A Firsthand Experience of Hiking Mount Tai in Shandong Province, China
One weekend, our group of foreign teachers decided to hop on a bus for a few hours and go hike the famous Mount Tai, or Tai Shan. Mount Tai has been a place of worship for at least 3,000 years and served as one of the most important ceremonial centers of China [Wikipedia].
It’s kind of a rite of passage to say you’ve climbed Mount Tai. Our group started at the bottom and started our way up. It’s not like an American hike with winding trails. The hike to the summit of Mount Tai is stairs. A long, straight, staircase. We started out overzealous and forgot to pace ourselves. It was just a few minutes into the hike up that we were all panting, red in the face, and exhausted. I remember the locals chuckling as they passed by us on the stairs while we were trying to catch our breath. We slowly caught our breath and decided to take it a little slower. One step at a time we climbed our way to the top. Every so often we would pass someone with a small cooler selling water or little Chinese snacks. I remember that the further we went up and the closer we got to the top, the more expensive the water got. I don’t blame them. They had to haul that water all the way there, the deserved more than the person at the bottom, in my opinion.
We climbed and climbed and climbed. There was false summit after false summit. We were convinced we were at the end and we’d get to that “top” stair and realize it just kept going. Exhausted, sore, hungry, and very thirsty, we finally reached the summit after nearly 7 hours of climbing stairs! SEVEN HOURS!
Even to this day, I have no idea how I did that. Anyone who’s ever gone hiking with me knows how much of a miracle this accomplishment truly was for me. We ate some dinner and booked a room in a hostel. All of us stayed in a tiny room with bunk beds.
Mount Tai is known for its sunrises and this is one of the main reasons people make the climb. I later learned that many people actually start the climb in the middle of the night so they can reach the summit just in time for sunrise. So I set my alarm to get up for the sunrise.
It felt like as soon as I closed my eyes the alarm went off and I had no idea where I was. My thigh muscles and calf muscles were screaming at me and I felt like I had been run over by a bus. Determined to see the sunrise, I forced myself out of the top bunk and down the ladder to the cold tile floor. I hurriedly put on some socks and shoes, grabbed my camera, and hustled out the door. It was freezing outside! I wasn’t prepared for the cold. I wasn’t prepared for anything actually. I found a guy who let me rent a huge Mao-era dark green winter coat. He laughed at how silly I looked in it, but I happily wore that thing all morning. I made my way to the spot on the side of the mountain where a crowd was growing to catch a glimpse of the sunrise. The anticipation mounted as I waited for that moment. I’ve never been a hiker or very outdoorsy, but I loved sitting on that small rock on the edge of a huge mountain with a few hundred Chinese people waiting on the sun to make its appearance. It finally peered over the horizon, I raised my camera, and took about two dozen photos. And just like that, the big moment was over. I stood up, went to find my friends, returned my rented coat, and jumped in a gondola to make my way down. This was the first time I realized that if the gondola could take me down, then it could have just as easily taken me up. I took the hard way. But I earned those sore muscles and I earned those epic sunrise photos. I earned the stillness of the pre-dawn anticipation. I earned the memories.