It was the May 1st, China's Labor Day holiday, and most of the news stations were warning the Chinese not to travel because of the crowds and congestion. It was a bit strange, and it made no sense to me that the government would encourage citizens to stay home on a holiday rather than contributing to the domestic tourist economy. I was going to venture to Mount Tai in Shandong, one of the five great mountains and a holy land for Buddhism and Taoism. In ancient times many emperors climbed to the top to pray for the Chinese; also many famous poets described the mountain in their poems.
In the morning I headed with Hope my travel companion to the little train station in Huaibei, Anhui for the 325 km trip north to the small city of Taishan, Shandong. I saw some familiar faces on the train, English major students who spoke English well, so this made the ride on the overcrowded train much more enjoyable. Once we made it to Tai Shan City we found a hotel room for 300 RMB and had time to look around a bit, I could see that it was a Chinese tourist city. The weather was hot so I figured that the more than 6,566 step climb up the 1500 metre ascent would be a sweaty affair.
My sleep was not good for several reasons; the box spring was so hard, many hotel beds do not have a top mattress; there was so much horn honking on the street; sirens were blaring and Chinese tourists were making so much noise in the hallway. At 5am I thought we may as well get motivated on reaching the base of the mountain, this would help with tolerating the heat.
After we entered the Red Gate
we met a Russian girl named Anna who was studying Chinese at a university near Beijing, we befriended her and she accompanied Hope and I up the mountain. As I stated in other posts, most all of the popular Chinese mountains have concrete stairs from the bottom to the top. On this day the 4 hours of ascending Mt. Tai would start with very few fellow stair climbers; the people we saw were very friendly, as were the people in the shops and restaurants around the hotel. So many people wanted to get their picture taken with me, at first it was flattering but then it became too time consuming as many people would be waiting with camera in hand. There were so many temples that we passed on the way up the mountain, some were more significant than the others.
The relaxing/sociable climb lasted for a couple of hours until we reached the Zhongtian Gate which is where the bus stop is that most of the Chinese that were intending to go the rest of the way up the mountain were getting off buses. There were thousands of people approaching the same set of stairs for the main route going up the mountain, the crowd was astonishing. Some bad behaviour seemed evident as people started to push as they shuffled their way toward to 2 metre wide space. Many Chinese climb these famous mountains to see the sunrise so when one climbs up in the morning, there are also crowds coming back down from spending the night up there. From the bus stop onward was a human traffic jam like nothing I had experienced before, as far as the eye could see the path was loaded with people.
From this photo one can see an empty staircase leading to a small temple, the main route for the top is a solid snake of people.
I entered in my journal that there must have been 20-30 thousand people on the mountain that day; in total I saw 3 foreigners, including me. The next 2 hours of climbing was a real eye opener for travel in this most populous nation on a holiday. The people were throwing all of their snack garbage on the ground, so many men were smoking and it was near impossible to escape the smoke since we were jammed so tightly. There were some screams and people yelling at each other as the sun beamed down upon us. Compounding the problem of people trying to go up as others were trying to go down were the vendors who were half blocking landings with their carts and small huts.
Some people hopped over the small wall that ran up the sides of the stairs so that is what we did, it was just too hot to stand there. Probably the trickiest part of scrambling up the dusty trail was avoiding all of the human excrement that dotted the side of the mountain. On the top of the mountain, Yuhuang Peak, was like a small town with many shops and temples; even a Heaven Street. The temples were just okay for me, I have seen so many of them in Asian countries. Many tablets were to be found on the mountain, at Yuhuang Peak there was one that dated back to 1545, so people have been climbing this mountain for some time.
I heard the zipper of my backpack and turned around to catch a guy who was holding a shirt over my pack as he tried to open it to steal something. I grabbed his arm and started yelling at him, he said something in Chinese.There are a lot of pick pockets around China and they must have a big pay day on these crowded mountains as city folks come out to be tourists. When we got up to one of the temples we looked down to a landing where this pick pocket stood with 3 other guys; searching out possible victims,
On the top there was enough space for the crowds to disburse and we could relax and casually take advantage of the views.
I took about about an hour to reflect on the climb before going back down the 6,566 steps. I thought about the difficulty for men to carry supplies on the litter (human powered vehicle), some men often get paid to take the tourist up these mountains on these wooden carriages on poles. So many people wanted photo's, especially when they saw me writing in my journal with my left hand; I accepted many requests before we left. My knees could really feel the exertion once I got to the bottom, it was a slow km walk back to the hotel. I had now experienced a tourist site with no crowd control and was witness to some bad behaviour; given some time and space, the Chinese tourists seemed very pleasant.
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