Adventures at Laoshan Mountain

I was pleasantly surprised that I woke up on my own before my alarm went off. We were told that lunch could be questionable since this was pretty far out of the city, so I ate a pretty big breakfast. All twelve of us plus Katherine and Zoey hopped in the bus we rented for the day and started our drive out to towards the mountain.

When we got to the main part of the mountain, we caught up with our tour guide for the day and bought tickets into the park. This also included / required riding another bus to go to the different parts of the park.

The first stop we made was at a series of temples. It’s always interesting to see and hear about all the old culture. Granted it’s very hard to remember any of those details even a few hours later, but it’s interesting to hear nonetheless.

There were also some fascinating facts around some of the trees growing there. The oldest temples were over 2000 years old and some of the trees were planted at the same time. The oldest tree was over 2156 years old (picture to the right)! My favorite story was about a 700 year old tree that had a creeper vine growing inside of it And wrapping around it. The vine was 100 years old, so the story was that this was an old man with his young wife. The other story / tree that stands out was a dragon tree which was actually a really old elm tree that had some knots that had grown out to look like the head of the dragon. Rub the head and you will have good fortune.

When then broke for lunch and had two options: KFC or something really local. Karen suggested that we might bring lunch, since we might not like the local food, but we decided to give it a try. Apparently sometimes they have insects to eat but they were out of season. Had we known how long it would take to get to the restaurant and how mediocre the food would be, I think we all would have gone to KFC or skipped lunch altogether. As it was, all 17 of us crammed into a little van with seats on the floor and everyone squeezed in where possible. As I implied, the food was pretty gross. There were several seaweed dishes that tasted like what you would think that seaweed would taste, and it was the second time we’ve had this odd tasting seaweed gelatin dish. The clams and shrimp were good, but given that it ended up be 50 RMB, it also seemed pretty overpriced. The highlight of the meal was some homemade bread that Katherine made the previous day.

After lunch, we filed back into the van and went over to a cable car — which was essentially an express ski lift — to go up to the top of the mountain. It was a neat trip up and after seeing the terrain, there’s no way that the group would have made it up and down in a reasonable amount of time.

Once we got to the top, we of course had to take loads more pictures as the scenery was beautiful. The only downside was that it was pretty foggy. And then we started down the mountain. Most of the path consisted of stone terraces that effectively formed large stairs. Along the way we saw some really neat vistas, and there were tons of shops selling a variety of things. All the veggies and drinks were chilled with water from the mountain that would run from one bin to the next to the next — pretty cool! At the very bottom you could see a good sized dam which formed a small reservoir and a waterfall right before it. Here’s a picture of the whole A Team with our Project Assistants (now dubbed Project Rock Stars)

When we got back, the A Team went out for a light meal at the Chinese restaurant right next to the hotel. The food there was really good and super cheap. We also found out that you can order a whole pitcher of beer for 10 yuan or about $1.5.