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Phase II

Vladivostok-Harbin Blogs

Main, Blogs, Vladivostok to Harbin and Harbin Photos

Ice Festival - Day Photos, Ice Festival - Night Photos

Vladivostok-Harbin, Harbin

Vladivostok - Harbin

Internet access was extremely expensive in Harbin, and access here has difficulties. We cannot preview our posts, as DNS redirects don't appear to work, maybe by design of the Great Fire-Wall of China.

We caught the train at 2:00 am Vladivostok time. Only our car on the train was going to Harbin, and it didn't get hooked up until 1:50. After an hour, the train stopped and left our car at the side. We stayed there for 8 hours, no heat or lights. Fortunately, we had quite a few vodkas and blankets (we had the 4-berth cabin to ourselves) and managed to sleep. Fortunately, we woke up again in the morning, when we got rolling. Later on, we discovered another car also going to Harbin, so they must have hooked it up then.

We stopped at the Russian border to emigrate. I took 6.5 pages of notes just of the emigration process, which took 4 hours. This is long before even approaching Chinese immigration. Will and I were dozing on our bunks. Will notices a woman outside shouting at him in Russian. As Russian women have been shouting at us ever since entering Russia, this is nothing new, and Will nods and smiles at her, and forgets her. Then the provodnitska comes in our cabin shouting at us, we have to get off the train, bring our bags, we understand the word "customs". It turns out everyone had left the train except us.

We rush pack and run out of the train. We have no idea where to go; there are no English or graphical signs anywhere. We rush around, thinking we are late and may not return in time to catch our train. We keep running in wrong directions until someone (some uniformed, some not) yells at us and points in some other vague direction. Finally we enter a building through a door on the opposite side from the train, and we see crystal clear customs type signs. That would be too simple, that was also the wrong place to go. We were ushered upstairs into a large waiting room with chairs like those in an airport departure lounge. We recognised some of the other people from our car. All that rushing and then we waited there for 2 hours. We wait there and try the currency exchange desk which of course was closed in spite of the published opening hours.

Then we all go back downstairs into the customs area. We line up, eventually go through customs where they check our passport and do a quick check in our bags. Then another line up where they do a thorough check of our passports against a computer database. Throughout this whole experience it appeared that we were the first Canadians they had ever seen in their entire lives. Every time they opened our passports and saw all the other previous stamps, they would call over half a dozen other officials to discuss it and, I think, just to show each other a Canadian passport. Then we hang out in the middle of this hallway area for about half an hour.

Then another door opens up and we line up and go through another passport check. This is where it got very special for me. They didn't like the fact that my passport had gotten wet and that some of the old country stamps were blurred. The main information and all the new visas were crystal clear, but that didn't matter. The only other place that had complained about this to date was that Polish immigration guy that shouted at me on the train to Moscow. So I had to stand to one side and half an hour later, a senior guy let me through. I rushed again, thinking about catching the train, but it turns out everyone was standing around waiting again in another hall.

We could either wait there or wait out on the train platform, and we did a little of each, totalling another hour or so. Then someone spotted our train cars and we all rushed out, but a Russian guard prevented us from boarding. We had to wait until customs had searched the train, which they hadn't done while we had been waiting inside for 3.5 hours already. Finally we were allowed on and we rolled away. We had exited Russia.

The train went through no-man's land, presumably, for about an hour, and stopped there for no apparent reason for another hour. Finally we stopped at a station and Chinese immigration officials came on the train. This would have only taken half an hour, but again they didn't like my passport.

I was escorted off the train. An official and I walked the entire length of the train (our 2 Harbin cars being tacked on at the back). It was now dark and very cold. We walked over a pedestrian overpass and into a large building that appeared to be an immigration hall. There were two booths manned, but other than that the place was completely empty and all the lights were turned off. I was handed off to a more senior official, we walked down some more dark corridors and up more steps. Another official hand-off, more corridors, and finally into what appeared to be a lunch room. This was lit up, warm, and had about 30 immigration staff lounging in there. They got the most senior official in there to look at my passport. He shoved some other younger guy in front of me who managed to ask me in English when had my passport gotten wet. I calculated, and told him at a train station in Poland on this very trip. Huge amounts of Chinese discussions and debates, every person in there had to see the Canadian passport. This took some time. Meanwhile some of the younger female officials approached me and tried out some conversation. My "Wo shi Jianadaren" line (I am Canadian) was a huge hit. Every official and everyone in that room were quite friendly to me throughout this whole incident; it's just that no one wanted to take the initiative and make the decision to allow my passport through. Finally Big Shot let it go, and took me back downstairs to those two booths for stamping. He handed it to them and left. Then booth-guy didn't seem to know what to do and had yet another discussion with the guy in the other booth. He painstakingly entered in all the passport information into his computer and finally stamped it and said I could go. I didn't quite know my way back through the dark passageways, but I managed it. I ran like crazy. This had taken almost an hour and I was sure my train had left. It hadn't. I ran the entire length and jumped on board. The train didn't leave the station for another 3 hours!

Once we got rolling through China, things became normal and there were no more 4, 6, and 8 hour stops. We arrived at the station and our hotel was right across the street, as promised.

Eric - from Beijing

Harbin

The Kun Lun hotel is in a good location and the rooms are OK, but there is zero English among the hotel staff, and separate from any language barriers, they are quite useless anyway.

The first day in Harbin we took a taxi out to the Siberian Tiger Park where they have at least 40 or 50 tigers, and we think we saw maybe 3 Siberian Tigers. Tree huggers would hate this place. The tigers are not being prepared for independence in the wild and they are totally dependant upon man. The sole purpose of the park appears to be tourist dollars. They loaded us on mini-buses and took us through the grounds. The tigers have obviously been fed from these buses and were coming right up to the back windows that could open, where we were sitting. They bumped right up against the buses. At one point a tiger followed us out of his area. The mini-bus driver took us around in circles as we corralled the tiger back into his area. Later on we were walking in this protected walkway through some other tigers. Will joked how they should provide raw meet for the tourists to feed to the tigers. Sure enough, around the next corner was a lady selling live chickens from a basket. Will couldn't resist and bought one. They showed him what to do: hold the live chicken by the wings through this gap and get ready to jump back. The tiger made a huge leap for it, but we were a little too high. He came close enough to give us a hell of a scare, though! Then Will dropped the bird and it was snapped up before it hit the ground.

Later that day we went out to the Ice Festival. The Lonely Planet and some of the hotel staff thought this was held in a park near the centre of the city, in the Daolin District, but it must have moved to a new venue. It is now on the other side of the bridge on the way to the tiger park. The grand opening of the festival was on January 5th, and this was only the 2nd, so they were still doing some finishing up, but mostly all the sculptures were complete. This is an absolutely amazing world-class event. There are life-size sculptures of famous buildings around the world and you can climb over most of them. There is a man made mountain with an ice castle and slides coming down. There are enough exhibits that it takes about 90 minutes to properly see every one, over 2 hours to take enough photographs as well.

The next day we walked through the old Doalin area downtown, saw some Russian architecture and the Russian Sofia church, and bought some train supplies. We also came across the Holiday Inn, where we should have stayed, and stopped there for a few drinks. That evening we went back to the Ice Festival. All the sculptures have coloured lighting built into them and the entire park is awash with colour. We did the whole tour again. It was just spectacular. It was worth the cost of the entire trip just to see this. It must be amazing on opening night when they have a ceremony complete with fireworks. They are also many activities for kids: skating, skiing, riding ice-skate-sled things, spinning Chinese tops on ice, and small to large ice slides. You can rent mini ice yachts, snowmobiles, or dune-buggies. You can have a ride on a donkey, horse, or reindeer; or in a horse-drawn sleigh. There is also a climbing wall for adults, 20 feet tall with knotted ropes, with a fall onto solid ice if you fail. Of course there are absolutely no safety measures at any of these activities, as well as at the multi-storey sheer ice steps. It's kind of refreshing after lawsuit-conscious North America and UK.

After the festival we went back to the Holiday Inn for supper. After that we went to their lobby and listened to the Philipino band while having a few drinks.

The next morning we walked over to the train station for our train to Beijing. Our train was not listed on the outside board, so we guessed and followed other people into this large departure lounge building. It was an absolute madhouse and we had to get into obnoxious shoving mode to get anywhere. There were hordes of millions in this station. We eventually found our train and got on. The train was different from the Russian trains: 6 per cabin (stacked 3 high), less privacy, but spotlessly clean and frequent food vendors going up and down the aisles. This was a 12 hour day trip to Beijing. The trip was uneventful and the landscape outside was farmland similar to scenes of Southern Ontario in the winter.

The Beijing station was also a solid mass of humanity, but it was straightforward to shove through, exit, and grab a cab.

Eric - from Beijing