Category Archives for Travel Lifestyle
A Swimming Date in China
The lesser spotted tween, and its larger relative, the greater spotted teen, are elusive creatures in urban China. You might glimpse one between 6 and 7am, neat in their tracksuits on their way to school, then again between 5.30 and 7pm, returning to their homes. On Friday nights, you might catch one in a restaurant [...]
Skiing China 6: Happy Days in Beidahu
There’s not a lot to Beidahu: two hotels, some half-built condos, and a ski centre, an hour and a half’s drive from the centre of Jilin city. But we don’t need a lot. And, thanks to this wonderful offer, we have a room in a Chinese five-star hotel. With bath robes, slippers, a tub, a [...]
Harbin Xi railway station sits way out in the west of town. It’s an enormous red brick affair, a grandiose arch that towers over windswept, snowclad plazas, its waiting room a blaze of dominant glass. The Chinese government completed it last December as a stop on a brand new line that runs from here to [...]
Skiing China 5: Our Own Private Mountain
And, as if by magic, with a little lot of help from Ski School videos, everything comes together. It’s snowing! It’s snowing, for this arid region, a lot. Lovely, soft fat flakes of ripe March snow, not the diamond-hard glitter of the January snows, spreading their cottonwool softness over the runs, smoothing the edges of [...]
Skiing China 4: Sun Mountain Yabuli
We awake to a blanket of snow, carpeting the shrubby elms and larches and softening the contours of the disappointing hills, chow down on our northern Chinese breakfast of steamed buns, soup and pickled vegetables, and summon the driver for SanGuo. It is, as I’d figured out, Sun Mountain. And it’s better! Much better! This [...]
Skiing China 3: Only in China…
You may have noticed, gentle reader, that I have a tendency to embark on insanely difficult projects without adequate research, and then whine about it. Or visit out-of-the-way places, enthuse about them for a bit, then start to find them difficult and complain that they’re not, ya know, London or Bangkok. What can I say? [...]
The Chinese are the most inventive nation on earth when it comes to winter fun, but skiing in China is a very new thing. And, as with other Western imports, the Chinese treat it in their own inimitable style. Take the ski train. This leaves Harbin every morning during the season, trundles three hours north [...]
In Search of the Harbin Ice Sculptures
We haven’t, frankly, had the best start to 2013. Or Harbin, for that matter. Among other observations on life in minus 30, I can confirm that this is not a good climate in which to be strapped for cash – however toasty your flat. Because you want to be able to take a taxi if [...]
10 Random Observations on Life in -30
1: Your Body Acclimatises When we first arrived in Harbin, the cold seemed so biting that I couldn’t believe locals would go out without gloves or hats. But, just as in the Middle Eastern summer 30°C (86°F) comes to feel cool, in the Manchurian winter -10°C (14°F) comes to feel warm, and -5°C (23°F) so [...]
Finding Home in Harbin?
It’s all too predictable that, after a 5000k trip that’s taken us south from Beijing, around -10°C (14°F), to Hong Kong and Shenzhen, in the balmy 20s (70s), then back north to -30° (-22°) Harbin, just a stone’s throw on the global scale from Siberia, I come down with a cold. Now, I’m sure there [...]
