We checked in to a cavernous pseudo-american coffee joint. The seats hung from the ceilings and were swings. Both of us ordered the most western food on the menu, which were club sandwiches. I don’t know what the deal here was, but we were the only people in the entire damn place, there were at least 20 waiters but still the food took forever and came out cold. Oh wait I know what it was…the waiters were all idiot fucking retards.

Ditched the coffee joint and headed to the train station across the street where we hopped on a local bus to head to the mountain for 1rmb instead of taking the scammy tourist buses. The bus ride was only about 15 minutes and then there we were, at the foot of the mighty mount Tai.

As usual there was the gauntlet of shops selling all kinds of random junk that had absolutely nothing to do with the actual attraction. This particular gauntlet continued almost ¼ the way up the mountain. We heard the climb took about 6 hours from the very bottom where we started. So our plan was to make it up in 2. I can say I’ve definitely had better ideas in my time. For once they weren’t overestimating the amount of time it would take for the average person to make the climb in a subversive scheme to manipulate them into taking the overpriced gondola. We started it, and being as the whole way consists of a paved path and stairs, it’s basically one MASSIVE stair climb. Unlike actual mountain climbing or scrambling, stair climbing is medieval torture on the calves. The other mistake made was that we started off jogging, running past everyone as they looked at us as if we had just escaped from a mental institution. This is what we were staring at for those next 3 hours:

And low and behold, the mountain woman:

By the time we reached the midway point where the tram and bus station was, if my legs would’ve had any energy left and some freewill they would’ve beat me to death. It was about 13 degrees but I was down to my beater and still swimming in sweat. The prospect of mountain women chasing me down for some mountain mating was not alluring to me, so put my hoody back on. After downing all the water I could, my friend came to me looking spooked like he’d just been buggered by the ghost of a shemale. He pointed me in the direction of the rest of the climb. This is what awaited us:

The next hour and a half was not particularly enjoyable. It’s times like these you realize that maybe you should get some exercise other than surfing the internet and walking to McDonalds across from your apartment. What really made us feel pathetic were the troops of old guys that were carrying these huge random objects up the mountain. Giant pieces of glass, bags full of garbage, pet monkeys, all kinds of crazy shit. The last stretch was a bitch and a half, my lungs almost imploded, but by the power of the Thor, I made it up. My friend beat me by a good ten minutes. After the giant climb, there was a mini town of sorts at the peak, with hotels, restaurants, and of course more junk gauntlets. For the record we climbed 1540 meters vertical in about 2:45, which to put in perspective is 3 CN towers.

This is the mountain that Mao supposedly climbed (haha probably got a bunch of peons to carry him up) and is quoted as saying “the east is red” while watching the sunset. Works on a bunch of levels don’t it? I came up with one of my own being as there was a nice thick haze covering most of the horizon. I said “the east is yellow”. Works on a bunch of different levels too…
I took a few more photos so I’ll let them speak for themselves:

By the time we had finished checking out the top, we decided that climbing down would be an unnecessary waste of time and energy, neither of which we had. For industrious individuals like us there were far more important things to do…like pass out. We took the cable car down, bussed it back to the hotel and then had a well deserved warm shower (we surprisingly had hot water in our luxury suite). Then we hit up a restaurant and had what was probably the best damn meal I’ve had in China. I’m aware my beast hunger may have had something to do with that, but I still savored it. Being as we had already walked the entire downtown, seen the main sight, and had very little else to do, we opted to take the red eye train back to Qingdao at 3AM that morning instead of waiting till the next available train at 8pm the following day. It worked out fine because we slept a bit in the hotel, got up, got on the train and had sleeper bunks so we slept again and had all of Saturday to rejuvenate.

So what else can I say about this place? There’s a ton of history dealing with emperors and other guys that climbed the mountain and made human sacrifices or goatsex or whatever, but history doesn’t really float my boat. We didn’t get to see much of a sunrise or sunset, we hear those are the showstoppers. With the air pollution the way it is here, unless you come on a translucent or transparent day, you aren’t going to see much. Avoid opaque, in fact, on those days try to stay inside completely. If nothing else, I can say I got enough exercise to last me until about this time next year, when I can then head off to climb one of the other 5 super magical mountains of China.

The imbecility of my prior actions began to set in as I accepted that I had in fact missed the train and this was not some horrible hangover induced hallucination. The hangover itself was kicking into full gear and I hadn’t had the masochistic pleasure of one like this for a long time. The only thing I could think about doing was somehow getting to the next station so I could jump on the train with my friend. There was no way I was going to abandon the journey we had planned because that would make me quite the ass goblin. Him having to take on the full costs of everything instead of splitting it simply wouldn’t be just.

I talked to my friend and tried to figure out what the next station was, for a brief moment I was actually exploring the possibility of jumping in a taxi and getting on the train at the next station stop. This idea quickly shriveled up and croaked when I found out that the next station was a good two hours away, probably more with all the goats and giant abyss-like-holes crowding the country roads. So I asked one of the security people what my options were and they said that the best thing to do would be to change my ticket for the next available train. With what little computational power I had left in my brain at this time, I decided it seemed like a satisfactory idea.

The next 30 minutes were the most horrible of the whole trip. I was waiting in this line for the ticket booth that seemed as if I was actually getting farther away from the window. I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the case what with the infamous queue jumpers partaking in my misery. My entire body felt as if it was stuck under a steamroller and the rolling apparatus was just about to crush my skull. Halfway into the line there were these railings to prevent line snakes and my lifeless corpse was dangling over it them whole time. There was an old guy behind me who literally pushed me forward every time the line moved up.

I got to the window and what was supposed to be changing my ticket, was actually buying a new ticket. At triple the cost of the old. Someone up above was finally giving me some slack however, because the ticket person informed me that I could grab an express train leaving at 10:45am. The amusing part was that I was actually going to get there only 10 minutes after my friend as he was on the snail train. So I grabbed this ticket for 160rmb (my original ticket was only 56rmb) and proceeded to take something like a nap involving loud overhead announcements and people barking into their cellphones until boarding time. After boarding I once more proceeded to nap off my pain until débarquement. In the few moments that I was awake on the express train, I discovered that China does have a countryside, and that the new trains go hella fast (225KM/h for you spec geeks).

I met my friend in Tai’An (泰安), a tiny hamlet of about 500,000. According to him, his train sucked because there were people sitting next to him in the aisles, and next to those people, there were kids pooping in the aisles. I know this isn’t true because he tends to downplay things, so it was likely the people sitting next to him were in fact the ones doing the pooping and the little kids were probably smoking meth and torturing their stuffed animals. In the ten minutes he had been there he found a hotel charging a larcenous price of $14 a night so I suggested we could do better. After a brief walk around the block we were booked into a dingy room (they’re all dingy rooms in touristy places like this, they save the good hotels for places where no would ever want to go to like Beijing) for $10 a night.

We went to lunch at a Chinese fast food place not so great but not so shabby either, then we spent the day burning off what little energy I had left combing each individual avenue and street to get a feel for the place. The consensus? Graveyards in the middle of a desert on an abandoned island in OUTERSPACE had more life than this place. Satisfied that the town offered nothing other than its famed mountain, we retired for the night after a hot pot dinner that turned out to be less lethal (some could say, tazer-like) than most hot pots I’ve had.

That night I was raped HARD…by mosquitoes. I have a serious problem with them. First they love my blood. I am glad vampires don’t really exist and I don’t live in a place with vampire bats, because surely those suckers would be knockin’ on my door…with battering rams. Normally I can deal with them. Here in Asia, and this is all over Asia, the little succubi bite me, then the bite swells to the size of a tennis ball. I am not over-exaggerating as one would tend to do in such situations to arouse pity. But it’s HORRIFYING I tell ya! They transform me into a hideous deformity, so freakish even Barnum brothers would say ”OMGWTF?!”. So I got worked by these little pricks that night and of course they got the only part of me that wasn’t covered…my face. I woke up in the middle of their orgy screaming “NO, NOT THE FACE!!!, NOT THE FAAAAAAAAACE!!!!”. My friend must of thought I was just having one of those totally common for people my age boxtox nightmares because he just kept dozing. It was true, after examining my face they had bit me badly. So I folded myself into a position even a master yogi would be proud of that cocooned my entire body in covers and had a horrible sleep, dreading having to show my mangled money maker in the morning.

I know it isn’t as much of a cliffhanger as last time, but hey…I’m lazy and I need a break from writing this junk…so…IS THIS THE END??? Will I be able to show myself to the world? Will I have the confidence to make the mountain climb…of the MILLENIA?! If hippies, hipsters and hiphop merged would the world collapse at the hands of an unholy trinity of stylistic MALCONTENTS?!?! Find out next time!!!

Wednesday night was Halloween. I don’t know what got into me, but for some reason or another I got blackout drunk. I had already started drinking when I thought to myself that the best way to deal with the train ride would be to zone out in a hangover induced nap. You needn’t work in a Jewish deli to know that this idea was not kosher.

I woke up to the phone ringing at 7:25am Thursday morning. Holy shit I thought to myself. I was able to quickly pull myself together and realize that I was indeed at home and not in a ditch somewhere. I picked up the phone and found my friend on the other end inquiring as to where I was. “I’m on my way give me 5 minutes” I coughed out. My brain recomposed itself and I flailed about wildly shoving the things I needed into my pack. I was out the door and running towards where I was supposed to meet my friend, when I noticed that I was still intoxicated to an unexplainable degree.

Thanks to my friend’s strength in organizational skills we had afforded ourselves enough time to make it to the train station with some to spare. We squatted down to eat some fried dumplings which were either the best dumplings in all of China, or just good because my stomach finally had something to fill the void. Then it hit me like a train pulling into the station. The buzz was making way for the inevitably immense hangover. But what really spoiled my bananas was that in my rush out the door I had forgot to pack the weeknight drinker’s secret weapon: extra-strength liquid Advil. One of those capsules was potent enough to mitigate even the most massive migraines.

Since we still had about 30 minutes before the train departure time, I told my friend I was going on a walk to get some stuff. My friend doesn’t really know me, and the shenanigans that I get up to, so he let me on my way. My mission was to get to a drug store to find something that would help me through my weakened state. In my hazy journey I had managed to get all the way around the station. I drew a Smithsonian worthy image below to give you an idea of what went down. What I didn’t manage to do was pay attention to the time, as by the time I got to the drug store I now had about 10 minutes to get all the way back from whence I had came and make it through the throngs of security, ticket checkers and Chinese travelers carrying big plaid bags full of God-knows-what to get to my train.

My friend began frantically phoning me to find out where I was. As usual in this little adventure I told him I was on my way. My tempo increased while I began scanning the vicinity to find a gate on the other side of the train station that would give me faster access, because I knew even if I ran, I wouldn’t make it back the long way. All I found was railway yards and giant garages for the locomotives. I quickly cut across through them, walking fast so I looked important, but not running as if I was up to no good. A few workers gave me looks of bewilderment as to why this random western person was infiltrating their place of employment, but they all generally ignored me. Finally I came to what was a giant wall that surely blocked the way to what would be the train station’s rail lines. My friend was phoning me and I was ignoring him at this point. I had about 5 minutes before the train was to leave and at this point I figured I was pretty much SOL unless there was some freaky divine intervention junk going on.

The divine intervention was a large tree next to the wall with a broken branch at the bottom of it. Using the branch against the wall, I scaled the tree and then swung myself from a branch Tarzan style as I jumped to the ground. I could see the platforms. I ran as fast as I could across the tracks to the platform nearest the train station. At this point the security people were swarming me but I shouted to them that my friend had my ticket and was already on the train. I had to guess which train was going to Taishan. They let me go and told me it was on platform 2, the one on the other side of the tracks, and I would have to run down below them through the underpass to get there. I went as fast as I possibly could with my head beginning to throb, my eyes bleary and the dumplings’ trying to make a second coming. I got to the top of the stairs when I was blocked by a security guy. I tried to tell him the same thing I had told the others, but then I looked over and noticed all the doors of the train were shut and the train was slowly lurching into forward motion. This was just like in the movies where the guy goes through hell to get to the train and manages to jump on the caboose at the last second, but in reality’s version the story ends with a missed train and passengers giving you the Nelson “HA HA!” as they fade into the distance.

The worst thing was that in my dumb ass quest for drugs, all I managed to buy was some strange medication whose ingredients read like that of a Twinkie. So there I was, stranded at the station, no train, a hangover to end all hangovers and some pills that would probably embalm my brain. Was my trip coming to an early demise? Did I screw over my friend who didn’t even know me that well? Which would you pick: a man-to-man kiss with tongue or drinking hot baijiu??? Find out next week in chapter 2 of “Taishan 泰山”, same bat time, same bat place.