Dream Trip 2008: March

Great Travel Moment

We are a small group of seven teaching in a non-western city in Inner Mongolia, China. This photograph was taken on our first vacation away from our school in Tongliao. We ventured south to Taian, in Shandong Province, China to climb Taishan Mountain. It was a difficult trip. The only available train was an overnight, hard-seat from Beijing to Taian, so we had little sleep. We could not translate to the Taishan ticket office that we wanted to leave our backpacks at the bottom of the mountain, so we had to carry them all the way to the top, which we wrongly assumed we were making a half-way climb. Needless to say, we were exhausted when we got to the top, but we saw the most beautiful sunrise the next morning over what the Chinese refer to as a 'sea of clouds' that surrounds Taishan.