Tai’an and Taishan

Tai’an is a city that has built up at the foot of Taishan mountain, one of the “Five Sacred Mountains of Taoism”.

The hotel we stayed in was cool and had the fastest internet access I’ve ever used The first two days we just relaxed and explored the city. On the third we walked up the mountain (all 6660 steps), the first half was fairly straight forward but from then it was quite slow going as our legs turned to lead. It was so cold that our water turned to ice but the exercise kept us warm. Once at the top we found ourselves a cheap hotel for the night and then went to watch the sunset. We then spent a very cold night in the hotel room, luckily we brought our sleeping bags, before getting up at 6:30am to watch the sunrise and start our decent. We bottled out of walking down from the top and got the cable car to the mid-level where we had some noodles for breakfast and continued down the mountain on foot.

We checked back into our hotel and then headed off to nearby Qufu the home town of Confucius. Qufu was a bit disappointing and we were glad when we got back to the hotel to pack for our next day train to Shanghai.