After exams had been done and completed, it came upon China the time of Spring Festival, Chinese New Year celebrations. This is when we get our break from studying, much like Christmas holidays back home. It’s traditional for Chinese students to return to their family to celebrate New Year together, and we internationals all go off travelling. Some of the more intrepid students go to other countries- some of my friends chose to visit Vietnam, Japan, Russia, and some even braving it as far as Britain itself!- and some, like myself, travel a bit more around China. Me, being a bit strapped for cash, could only afford a little bit of travel. And I knew if there was one place I wanted to spend a Chinese winter, it was Harbin; one of the northernmost cities in China, very near the soviet border, and famed internationally for its Ice and Snow Festival. Well, how could I miss out? I booked my hostels and flights, bought a new coat- my normal one wasn’t warm enough, I said what should I get, Kat said to get down, I hit the deck (thank you Rhod Gilbert) and made my way up to the frozen north!
Now, in my defense, it’s been a while since I’ve been travelling in the old hostels-and-maps way, and this is possibly the first time I’ve done long-distance travelling by myself. See, four of us all told- me, Hannah, Kat and Jess- were visiting Harbin, all arriving on the same day, but I had an earlier flight. So I arrived first. By myself. It was dark, I was tired, and unfortunately I’d made the two big rookie mistakes of travelling: I didn’t have a map for where I was going, or a phone number for the hostel. Best I had was a set of directions to the nearest landmark (Harbin medical university) and some walking directions from there. Turns out my hostel is far out on the fringes of town, and none of the airport cab drivers have heard of it. Sooo… this is awkward. But they knew the medical university, so I could surely just make my way there and follow my walking instructions afterwards? Sensible plan?
Lady Luck it seems was tutting at my naiveté and wagging a finger of disapproval. It could never be that easy. The walking distance from the medical university to the hostel, I later found out, was roughly nine minutes. In the dark, in the cold, tired and carrying a huge backpack, it took me just over an hour and forty minutes to find the hostel. This was when I realised I hadn’t planned very well for this trip.
The worst bit was knowing that shortly, very shortly, the others would land in their plane, and I would have to direct them to the hostel. They were relying on me to tell them where it was. All this time I was wandering up and down the road trying to interpret my hastily scrawled directions and translate the street signs, I couldn’t stop wondering how I was going to answer the question “Hi Dan, we've just landed, can you tell us how to get to the hostel?” if I was still sitting on one of several identical-looking snowdrifts by the side of the road! I went through every emotion- confusion, annoyance, panic, seeing the funny side, panic again- all the while aware that time was ticking on.
Fortunately, I found the hostel in the end, and was able to direct my friends there with some help from the reception. I wish, oh how I wish, I could say there had been a sudden epiphany and I’d worked out where I was, or that I’d fluently asked a passer-by how to get there, but no, sadly I was not to be permitted such a dignified and proud solution to my problem. I found it because, as I walked up a street I knew I had already walked up, a Chinese girl came out of her house, told me she had seen me walk past the window several times, and invited me in to find out where I was going. Between her impressively good English and my desperately lacking Chinese, we were able to establish the name of the Hostel, and rather than simply direct me there, she had to walk me the whole way. Turns out at the point I was less than four minutes walk away. So, on the one hand, not my finest start to a journey, but on the other hand, I’m hard-pressed to say which my finest start on any journey has been so far.
All told though, that was the end of my blunders (pretty much) in Harbin. The hostel was… well, it was a bed to sleep in, not much else really. And as I say, shortly afterwards the girls arrived and I carefully neglected to tell them I’d had too much trouble finding the place (hopefully none of them will read this!).
And then, the next three days we spent exploring the wonderful city that is Harbin! Now, sadly my camera couldn’t cope with the extreme cold, so until we get around to photo-sharing I have no pictures- but they’ll come in time! The cold was truly insane, as we easily hit minus twenty-seven degrees Celsius every single day. Minus twenty-seven! I didn’t know the thermometers went that low! Wrapped in a good seven or eight layers a day, we looked for the most part like great waddling mounds of cloth and fur, hiding our faces in hoods and scarves and facemasks.
Oh but it was worth it. The city has a long city of soviet occupation, and it showed. The streets were wide and open to the sky, and all the buildings were small. This being the winter festival too, every few yards there were giant sculptures of bears, horses and figures from Chinese legend built purely from blocks of ice. Even the road barriers and fences were covered over with decorative ice sculptures that glittered in the fine snow. On the first day we went to the Songhua river, which much stretch about a hundred and twenty yards from bank to bank, but in the winter freezes over so solidly that an extra temporary road is built on it, carrying full-sized busses and HGVs across. From where we stood the far bank was a forest of grey pines and fir trees, and the sky above was misty and pale, all hazy with snow. It was beautiful to look at. Little pony-and-carts went up and down on the frozen river itself, making it look like quite the Christmas card scene! We of course paid for the little trip, it was charming. Although with all those coats and jackets on, getting in and out of the cart was a bit of a struggle!
There were a couple of other touristy things to do- an old war base from the second world war, where Japanese troops performed horrific medical experiments on Chinese civilians, although just as disturbing was how it had now been turned into less a museum and more a piece of anti-Japanese propaganda (opening line on the information boards: “To further their cruel and violent intentions during the war, Japanese soldiers…”). We also paid a visit to an old Russian cathedral, Saint Sophia’s, which had sadly fallen into disrepair, and similarly now served less as a beautiful piece of architecture and more as a warning about not forgetting the past. It wasn’t hard to imagine her in her glory days though, all lit up with a thousand candles and the paintings on the roof stretching high up, echoing the singing of its occupants around… look at me, I’m getting all nostalgic again!
Oh and of course, we had to try the famous Harbin ice-cream! Now allegedly, if you’re cold, the best thing to do is to eat something cold to help you warm up. That doesn’t make much sense to me, but who am I to argue with QI? Well anyway, Harbin is famous for its ice cream, which weirdly tastes an awful lot like those little milk lollies you had as a kid- with the cows on them. And I can’t remember the name, which annoys me, because we were so happy when we remembered it back up there. Mini-Milk! That’s it. Thank you Google. (As you may have guessed, I don’t redraft my blogs).
Now, cathedrals and snow on the streets and ice creams are all very well, but they are merely a preface- merely a footnote- next to the World of Snow and Ice, the very epicentre of Harbin’s winter festival. I can’t build this up enough, so let’s dive straight in!
Even as you arrive, you can’t help but be bowled over. The entrance gate stands eighty feet high and much, much wider, with three great long arches to grant you entry into this wonderland. That alone was built of the same blocks of ice we’d seen in town, but nothing on this scale. And here, built into the ice blocks, where hundreds of LED lights that phased pinks and greens and blues and through all the colours you can imagine, which transmitted through the ice to light up the whole structure. That was shock enough, but it was just a taster. Stepping through and into the Ice World was the most surreal and beautiful sight. Firstly the ground was snow compacted so flat that no footprints indented into it, so it was just perfectly flat, like the surface of a lake. It genuinely felt like walking on water. Right in front of us was a full-sized Russian palace, built from the ice blocks and lit up with LEDs, great towers and staircases that you could walk up among to look around at everything around you. I was bowled over looking around- in one corner, two eighty-foot statues of cross-legged, meditating Chinese gods, sculpted from pure white snow. Nearer than them, an ice maze that from high up I could see people excitedly running around in and jumping up to see over the tops of the walls. Then on the far side, lighthouses and pagodas, all built from ice. And walking on the sea of ice all around us where more of the horses and carts, but not little ponies this time- huge creatures like Shire horses, pulling open-topped carts with whole families peering out with their mouths wide open at the world around them. The air was crisp and dry, and no cold wind blew, and all above us the sky was navy-blue and filled with bright twinkling stars. There is nothing I can type here that will adequately get across how amazing it was to see, nor will any photo capture that kind of magic. It was, frankly, astounding.
Until our toes got too cold that is, then we came back home for hot chocolate, and some Thorntons, sent by my brothers for my birthday (good shout boys!). Ah, luxury.
It was with a pretty heavy heart I left Harbin. There was so much I hadn’t done that I still wanted to see (white tiger safari, ice skating, horse-riding on the frozen river, skiing), and the streets themselves were picturesque enough that I was quite happy just wandering among them. Plus it was so good for my Chinese. Harbin people seem to be among the friendliest I’ve met in China, particularly cabbies, who were very eager to chat to the westerners, so good news for me! A perfect chance to practice my language skills. It was a bit of a badly-timed mad dash to the airport to fly back, but at least this time I didn’t have to stop and ask for directions! Travelling back through Shanghai, I eventually made it back to Ningbo (I hadn't planned that bit, though it went unusually well and I made it back in good time), and home again I am!
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."- Robert Louis Stephenson. Personally, I like to know where I'm going, and next time I shall have a blasted map.
