One place that everyone told us we had to visit was Harbin, not for their beer but for the ice festival. Some friends said that they were going and suggested we join them that weekend. We left our booking somewhat late and so flew with Spring Airlines. The perfect choicee if you like less leg room than your average airline, a good 30minutes of an airsteward trying to sell ridiculous items over the communication system and vintage aircraft with multiple patches and signs of aging on the body.
On arrival in Harbin we didn't have a car booked so headed for the taxi rank which is sign posted, the only thing is there aren't any taxis in the advertised location. The taxis are somewhat hidden around a corner and are nearly all the more expensive black taxis. We knew it was only about a 40min ride so we weren't expecting to pay more than 100RMB. The meter and had been partially obscured during the journey by the driver's tea bottle and so we were shocked on arrival at our destination that it read 246RMB. Unfortunately none of our friends had warned us that many drivers in Harbin tamper with the meters. This scam happens regularly in Harbin and we were the unlucky ones. Apparently you should get the driver to agree to a flat fee of 150RMB. Not much help to us now.
We met up with some of our friends as we had all been on different flights and headed down to Stalin Park. The park is on the frozen river and becomes a playground for people of all ages in the winter. It also becomes a great place to make money which is somewhat ironic considering the name of the park. Large blocks of ice have been stacked and transformed to create castle like facades with grand arches and turrets. You can ride down to the river from an ice tower on a wooden sledge or travel up a travelator and race numerous other poeple down on a rubber inflatable. You could rent an ice bike or a series of seats joined together with metal poles in had to puch yourselves across the ice. Alternately you could pay for a ride in a buggy, on an inflatable banana, on a rubber ring being pulled by a vehicle, on a snow mobile, on a dog sled or a horse and carraige. It's amazing that you can safely walk, ride, slide and play on the river whilst being safe and seeing the sheer depth of the ice that you stand on.
I was completely sucked in by the chance to hold a snow fox at Stalin Park. We saw a man holding a snow fox and he had a second behind him asleep on a blanket. He was playing with the fox and it seemed quite happy. For 20RMB I got to cuddle a very soft, warm snow fox. It behaved like our Labradoodle and went to rest its head on my shoulder and sleep . I was lucky that I was able to hold the snow fox for so long as when we visited other tourist spots people were allowed one photo and the fox was taken away. Unfortunately all of the other people we saw with the foxes really did not seem to be treating that well at all and this made me very sad. In hindsight the snow fox I held was probably little different to the others and I majorly regret supporting animal tourism in this way.
A little later we walked to the St. Sofia Cathedral. It certainly holds the Russian architecture and many of the traditional features of a Russian orthodox church. Inside the building is full of photographs. Sadly the exhibition made little sense to us as the captions were in Mandarin characters. The Cathedral was the only real stand out piece of Russian architecture that we saw and I found that rather surprising.
Our final stop on the first day was the largest sculpture park. You need a driver and quite frankly you need that driver to act as a tour guide and get you in. You can visit during the day for about half the price it is at night, but we had been advised that night was really the best time to go. It would appear that every person in Harbin had been given the same piece of information. Our driver decided to give up trying to drive to the actual entrance, but parked and then guided us between the vehicles. Police were at the entrance refusing everyone entry. We were advised by the driver to make a line behind him and not let anyone split us up. We turned ourselves into one very stubborn conga line and held on as best we could. People all around were pushing and shoving, trying to break through the police line. The moment that the police were willing to let anyone through the crowd surged and we were genuinely scared that we were about to end up in a stampede situation. You’d think that passing the police we would now be in the park, but no. We had to wait for our driver to persuade someone to add a couple of people to our line to make us a group of 10 so that we could go through the group line. The final hurdle was being aggressively shoved through the turnstile by the person collecting the tickets.
In the park itself you can see an ice wall of China, castles, igloos, a train, slides, a grand piano, armchairs and more. There were a large number of people in the park, but nothing compared to the crush we had experienced outside. Probably the most dangerous area in the park was the stairs in the castles. As you climbed there were people pushing past you trying to reach the top before you while others tried to descend on the same side. Excellent health and safety. The igloos served as an ice bar where you could drink blueberry brandy or blueberry brandy or blueberry brandy. The temperature does drop in the evening and there are places inside the park that you can go in to get a hot drink and keep warm for a few moments. The scale of the ice sculptures is impressive, but the lights do make it a little gaudy.
For our second day we planned to head to the smallest park near our hotel and then onto Sun Island to see the sculptures prior to our return to the airport. If you check on line Zhaolin park is open 9am - 9pm. This is sadly not the case. It is open from 13:30 - possibly 15:00 and then 16:00 - 21:00. We quickly called our friend who spoke more Mandarin than us and got the driver to take us to Sun Island earlier. Sun Island has large blocks of ice that have been carved by hand into some form of statue or sculpture. It is vastly different to the all of the other parks. Some of the sculptures are part of a competition and the plaques describing the inspiration and some of the translations were really quite entertaining. The intricacy and sheer size of some of these sculptures were really impressive. In some respects I think that this park was more impressive due to the type of skills that were used in creating them.
We didn’t go to the tiger park as many other tourists do. For us witnessing animals being thrown to the tigers to be destroyed didn’t seem like something that we wanted to do. Tourists can buy something to have thrown in and that really just doesn’t appeal to us at all. There are few other attractions in Harbin so you only need a couple of days, but you really need a local driver to help you. If my Mandarin speaking friend hadn’t been with us we would have been completely and utterly stuck. It’s an expensive weekend from Suzhou, but it’s a once in a lifetime experience.
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