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Ni hao True believers! Once again it's time for our hero to travel across the great and mighty land of China and this time he finds himself in Harbin: the ice, northern landscape found just above North Korea and Just below Russia. A bit of background for Harbin; for a long time it was a disputed territory between China and Russia known as Manchuria. Due to this the town has a major Russian influence as well as many Russian people. It is also world renowned for hosting the world's largest ice festival with buildings, restaurants and bars made of ice. Now there is some anticipation, let's get this shown on the road:
Journey part two:
Train journey length: 12 hours (standing) Total: 46 hours travel
Distance: 775 miles Total: 2775 miles
Me, Erhorn , Rowland, Dan and Tim awoke bright and early on the 19th January (five am to be exact) to board a train to Harbin. Due, once again, to a mixture of corruption and high demand for tickets we had only be able to acquire standing tickets for the ten hour journey. Once we arrived and ate a McDonalds (we haven't been the healthiest on our travels) we settled down and waited to board. Once again it was absolute chaos at boarding time and it just happened we we're in the second to last carriage so had to run along the platform to make it there in time. We had a great struggle inside finding somewhere to place our bags as the train was completely full and without any space to move. We managed to secure a spot located between two carriages. However hindsight tells us what a terrible decision that was. The space between the carriages is not only a smoking area so we were chocking most of the journey but the rubber connecting the two carriages creates a lot of condensation. This essentially meant it was raining on us for a good six hours of the journey. We chatted to the Chinese around us and ate some corn sausage offered to us (it was absolutely foul) until it all became too much. At this point we headed to the dining cart and took a seat for an hour. When we headed back (nine hours in) we were suddenly informed that we would be delayed by a further two hours so the journey ended up taking twelve hours not ten. And to top it all off once we arrived my hiking boots, my only shoes, decided to rip open leaving me in what was essentially sandals standing on the -25 degrees Celsius Harbin train station. We were off to a fantastic start.
Arrival, although freezing, was beautiful. The second you step out of the train station the Russian influence is apparent; the architecture and layout of the city is far closer to a European city than any other Chinese city we've visited. This is mostly because the roads have bends and buildings curve whilst in the rest of the cities everything's done in blocks and cubes. On the bus to the hostel we also got to see many, many ice sculptures all along the roadsides making for a very beautiful journey. There were ice animals, ice huts, ice beer (Harbin is also famous across China for its beer, more on that later) and generally icy things. All very beautiful and all lit up like Christmas trees due to the insane amount of lights the Chinese had adorned them in. We finally arrived at the hostel cold tired and chilly, booked in and settled in to chill out for a while. I did eat one of the worst meals I've had in China in the restaurant next door but after a twelve hour train journey it went down as well as anything else.
The sharper amongst you may remember that in my Beijing blog I described bleeding over a guitar in dedication to the Harbin youth hostel before we had even arrived. I booked one month in advance and needed to book one extra night because all of Harbins hostels were full thanks to the ice festival; They did not reply, did not confirm a booking and would not answer phone calls or emails. To say I was livid hits the nail on the head. What can I say about the Harbin Russia youth hostel when we arrived? The staff were nice enough but told us to be quite at eleven PM for other guests (in a youth hostel), we had to pay for toilet paper, there was no heating (genuinely -25 without heating) and generally was fairly bad. Its redeeming factors are: Yellow, the fat resident cat who was a delight, the fact they sell Russian chocolate and the interesting people we encountered. This blogs dedicated to you Harbin Russia youth hostel.
The next day saw the arrival of a few more volunteers; Ed and nick, Carice and Claire and also Anya. That morning I was rather bored so took a walk down to the river in Harbin. It was a truly awesome sight; The whole river, a 1/2 mile across, was completely frozen. You could step out onto it, jump on it, burn stuff on it, the ice was that thick. After a wander on the ice it became to cold so I headed back to the hostel to plan the days activities. We all decided the 'Russian style town' sounded cool so we headed towards there on the bus. The walk to the bus took down the main high street of Harbin and it was really, really surreal. If you removed the masses of Asian people you could have been on any high street in any European city. Harbin was the place most different to the rest of China in terms of the general feel and look of the city. Although I think it is a really special place and it did bring back memories of my trip to Moscow and St Petersburg I could never, ever live in Harbin. It's too darn cold for too darn long in my opinion as I nearly froze on that walk to the bus.
When we arrived at our destination it turned out the entrance fee to the complex was two hundred yuan so we did what any schemie would do; walk across the lake and over the fence. So we all wandered across the lake which was great fun, on a hill on the other side I even had a cardboard sledge race with Carice down the hill which was an enlightening experience, before finding the 'Russian town'. My god. Look at the pictures I have designated 'Russia town' and you will see what I mean. What they had managed to do was create a really scummy kids park out of all of the Russian stereotypes you could imagine. We paid 20 yuan for a fake passport that gets stamped on your way in and had a look around. Inside were really creepy old statues, lots of gift shops selling items like lighters with topless blonde Russians on them, vodka in bullet shaped glasses and pig. A solitary pig. Inside the museum type buildings were further pictures of scantily clad Russians being visited by Chinese officials. It was all rather racist, showing of the stereotypes, and clearly engineered for the Chinese to have a good poke at Russians. All in all I can't say it was my favorite attraction we visited on our travels. But it certainly was the funniest. After this we just wandered around Harbin, grabbed some food and settled in for a few beers before the next day.
Day three was an extremely stressful day. Alex and Jacob arrived who we hadn't seen since our first week in China which was nice but after that was a pain in the bottom. No one had planned what to do after Shanghai so me and Dan spent most of that morning organizing who wanted to go where, how much train tickets would cost, what and when we could book and who we were booking for. Once that was all sorted and money we gathered we all took a trip to the train station where Me, Dan and the wonderful Tim booked train tickets for everyone (it was mostly Tim though). Once that was out of the way we ate a hearty lunch and prepared for the evenings activity; the ice festival.
Almost all of us had come to Harbin solely to see this festival. We decided to go at night, even though it was double the price, so we could see it all lit up. Totally worth it. Look at my pictures to get a taste of what it was like but pictures truly can't do justice to a place like this. Once we arrived and were in a whole world was opened up to us. There as a castle made of ice which you could walk upon and look from the highest turret and look over the whole festival from. There were ice slides, one of which we all went down together at breakneck speed sending other patrons flying. There we plenty of ice sculptures to be seen such as two scarabs holding up the world, a horse being ridden by a monkey and a bear fighting a bear. It was all very, very cool (pardon the pun). However, due to my sandal shoes, it got extremely cold very quickly. Down to -35 degrees Celsius in fact so we had to keep ducking in and out of shops to stop frostbite setting in, especially in my feet. We looked around the whole place a few times over; the highlight of it for me was the ice castle you could walk upon but the recreation of a roman coliseums as well as the ice clock tower was also a nice touch. The ice festival is something I recommend everyone sees in there lifetime but do wear appropriate footwear.
When we arrived back we knocked back a few beers to counter the morning's stressful activities including one of the famous Harbin beers. I have to say I was severely disappointed with the beer. It had the unique combination of being incredibly weak and tasting of wee, neither quality do I particularly admire in a beer though. We also got chatting to one of our roommates; a tall, slim Californian the same age as us called David. We first got chatting because of his impeccable ability to speak Chinese and it turns out from the ages of ten to fourteen he had lived in Shanghai at an international school whilst has dad worked there for lurpak, strangely. He was an incredibly nice and interesting guy who also gave us a large amount of useful advice for what to do and where to go in Shanghai. I wish him all the best in his future and his travels.
We all slept in rather late the next day, possibly due to the Harbin beer tasting, and made the decision to go see Harbins tigers. We had heard a lot about Harbins tigers reserve and had been shown videos of people releasing chickens and the likes into the enclosure to watch them quickly get snatched up so the bloodthirsty lot we are we couldn't wait to arrive. We took the public bus system and after many mistakes drove up to an entrance gate surrounded by tigers after three stops since the last bus. Our instructions said five. So we stayed on the bus going about two miles beyond what, amazingly turned out to be the entrance. Dan was insistent there may be a secret entrance. There was not. After another bus journey back we finally got in to see the tigers. They shove you into a mini bus with cages over the windows and zoom you round through each enclosure. There were many, many tigers to see and some lions as well. I couldn't help feel sorry for them; although there enclosure were fairly sizable they still did not look happy. There was also a white tiger or two which I was pleased about, there gorgeous animals. Finally we arrived at the 'chicken zone' but it seemed that, due to all the bus problems, all the tigers had been fed and there were no chickens left. Our bloodlust quickly subsided and we continued our waya round looking at the animals. Near the end they had some more exotic creatures in sadly small cages; a cheetah, a leopard, a black panther and even a Liger, something I though I would never get to see. Although I did really enjoy the tiger park it was a little bit depressing to see so many tigers, they were into there hundreds, caged up like that.
A few people hoped into strangers cars and payed them to drive back to town but the trooper I am me and a couple of others took the laborious bus routes back. Once we finally arrived at the hostel we decided a night out of the hostel was needed, considering every night we were told to shut up at eleven, so we headed to a Russian bar named Blues. They had a fifteen yuan foreigner's fridge which was nice as you cannot complain about a cheap night. The clubs entertainment was interesting to say the least and the rest of the nights events are best left untold in a Project blog.
The next day was certainly an interesting one. It was decided we should visit the 731 experimentation camp. For those of weak stomach, skip this paragraph. This is essentially a camp set up by the Japanese during world war two to test the limits of the human body and pain threshold. Lots of scientific discoveries such as how cold the body must get for frostbite to set in, how much air a person needs and further horrifying discoveries are still used in medical science today. It truly is a horrifying place and once we were in we were guided around by signs and each room gave us more information on the camp. I won't go into great detail but you can see why there is a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment on two fronts; what they did in that camp was disgusting and also the way the Chinese have chosen to present the information. Most of the museum is propaganda through and through the 'fascist disgusting Japanese' opened most of the information boards. Not only that but here's a horrible example; the scientists did tests to see what effect frostbite had on human flesh. A few pictures were shown and snippets of information. Fair enough, But then was a dramatized video of what would have happened including baby murder, crying and a woman's flesh being torn from her arms as the scientist looked on laughing. It was ridiculous and false, no wonder there's anti Japanese ideas in China, It made me dis-trust the information, something a museum should never do. I also learnt a lot about America that day. Despite condemning the camp when it was taken down by America they exchanged the scientist's lives for the information in the camp and used it to create Agent Orange, napalm and more Vietnam War weapons. I honestly don't know what disgusted me more; the way the Chinese presented the information, what the Japanese did in the camps or that the Americans thirty years later decided it was ok to use that information to make worse chemical weaponry. It really goes to show every country is as bad as the next in history, despite what political relations want you to think.
That night we managed to get our whole group together and pooled money together to eat in a pancake restaurant. It was kind of like duck pancake but with different fillings and a much thicker pancake. We ordered a variety of different dishes such as beef strips and some actual duck, although that was ridiculously expensive, before heading back to the hostel. We met two really interesting guys that night called Matt and Rudy. I thought at first they were both Scottish but it turns out Rudy is Scottish and Matt is Danish but his English was impeccably good and he was able to imitate the accents of people he is with hence the Scots accent. He also spoke seven languages including Chinese. They had just made a return journey from Pyongyang (capital of North Korea) and told us all about there experiences within the country, showed us what they had purchased whilst there including a CD with such great hits as 'We will work hard to harvest the crop' and 'Oh our great leader'. They had some really bizarre stories but were intriguing people. Hostels seem to be the best way to travel as you do meet so many interesting people, make lots of new friends and even some drinking buddies along the way. Hostels are the place to be.
The next day almost everyone departed from Harbin via plane and train to head to our next destination: Shanghai. However our flight was the next day, as was Ed and Nicks, so we decide to try and make the best of it. We walked out onto the frozen lake and managed to walk across the whole thing to the other side which stretched about 1/2 mile. It was an extremely unique experience although I was rather nervous about being on the ice. There was of course no need to be nervous as it was at least three feet deep beneath us but when you look down and see the bubbles beneath the ice your breath catches a little. After that we went to see St Sophia's Russian Orthodox Church which, having been to Russia and seen the Russian churches was rather unimpressive and small compared to the pictures of it. We decided to grab a coffee in a lovely coffee shop on the same courtyard and watched as the sunset and the church lit up which was a spectacular sight. After that we relaxed again in the hostel and did meet another bloke called Matt from Ipswich who was very into his metal. It was nice to talk about it all again. With that we headed to bed, ready for the next day when, thanks to the wonder of flying, we would be in Shanghai!
There you have it readers, another destination down with four more to go! Although it's been a tiring experience writing blog after blog it's also been rather fun as it's given me time to reflect on my experiences on spring festival. With regards to Harbin it was just extremely nice to be in a European feeling city again. Although the Chinese presence was obvious it felt completely different to anything else we have done in China though that's probably because it was.
Well that's all for this time folks but do join me again when I will be documenting my experiences of shanghai and as I was there for ten days it's going to be a long one!
Until next time fair reader,
Excelsior!
- comments
Auntie Ann I have read this blog numerous times Alex as I find it fascinating. The pictures are absolutely surreal. Would not fancy the walk across the frozen lake though! Keep them coming as they really make my days.