Visiting Laoshan before heading home

2007-10-19

We were to catch a train back to Beijing in the evening, but first we went and visited Laoshan, a huge natural park just outside of the city. We took a bus both ways, which, while cheap, was extremely slow. We got to see a lot of the city though, and the park at the end was really nice.

There are some buddhist shrines and temples in the park, and I think we only caught half of it (the part with the funicular up to the top of the mountain was closed because of high winds), but it was still pretty nice. We had to rush to catch our train at the very end.

We started out by taking a few more photos of the waterfront, however, since it was such a nice day out, and that's where we caught the bus.

[Click on any photo for a larger view]

Blue sky and water! They'll be holding the Olympic sailing events here.

We arrived at Laoshan about 90 minutes later.	Lots of shops with snacks and the like here, but finding transportation around is a bit of a hassle.
Bus after bus full of tourists come here.	We're still right on the coast.
So we started our way up the path into the mountains.
We weren't hot before, but started getting so quite quickly in the sun.

You can pay to have some people carry you around in a palanquin if you want. It's only a few hundred RMB.
	Oddly, all of the shops and the like were abandoned. Not high season? Nobody comes on a Friday?

This little bridge area was quite crowded.
		We had to manage our time carefully, as we had to be sure to get to the train station on time, and this path is quite long.
	"Hey, what's that?"


		You can pay 5 RMB to have your photo taken and printed out here.
We caught a bus back to the city. The taxis are crazy expensive.		The bus gives some great views. We caught our train with about 10 minutes to spare, and had a quite ride back to Beijing.

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