Tai Shan

The disappointing news is that we did not make it to see the sunrise. According to the hotel we needed to wake up at 1am to catch a ride to the midpoint of the mountain and then walk up the rest of the way to the peak as the cable car would not yet be open. We decided that a good sunrise was fairly unpredictable and we didn't feel like climbing up a mountain in the dark without sleeping, so we slept in instead. We took the lazy man's way up by bus and cable car. I can see why Chinese people like this mountain since it has a lot of rocky edges to it. The top is okay, it's got a lot of Chinese characters carved into it, being so holy and all. Some of them were even written by Qianlong, the Qing emperor who collected a lot of the art that was part of the Forbidden City collection. We had planned to walk all the way down, but we realized it would take too long and we had to catch a bus back to Beijing that afternoon, so we only walked halfway. It took a good two hours and after every bend, we were thinking, where is that bus station!? I know, pretty wimpy, considering we saw a lot of grannies and people carrying 40 bottles of beer walking up the mountain. TCL even had a company retreat where they got to walk all the way up from the bottom. Good thing I don't work for TCL.