Travel in China Archives - The Squirrel Chase

During mid-autumn festival one year my son and I went to Penglai. It is in Shandong Province, China. Because of time constraints we only had one full day there.

About Penglai

Penglai is on the North coast of the Shandong peninsula, which juts out into the yellow sea toward Korea. It lays at the intersection of Bohai (the bay which has Tianjin, the main port serving the Beijing area) and the Huang Hai (Yellow Sea). Since the stone age it has been inportant for trade, with an exciting history of pirates. Also, it is, reputedly, the landing where the Eight Immortals (also called fairies) arrived from over the sea.

The shoreline of Penglai, facing the "Eight Immortals Tourist Area", which is a figure eight shaped man-made island. — Penglai’s beach.

We came over land, arriving on a bus from nearby Yantai. If we had been savvier we could have come directly from Weifang and skipped Yantai, but it was hard to understand what they were telling us at the bus station in Shouguang. After being on buses all day, I headed out to find the sea. It was lovely, and the weather was lovely; I walked the path along the shore until it was getting dark.

View from the path along the shore line toward the headland with the temple complex and ancient lighthouse at dusk. — Walking toward the headland with the temple complex and ancient light house at dusk.

The one hiccup in our travel plans…

My phone rang; it was a representative from Bookings.com, there was a problem of some sort. I was already headed toward the hotel, where I had left my son napping (his favorite way to start a vacation). He called not long after to explain what was going on.

In China there are some hotels where foreigners can stay and not at others. The chain of hotels I chose had both kinds. And the place where I booked was not allowed to have us stay. They didn’t figure out there was a problem until the number of digits in our passport numbers wasn’t long enough for the number of digits they expected.

Happily, everyone was kind and they took us to a different hotel in the same chain, where we, for the same price, had a two bedroom apartment on the 26th floor with a great view. But it took a long time and I was exhausted. So we went out and got lost and ate dinner at a tiny restaurant, who knows where.

Thank goodness James speaks Chinese!

Views from our new hotel room: the evening and the morning.

The Penglai temple complex

We spent our one full day in Penglai, primarily exploring the temple/lighthouse/museum complex. It was fascinating…

The temple complex focuses on the Eight Immortals, and there are many places for people to pray for safe travels. As you can see in the gallery above, it had many elements that one sees at Chinese tradition temples. Since it was mid-autumn festival it also had many Chinese people doing the same thing we were.

I wormed my way up to see what everyone was looking at.

In some ways that was kind of cool, in others it made the day a bit overstimulating for this woman of “a certain age” with jet lag (it was only day 3 in China).

The ancient lighthouse

The ancient lighthouse was lovely, but hard to photograph because of the crowds. Notice that it has roof guardians.

The museums

The museums in this complex are really good. Because of the continuous history from the stone age to the present there are many artifacts. They explain the construction of ships and they also do a very good job with life sized dioramas showing ship building and other aspects of daily life.