Harbin - the cold, the freezing, freezing cold

Hmm. Where to begin. A lot has happened in the past four weeks. As in, a lot. I can't even remember half of it. So I guess I better begin where I left off. I'll make it quick because I want to rave about Corey Delaney and his ill-bred antics.

So, I went to Harbin and some nearby states in China's frigid, frozen north with family and extended non-essential others for a week.

Day 1
Basically, it was alright the day we got off the plane. Had a bit of a wander around town. A very dynamic picture of the first day:


Day 2
Not so alright. We got snap-frozen. The temperature dropped to about negative 15. Like, it was cold. It's kinda hard to describe without using cliches. I felt like I was freezing from the inside. I thought it was cold then. I didn't know what was coming the next day. Anyway, on Day 2, we went to, I think it was, the biggest snow ranch in Asia. It was big, but there was nothing there. So we opted to go on a cable car up to the top of the mountain and back down on toboggans. The cable car was downright dangerous. What they did was, the cable car's coming, then they push you on to it. So I got pushed on to it, then I saw these support poles that were leaning at very dangerous angles. Plus my car was broken. Here are some photos taken from there:

This one's of my broken car:



After that debacle, we went on the toboggans. Even our native tour guide, who foolishly followed us up, complained of how cold it was on the way down. My nose was about to fall off after it. If you've ever been to Gumbuya Park, it's like those toboggans, except for the inexplicable stopping and starting. But yeah. It was cold. Like riding a bike in negative degree weather. Here's a picture I took during one of the stops.


It was so cold, my dad got a head cold, which resulted in him dressing up, as he described it, "like Arafat."

Yes, I am a merciless papparazo. My thought/question for that day was: "Why does it seem like midnight at 4 P.M???"

Day 3
We went to a country town in the mountains. The bus ride was adventure enough, with a combination of shoddy suspension and poor road building playing havoc with my brain and the food I was trying to hold down in my stomach. My head hit the roof three times. No joke. Like, I bounced up and hit the roof. From a sitting down position. Stationary. Probably because I was sitting in the back. Then we got off the bus. I felt like there were shards of ice sticking out from my body. There was wind. Fierce, fierce, bone chilling, freezing, arctic-grade winds, combined with negative 20-something temperature. It was cold. Then we six of us had to sleep in a bed for five. Yes. One bed for six people. As shown below:

Best sleeping conditions ever. They tried to split the men (me and dad) off from our family to sleep with other men, which was as scary as it sounded. My dad flatly refused, while making the point that we were already helping them out by only taking a five person bed for the six of us.

I also took these pictures:



Let me tell you how hard it was to take it. It was snowing, freezing and the wind was howling. My glasses had steamed up, which, in normal weather, wouldn't have been that bad. But in this place, the lenses on my glasses frosted over. So basically, those photos above were taken when I was half-blind.

Well, anyway that was pretty fun. Except for the fact that I had wind blowing on my freaking ear for the whole night. And the fact that the log fire under the bed stopped burning in the middle of the night. And the lack of showering facilities and minimal toilet facilities. So really, it wasn't all that fun. But it was all for the sake of the views that we attained. I'd like to tell you it was all worth it, but it really wasn't. I mean, I weathered torrential snow and painful cold to bring you photos like this (these were taken the next morning when it wasn't so bad):

Random photos taken when we were pretty damn bored:


Plenty more at my Flickr. Also, there were many fireworks. I think it was because it was approaching New Years Day, and government officials had siphoned off enough money to leave some over. This photo was taken at the mountain:

while this was taken somewhere the day before:

Day 4
After taking some photos in the morning, we hopped back on the bus, but not on the back this time. Then we found out sitting in the middle was almost as bad as the back, except the ceiling was higher, so you couldn't hit your head. When we arrived at our destination, we found that it was at a frozen waterfall. It was actually pretty nice.

Then we went to this frozen lake, which was also pretty nice.

Me being fully tank and chopping a board of snow:


Then we went to a hotel with a communal cat. Then we had a full-on laughing session after my cousin said to the cat "Luckily for you, we're not you're typical Cantonese people, otherwise you'd already be supper." But in all seriousness, the cat wouldn't leave even when we wanted it to. It curled up and slept. Like so:


I mean, what if someone had a cat allergy?

Day 5
Alright, I wiped up some coffee with a towel on Night 4 (or the night of Day 4, to simplify things...or not). So the next day, the hotel tries to make us pay for it. Then my parents had a massive tiff with management. I mean, get over it. It's a coffee stain on an already ragged looking towel. I'm sure they would've preferred it if we left it to drip on to the carpet. So after we overcame that adversity, we trundled on to our next destination - Long White Mountain (direct translation). But first, a photo from the hotel that morning:

I also found a fake palm tree outside the hotel, which was really quite amusing. At least I thought so.


Fir trees I understand, but one should not dream of the impossible (palm trees in a frozen wasteland).

So we went to Long White Mountain, which was pretty much touted as the highlight of the trip. I was quite happy with it, and felt that we could've gone there for an extra day and skipped out on the five-person bed experience. We saw the Olympic snow statue thingo...

...and one with TB's posing in front (that's supposed to be a heart shape formed by the arms)...


...found out that even the bins look prettier there than the rest of the north-eastern bins...


...and met a neo-John Lennon wannabe on the way.


So we took a car up Long White Mountain to see the much-acclaimed frozen lake up there. And here is a picture I took while up there:


I risked my life (and my camera) taking that photo. The wind was huge. It was like a hurricane. And my glasses kept fogging up and frosting over. Did I mention is was cold? So I almost stepped on a rock and fell off the cliff. Just to bring y'all this photo. And another one:


This was another one that I took in the relative safety of the car back down:


As you can see, the shots aren't so great when I don't risk my life to take them. I say "relative safety" because we were lucky to be able to go up in a 4WD that day. See, when the path is snowed over, what they do is shove thirty people into an equivalent of a 4WD sized box with a shovel out the front and drive through the snow. We heard horror stories of people fainting of suffocation. Then I raised a point. Since they have snow shovelling machines, why couldn't they just shovel away the snow and let the 4WDs go through? It turns out they stole my brilliant innovation before I had even thought out it. So this year they actually did that. So we were lucky it was a non-snowing day, otherwise we wouldn't have gone up, because it cost a mint of money just to go up in one of those boxes with snow shovels. But it was a pretty good view on the peak of the mountain though.

A photo of me taking a free kick on a snowballish thing and generally being an idiot after we reached the foot of the mountain again:


Our next stop was the waterfall, which also happening to be on the mountain. So we trekked up a slope for about half an hour, beating everyone in our tour group in the process, and saw the promised waterfall. We walked past hot springs/rivers in the process:





I know, some of them aren't springs and stuff, but get over it.

Anyway, when we got there, we had trouble finding the actual waterfall. Truth be told, it was kinda hard to see. I had to use the zoom lens on my dad's camera to see it. Here we go with the photos. The first sight I got of the waterfall:


...and that's about as close as I got. In fact, I seem to have gotten further away from it:


When we went back down, we noticed a novel way that people were cooking eggs and corn, like so:


However, being China, I don't how real that was. Maybe they pre-cooked the eggs/corn and then kept them warm in the springs, instead of actually cooking them in the springs. Who knows. Not me. Anyway, we bought some corn and eggs because it was cold. If there's one thing I learned during my trip to the North-East, it's that anything tastes good when the constituency of your body is more icy-pole than human.

Day 6
Owing to the spectacular breaking down of our top-drawer 50-year-old antique tour bus overnight, we spent most of the morning waiting for it to be repaired. So we took photos in the hotel lobby of course. What better past-time.



There's a rainbow in that pic above. It's on the right.

So around lunch, our tour bus got fixed, so we hopped on and went to lunch. Outside the restaurant, we saw a "snowman":


I say that with sarcasm, but that's just the way I am. It's actually a pretty good snowman and you can see that a lot of effort has gone into it, indicated by the tin hat and red scarf and all. Like, you'll never see one like in the movies unless someone specially sculpts it with professional equipment (funny, sounds like something Hollywood would do). At any rate, it's better than any snowmen that we created.

Then we buckled in for a six-hour drive, stopping by to purchase some Chinese medicine. It was here that I took some very innocuous-looking photos, one of which is here:

However, I was informed by certain people that, had the people in the shop not been busy flogging their goods of dubious usefulness to our group, they would've charged me ten dollars per photo that I took of the plane. And there was also a sign there saying so, which of course, I couldn't read. Almost owned hard was I.

So at about seven that night, we got to Kunming, which was the next state. Anyhow, they still somehow managed to take us to the places that the promised to, in roughly 25% of the original planned time. So we didn't get any money back. So then we went out for supper of sorts. It was really, really cheap. Like, we fed our whole family for like 20 AUS dollars.

Day 7
This was the penultimate day. For this last day, we experienced the splendour and wealth of China by visiting a square that they had built for the people, all while the said people were starving and cold. Then we went and toured a picturesque river thing. Photos below.




We then visited this temple thing, which was next to the lake thing (man my vocab is huge). There, I took awesome photos of pegs:


Well, we flew back to GZ that night and, even though it was 15 degrees, it felt sweltering. Anyway, just a thought: The presence of snow usually indicates very cold temperatures. Should've thought about that before we went there. But it was fun. I'll leave y'all with this photo and see you on my next post.