Tour of Dongbei (North East China)
// July 13th, 2009 // China, Dalian, Harbin, Travel
I just got back from a week of touring through some of the most famous parts of North Eastern China (the region known as “dongbei” or “东北”) so I thought I’d write down all I did in the past 7 days. Here it goes:
Friday, July 3, 2009
Friday night we all got on a night train to Dalian. Being the third time the whole group has traveled by train, I think we’re starting to get the hang of it. Things went smoothly and we had another night of singing songs and playing cards into the night at 140 km/hr.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Saturday morning we arrived in Dalian. After breakfast at a Chinese fast food joint, we got on a bus to Jinshetan, which is about an hour northeast of Dalian. So I was pretty bummed when I found out that we weren’t actually staying in Dalian, my old home town from last year. In Jinshetan, we went swimming at the beach, then in the afternoon everyone went to an amusement park. I still don’t really understand the decision to spend our time this way – both the beach and amusement park you can do in the States, and I felt it would have been a much better decision to actually stay in Dalian and see the city. Regardless, we had a good time at the beach, and then I took a train with a classmate back to Dalian to see my friends from the previous summer. We only got to hang out for a few hours, but it was great to see them again. That night we headed back to Jinshetan and celebrated the 4th of July with everyone. We had a huge fire and cooked hotdogs and smores on sticks. In the distance we saw a bunch of other fireworks going off, and it was comforting to know other Americans were in the town.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
We didn’t do a whole lot on Sunday. In the morning we took a bus out to a shipping port where we waited for about an hour to board our boat to Yantai. We spent the rest of the day riding the boat. It was a smooth ride and we got the VIP room with card tables, so it was a pretty sweet deal. In the afternoon I spent about 2 hours talking with some of our teachers in Chinese and had some wonderful conversations, taking notes all along the way.
Monday, July 6, 2009
We traveled to the Penglai Fortress the next morning where we learned about the Penglai mirage and about the Legends of the 8 Immortals. We took a motor boat ride in the afternoon and hiked the side of a small mountain to a temple. The weather was particularly hot that afternoon and a lot of people ended the day with red necks, myself included, but the view from the top was worth it. That night we boarded another night train to Yanzhou.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Tuesday morning we woke up in Yanzhou then took a bus to Qufu and spent the morning touring Confucius’s home. In the afternoon we went to Mencius’s home, one of Confucius’s most famous students. I took a lot of photos of the two areas, both which were rather large sort of parks filled with trees and ancient Chinese buildings. I wish I knew 
more about the history of the places because after a while everything started to look the same, and I could not distinguish the significance of one temple over the other. That night we had a delicious dinner, complete with scorpions as a local delight.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
The next morning we took a bus to the Ling Yan Buddhist Temple near Mount Tai. It is said that if you go to Mount Tai but you don’t go to the Ling Yan Temple, then you haven’t actually gone to Mount Tai. I wrote my name in English and Chinese in a book in one of the temples which is said to bring good fortune. The temple was gorgeous, but the weather didn’t necessarily agree. Just before lunch, the rain started to pour, and it didn’t let up for most of the day. That afternoon, we all put on ponchos and began the hike up the 1500 meter tall Mount Tai. We took a bus half way up then walked for about an hour literally inside a rain cloud up seemingly never-ending stairs. At the top, some people got lost because you couldn’t see more than 10 ft in front of yourself. We were supposed to get up the next morning around 4:00 to see the sunrise, but the fog was just too bad.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
The next morning we broke up into two groups. One hiked all the way back down the mountain. The other group, the one I went with, stayed at the top for the morning, and it turned out to be a good decision. Around 10:00 am, the fog dissipated and we found ourselves looking down at clouds and up at beautiful blue skies. The photos don’t even come close to capturing the awe of that morning. It turned out the bad weather the day before was a blessing because the cable car was not working and no Chinese tourists were able to come up. We ended up with the entire top of the mountain to ourselves. That afternoon, the cable cars began working again and we rode them down to the buses. After Mount Tai, we went to Larry’s home village (Larry was one of our guides). The small town had set up 
a huge celebration for us, and we were placed at tables in the center of about 400 Chinese villagers in front of a stage. For the rest of the day, we watched the local townspeople perform on stage, and we even got a chance to go on stage and sing a few songs. The warmth from that small town was perhaps the most incredible part of the whole trip.
Friday, July 10, 2009
We spent the night a very nice hotel and spa, then the next morning went to Pu Songling’s Liquan Spring where we saw his gravesite and visited a haunted house. Pu Songling was a famous Chinese writer, sort of like a Chinese Hemmingway. The haunted house was similar to most haunted houses in the States, with very fake looking stuff inside, but this house was a bit more graphic than ones I have been to before (for example, a naked man clenching to a glowing hot steel column as torture for his sins). That afternoon we headed to the airport where we found that our flight was delayed several hours. We finally left around 7:30 pm and arrived back in Harbin around 9:00 pm.
All in all, the week was a great experience and a nice break from classes. There were definitely some flaws in planning, and it seemed like we spent way too much of our time on a bus or a train or waiting, but I think the good outweighed the bad. Going to Mount Tai and Larry’s village alone were two amazing experiences I would probably never have the opportunity to do on my own. I posted a bunch of photos from the trip in 4 separate albums, so check them out it you’d like on my photos page or on my flickr account. Now I’m looking forward to only 4 weeks left here in Harbin. I can’t believe how quickly this program is going by, but it’s been awesome so far.
