Continuing on from Part 1, this post covers the trip to the Harbin Ice and Snow world. This is the place where the main bulk of the ice sculptures and activities were to be found. We even got to do some skiing, which I hadn’t done in about 10 years! There were some great buildings and sculptures made from ice. Let’s dive right in…


The modest entrance.

One of the ice statues outside the gate.

A HDR shot of the main ice building. Ruined a bit by people moving. Pfft; how dare they?!

It’s ME!



The sun was starting to set. And this was taken at 3:30pm!! Talk about early.

I’m gonna run out of impressive things to say about ice very, very quickly.

Julian feeling the cold.

Another building.

  
The ice slides were quite fun!

It was fun. Me and Julian had a few races. If you go down normally, it’s Ok. But, if you lift everything off the floor so just your ass is touching, you slide down *fast* – being a speed freak, this of course became an obsession.

Looks very Disney.

We also went skiing. So, all the signage for the place was in Chinese. This whole festival was very not-foreigner-friendly. My pidgin-Chinese got me so far. At first we thought we got majorly ripped off by 200RMB (£20) for 20mins but – then we realised the 200RMB was a deposit which we got back. Went from being a very not-happy-camper to “Oh, well, for free – that was great!) I also learnt I suck at skiing, and snow tastes delicious.

  
By the time we finished skiing, it was pitch black.

A panorama of the place. Click to make bigger. 😉

It’s me!

It’s Julian!

Huge snow sculptures too.

Great detail.

  
Here you can see a rabbit being chisel’d out.



It’s not China without dragons, right?

Coffee hut.

Frozen lake…

…plus one of these…

…Huzzah! This activity was COLD. Also a little boring… until I realised you could drift them. If ever you find yourself on one of these, here’s what ya do:
Get up a bit of speed, not too much, about 10mph is enough, then gently turn into a corner. As the bike starts to turn, suddenly kick the **** out of the pedals. The rear wheel will spin so fast that it looses grip. At this point, counter-steer and simply keep peddling like a mad-man to maintain the drift. I think I invented a sport. One Chinese guy looked intreagued as he saw me doing it, so I showed him how and he seemed to love it to. I dub this sport; super-mega-ice-bike-drifting!

Another frozen lake, another free activity. This time…errr, I don’t even know what to call this. It’s like a wheel chair, without the wheels. So. Just a chair I guess. Oh, and you get a pair of not-so-sharp sticks that you’re supposed to propel yourself with. This was the most tiring method of transport ever. I’m gonna do what all good racers do, and blame my equipment. Seriously. It was as if I was on an office chair on a 40/60 wool-twist carpet. Also, it was FREEEEEEZING COLD!

Even my thermometer was finally starting to acknowledge the cold!

At this point, my camera was really starting to suffer. The LCD screen was really slow to update, kind of fading between images. The Image Stabilisation in my lens was making strange noises, and breathing when taking a photo instantly deposited icicles on the camera. My camera was also behaving weirdly, occasionally totally over or under exposing an image. Considering it’s price tag, it was scary. Canon claim the operating temperature of the magnesium-bodied 5D Mark II is 0~40’c. It was well, well out of it’s comfort zone…and warranty zone.

  
Another ice slide. YaY. I bruised my arse on this one. The pit at the bottom wasn’t as soft. 🙁

Then, a rest from the cold! We went inside a giant theatre thing to watch a dance show. It was no pictures allowed. I couldn’t really take any anyway; as my camera was busy de-frosting / not steaming up in my bag.

There was also a magician dude. Everyone loves magicians.

It was quite a good show. A Russian dance troupe. Quite a big theatre too, with very comfy seats and a great sound system, very good considering it’s a temporary set-up.

As it was the opening-night of the whole festival, we came out to fireworks. Time for my camera to brave the cold again.

Now, the Chinese LOVE their fireworks; and this was a show like no other. They know how to put on a firework show (you’ve all seen the 2008 opening ceremony.)

There was some talking on a stage… all in Chinese, no translation.

They declared the festival open…then; MOAR fireworks. They didn’t let up for about 30mins. I took plenty of pics of them, I’ll try not to post too many:

It reminded me of the opening thing you see before a Disney movie. The castle with the fireworks over it.

They went on and on.

Then we went in search of over-priced (by Chinese standards) food. We found a Japanese place and had some…damn, I can’t remember what we had. Argh. I guess this is what happens when you try write a blog 4months after something happened. Ooops.

Horse and carriages to take you around if you were feeling lazy.

After feeling like we’d taken in everything there was to take in, we headed for the exit. It had been a long day with the tiger park in the morning and then this. The feeling of a long day wasn’t helped by the early sunset either. Tune in soon (maybe) for part 3.

As always, more photos on Flickr.

Part One.

Part Two.

Part Three. Coming soon!

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