Wutai Shan

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Taiyuan, not at all famous and known as a dirty city, was one big chaos. I had to go to the east bus station to get on a bus to Wutai Shan, but this was very complicated. Luckily a student following an English language course helped me out. He was not from Taiyuan himself, so had to ask around for the bus himself. It turned out that many people said that there is no bus, because the roads are really bad around the east bus station. They all proposed to take a taxi. So I decided to do that. It turned out that the taxis also didn’t want to go there because of the bad road. After some heavy negotiations, I could get on a taxi for way too much money. After one hour of walking around the train station, I just wanted to leave the chaos!

The east bus station itself was very well organized. At the entrance gate for Wutai Shan, it turned out that the fee is really high. They also wanted to sell me an additional ticket, which was some kind of a scenic tour bus ticket. Finally they let me through without the additional bus ticket with a kind of a look saying ‘we are not going to understand each other anyway...’. In Wutai Shan almost nobody speaks English and it isn’t really a place that speaks for itself, so I was very glad when two French tourists appeared. They gave me a quick introduction about the free shuttle bus and the location. After having booked a hotel room (again), I went to the main village. Wutai Shan is one of the holy Buddhist mountains and famous for the overload of temples, which created a very nice atmosphere.

Also here, everything is made for tourists, but it is mostly less well organized. It doesn’t appear as fake as some of the other places I’ve visited in the South. So I went to see some temples, took a cable car up one of the hills (my legs are still protesting when I have to walk on steps) and had diner in a way too expensive restaurant. The value you get for the money here is not very good I would say (later, I met some people who also felt they were ripped off all the time at Wutai Shan). The views are nice, but not the best (although I haven’t been to one of the peaks and perhaps it was just not my day), the food is expensive, and the people are somehow also not the nicest. Well, it cannot always be amazing I guess!

Before coming to Wutai Shan, someone told me the trip to and from Wutai Shan is very ugly and not really worth going. However, I totally do not agree with them. Indeed, the landscapes are not only beautiful, but what you see during the ride is a part of daily life in China. There are many mines and stone pits, many roads which perhaps wouldn´t qualify for a real road in Europe, many different villages... so I found the rides very interesting! Unfortunately I couldn´t make any pictures, because the windows of the buses were coloured...

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