day 9 - Tai Shan mountain - 25.08

Headed out of the hotel early in the morning as we assumed that we will use up all the promised 8 hours at the mountain. There are various ways to get up there and also to come down. As we found out later then going up and coming down only by foot would take 8 hours as there are some 6660 stairs to climb :) Riina was not so happy about the stairs as she got her share at the Great Wall :)

Anyhoo, we grabbed a taxi by the hotel and showed the signs of Tianwai Village to the taxi driver (that is how it works, all the signs of places are given in chinese in the travel guide so that is the best way of clear communication) as that is where the buses would depart from. Communication with them is interesting - they have the strangest signs for numbers. When they corss 2 index fingers then this is 10 and when they lift the thumb and index finger then this is 8, other numbers we have not figured out yet :) Well 1 is easy as well, that is just an index finger. Apparently those finger combinations somehow represent their signs when writing numbers, although most of the phone numbers don't use the hieroglyphs but are written in regular latin numbers.

From Tianwai village we were able to purhase our pass up the mountain as well. Somehow they also smuggled local insurance for us, well that is comforting :) Bus took us halfway up through a windy road. From halfway up we climbed some stairs for 2 hours - that was rough. The air was a bit cooler up here, but the sun was blazing down at us and climbing up was not an easy task either so all together we were burning up in any possible way. And, no we did not need our fleece jackets that we dragged up there - we were dying of heat no matter what.

Up on the summit there were numerous temples, hotels, shops, restaruants, cliffs and some what looked like army buildings. We spent about 2 hours walking around up there enjoying the amazing views and beautiful scenery. During that 2 hours we noticed our red shoulders which reminded me that i forgot to put sunscreen on :(, I applied it on the last moment, but we both ended up getting burned in our face, shoulders and upper back - oh the night will be painful.

For the downward journey we decided to take the cable car from the summit to half way down and then walk the rest. Cable car experience was great :) At first I wasn't so sure about taking the cable car, but I'm very glad we did. Claustrophobic as I am it was a bit scary, but then again it was twice the excitement. About 5 people would fit into the single car thingy, it had seats on two sides. Whole thing was made of glass and had small windows on top - to let some air in. The ride was very smooth and lasted about 10 minutes. The view, well, no words to describe that. Rest of the way we walked down the stairs happily, made it back to town around 5pm.

For dinner we ended up walking out of 3 eating places. First eating place would serve only hotpot food which meant that they bring a huge bowl with broth and whatever you ordered would be boiled in front of you in that broth and they you would fish it out with chopsticks and eat it - somehow that did not look very appertising and we ended up leaving to find a bit better place. In the second eating place we could not understand anything from the menu and the waitress was not able the explain the food in any way so we just left. Third place smelled so bad that it took our breath away and we were not able to stay in there for longer than 30 seconds. Finally we went to some tiny eating place and ended up getting one of the best meals yet. We got white rice, steamed vegetables (yeap, this first time for us to have water soaked chinese cabbage things) and then meat pieces fried with onion. The meat dish was delicious! It had the best sauce ever - we ate every single piece on that plate, it had garlic and ginger there as well for taste. Sauce seemed to be terriaky sauce, well, it was the tastiest thing yet.

Evening was another movie night. Around 10 in the evening we witnessed rain for the first time here. Last time when it rained in Beijing then we were sleeping - we just heard it but never saw it. Last night we ran over to the hostel entrance to look at it - it was juust pouring. I could not imagine getting stuck with our pack bags in something like that while walking. I think it would come down so hard that we could not stand up :) It passed quite quickly though, rained perhaps for about 30 minutes or so and then that was it.