hordes with megaphone-toting tour guides, students, touts, sedan-chair coolies all blend into the melee that is a 6000-step artery all the way to the summit. Amongst all the goods on offer, notable ones peddled include gaudy red "I conquered Taishan" headbands, good-luck mini-statues of assorted Tao deities (pretty cheap luck at only 1yuan a piece) for people needing blessings for health, exams, lottery,etc. , T-shirts & flags (again in the same vein of "I conquered Taishan"), whistles (that sound like birds or crickets), towels, sun-shades, instant photo services etc. What amazed me more was the fact that people actually bought them.

Thankfully, we took a quieter back route up the mountain and it was virtually empty. It offered some great views of the rugged range, waterfalls, springs and swathes of pine forests. Here, you could stop whenever you want to enjoy the scenery, listend to birds chirping (real ones, not those bloody annoying whistles) or take a snack break in peace. In fact, there were few shops we passed and most of them called out lackadasically to you to buy something, have a rest or some tea but were never pushy. At one point we ran out of bottled water and filled our bottles with sweet, refreshing spring water. I did worry at some point about giardia and other nasty parasites (You can take me out of Singapore, but can't take the Singaporean out in me!) but decided to flirt with danger anyway .

5pm, almost sunset and a few hundred metres altitude to go. We had made slow progress in part due to the heat and heavy backpacks. A cable-car station loomed in sight and looked extremely tempting. It was a case of Cable-up-and-enjoy-the-sunset vs continue-heaving-reach-the-top-possibly-in dark.

Surely it would be extremely wimpish to take a cable up to the top after we've made it this far on legs! Wouldn't i be relegated to those "softies" (that i usually scorn) who take the easy way up? So weak! so wimpish! Ugh.

In the end, Cable-car won. To hell with pride. The cable (more like a ski-lift) zipped us and our heavy backpacks to the top in cool efficiency and for only 20kuai (4SGD). It was an awesome ride and definitely a different experience to feel the breeze, look down and see the tops of trees whizzing past beneath your feet. Made a mental note to try the soft option more often in future.

The summit offered -you guessed it - more souvenir shops, instant photo services and of course temples. It was almost sunset when we finally reached the top and we hurriedly pitched our tent, sat outside the tent watching the beautiful red and orange glow in the sky with a bottle of red. Dinner was a simple, hurried affair in a tiny eatery - as the wind howled outside, we wolfed down steaming bowls of noodles with fried vegetables and eggplant. And then we scurried back to the tent again to escape the wind.

Stars in the night sky - lots of them.

Early start at 4am after a particularly uncomfortable sleep (in part due to some other noisy campers) for the famed Taishan sunrise - but we didn't get to see it due to too much cloud cover.

Oh well - time to de-camp and head down!

We tried to weave through the crowds as quickly as we could via the "imperial" route. The route up was much more pleasant than the way down! I had a vague feeling that Taishan (esp the main route) isn't the sort of place to get away from the crowds or to have some quiet contemplation of the navel. Even the temples atop seemed rather commercialised and had lost its "sacred" aura.

6000 steps downhill wasn't a piece of cake like i envisioned, and after about 4000 of them, we caved-in once again to the comfortable option - a BUS!

And so, that was Tai-shan crossed of my long "To-do" list.

Clockwise from L (Sedan chairs to carry visitors up the mountain, Taishan, sunset with some satellite dishes camouflaged under a pagoda, and yours truly bringing my own bar up to Taishan)