Climbed mount tai after a delayed start in the hotel due to rain. Napped. Climbed up to ‘dragon door’ point with a couple of girls. Lunch, dinner. At night, awesome hotel let us go on fb and wp. Herman, jen, godwin, helen, mandy, and i met up at 11.10 despite the fb connection and went outside to scout the area. We got a 108 RMB 70 min food massage that included shoulders too. It was good and very professional. Slept at 4 am bc i was on fb…

That’s the very short post that I had on Day 11 of the trip.  You can see how exhausted I was since I was crawling into bed at 4 a.m. and still managed to type coherently into my phone.  Anyway, here are the photos that show the day a little more clearer than my blurb:

After we had breakfast at the hotel, we were told that we might have to forego climbing on Mount Tai since it was raining outside and the cable cars might not be running to take us up to the midway point.  So, we had more than an hour to ourselves at the hotel.  I used it to nap, haha.  After that, we visited a small plaza called “Mount Tai Plaza” that had some interesting things.

It was still very foggy outside when it was deemed safe enough for us to travel to Mount Tai.

Finally, our tour bus got us there!  Here’s a map of the path up to the top of the mountain.

Great view:

As we started climbing up the mountain, we would see tons of these gigantic rocks that had various Chinese phrases on them.

This was one of the waterfalls along the path.

The steps were SUPER steep!  They weren’t as steep as some of the steps on the Great Wall of China and at least these ones were even-footed.

This tablet is famous on Mount Tai.  Tens and thousands of years ago, the Chinese somehow were able to climb up on the side of the mountain side and engraved an entire Chinese poem into the stone!  It’s pretty incredible.  The writing is precise and perfectly neat as well.  How did they do this?

You can see the poem on the mountain wall behind me:

There were lots and lots of tourists climbing the mountain with us.  It was really difficult to continue on the path sometimes — not only because it was steep, but because you also had to navigate your path to get up.  Sometimes, you would get one or two people taking a break right in the middle of the way up and you have to stop and weave around them to continue on.  It was really frustrating.

It was tough, but we made it to the “Dragon Door”.

This indicates that we were 900m above sea level.

After around 3 hours, we were finished and hopped back on the coach bus to take us back to the ground level.  It was a very windy road.

There were a lot of shops selling freezies, snacks, and souvenirs on the ground level.  Here were some toys that I found amusing in front of one of the shops:

Then, back on our tour bus again, we broke out the snacks and passed them around to share.  Haha, this was one of the nicest parts of the trip.

At night, we checked into the best hotel of the trip!  This hotel broke through the China anti-facebook and anti-wordpress boundaries to allow us to surf through whatever website we wanted to.  That’s really why I spent the rest of my night surfing on facebook until I finally gave into sleep at 4 a.m…

That’s all for Day 11!  We’re almost at the end of the trip.  Four days left…

Click to view my posts for Day 1&2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, and 15!