Mulzey on Ice
Trip Start
Dec 2007
1
25
41
Trip End
Aug 2008
Beijing,
China
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
But to grab the most out of the winter cold, we all bundle up and head to an Ice Festival. In the north of China, in Harbin, each year there is a city-wide Ice Festival, that features everything including Ice Hotels. Places where you can stay overnight, for Ritz Carlton prices, in a hotel completely made out of ice. There are of course Ice Sculptures, Ice amusement park rides...everything made in the town is made of, or resembles ice. Harbin is a good 5 hour airplane ride from Beijing, so a small community, mostly know for beautiful gorge and dam has decided to increase their petty incomes by having their own mini-Harbin festival. This gorge is at least 2 hours north of Beijing, but it is a beautiful ride, and much of the Badaling Expressway passes along side the Great Wall.
The Great Wall? Um, it's kinda big, like a thousand miles long. It was built thousands of years ago to keep the foreigners out. If failed eventually, when the Huns realized you could just go around. I'm looking forward to the tourist traps that will be set up in Brownsville Texas, a thousand years from now, when the US-Mexico Wall Immigrant wall is a great attraction. A very nicely dressed docent will be leading a group of tourists through the ruins while giving a very informative lecture, "Yes, folks in the first part of the 21st Century, over a thousand years ago, the United States decided to build a wall to keep out foreigners from the south. It failed immediately, just all 'Wall' ideas have...let's see, I seem to remember a wall in Berlin was around for awhile at that time as well. You see what we now know, that walls don't keep people or things out, and eventually they trap those who built them inside... This is a good chance to have a photo taken on top of the wall with a cardboard likeness of the current US President Mr. Rodriguez."
Sorry for the rant...I promised to keep my rants out of these, didn't I....no more...
So, the Ice Festival...yes. Andrea calls and invites me along with a group of people going to the fest. She tells me, in very much the Mom mode, being a 2-time mother, she says to me, "Now be sure to dress warm. It is going to be cold." Yes, Mom... We drive for a couple hours north, well past where the signs are in both Chinese Characters and Pinyin (which is Chinese words only using Western Letters...like "Beijing" instead of *&(*&()) We are trying to decipher our journey's path as we drive, and by we, I mean Andrea is driving, reading the map, decoding the Chinese symbols, making all the correct turns, all the while having interesting things to say to keep the kids from going crazy during our 2 hour drive...Amazing. I sit glaring out the window as we slowly start leaving the city, and actually get out into the China I had envisioned I would see before arriving here. The small villages...the horse carriages carrying entire families and huge piles of belongings on dirt roads...while I race along at 60 miles an hour on a super highway. We even pass a failed amusement park that was built to resemble Disneyland. There is a Cinderella's castle, large forbidding walls, a parking lot....and nothing else; they ran out of money. It is eerie, and looks like something like we had hoped to discover on Mars when we sent spacecraft to photograph the surface. The remnants of a once glorious civilization that suddenly disappeared, like Atlantis or perhaps, the Soviet Union.
As we get closer to the festival, the civilized street signs start to disappear. We have to exit the Badaling Expressway as we enter the town of Yanqing and from there is all hunt and peck. There were a couple signs, but they could say anything. They could be an advertising banner for a new restaurant or it could have said "Danger Do Not Enter...Certain Death Ahead!" and we would have never known the difference. Somehow we find our way to the correct street, and as we drive up to the festival, we are met by crazy peasant types who are stopping the traffic by waving red clothes and by throwing their bodies in front of the moving cars. We stop, and are informed that we need to pay 50 yuan...for something. What the money is for is unknown, and Andrea does her best to determine what the charge buys us. Since we are a caravan of vehicles, it is easy to fleece us all. Andrea gets out and negotiates for the group and it is decided the 50 yuan is for parking...that we should follow this person who will take us to where we should park. A thin scary looking guy hops on a motorcycle and waves for us to follow him, and we do.
Our traveling companions drive off behind him and we follow them in Andrea's small car. The motorcycle takes off at about 50 miles an hour over a dirt and rock road. Our friends who are driving a giant SUV thing, follow right behind, meanwhile the little ancient mini-subcompact is having a tough time keeping up. We bounce and I fear we might be leaving much of the car behind as we roll along. We drive along an increasing dangerous (I can't really call it a...) road until the motorcycle pulls off to the side and points further down a gully. We carry on alone down the thin dirt road until we see the gorge, and another man bundled up in huge Mao-era Military Winter Coat several inches thick. He knocks on our window and demands 25 yuan. "What is this for?" Parking of course. You see, the previous 50 yuan was for "showing us where to park" not the actual the parking fee. Andrea says without emotion, "Welcome to China!"
After paying the additional 25 yuan, we are jockeyed into a parking space which was designed to hold a couple small bicycles...we move up and back to get our car as close to others as possible, so close that no one could possibly get out of any of the cars. Once out of the cars, we are assailed by old men on very furry horses who want to take the kids to the main entrance of the festival by horseback, but the whole concept, rather than being a fun ride, scares the kids to death. The more they pester us, the worse it is...it is really creepy. Like a scene from an early David Lynch film...a slightly askew camera angle of an old toothless weathered face screaming in your face as a huge slightly angry horse kicks against the heavy-handed riding techniques and the cold.
Did I happen to mention it is cold? I talking sub artic temps...and I'm not kidding. It has to be, at least minus 20 Fahrenheit as we walk towards the entrance across a tiny wooden bridge over the gorge itself. Did I happen to mention that Andrea told me to dress for the cold? Did I happen to mention my mocking her? Did I happen to mention, I didn't dress appropriately and now I freezing my butt off? Did I happen to mention? The place is truly beautiful, but damn it...I'm FREEZING. We walk around and look at some sculptures that look like they are carved out of marble, but the white substance is snow and not stone. We pay our entrance fee (another 80 yuan...they really get ya...) and we all go into an area just past a turn in the gorge. It is a huge area full of ice buildings and sculptures. It is truly amazing. I started snapping pictures right and left, and then the batteries started to fail due to the cold, although I did get some good shots before the power died.
There were entire buildings with passageways and huge sets of steps all made completely from ice. Hello, can I get in touch with my ambulance chasing lawyer? Let's see, um, 45 feet of ice steps leading to hundreds of yards of untreated ice sheets, and then thin ice railings between me and literally a 400 feet fall on to jagged rocks below...and I should be walking on this with my slick rubber Timerland boots? Okay... It was unbelievable in so many ways. The ice sculptures and buildings of course, but also there is a huge dam that is probably 60 feet tall at the end of the gorge. Drops of water have dripped over the edge of the dam all winter and then have frozen as the hit the ice below...and now there is a huge ice mass that is made up of hundreds of thousands of shafts of thin frozen drops...Stunning. There were toboggan rides that ran the length of a ice ramp that circled the entire festival, and a huge dragon escalator the moved up the mountain in a serpentine manner. It was a bit cold for the toboggans and the ride up the mountain, but they have a great inner tube slide down the mountain that was actually a sheet of ice. I watched the kids race down the hill a few times as the frostbite crystals in my fingers and toes settled in for their long winter's nap in my extremities.
We waited until it got dark to leave so we could see the lime green and pale pink neon lights built within the ice sculptures illuminate in the night...quite spectacular. It was recommended that you should visit at night to see everything lit up. We came, we saw, we froze...and then we headed out....at least we tried. You see, we were parked up front of the parking lot and in order cram as many cars into the tiny illegal scam lot, our peasant family didn't really leave any exit paths. The cars were parked so closely it was nearly impossible to maneuver any vehicle out of the tight spaces and get faced in the proper direction to leave, and the second issue was the thin gully road we came in on is barely the space of one car, and the peasant family is still directly cars in, with no way for anyone to get out. We get in the car, start it up to get warm and wait for someone to figure out how were supposed to get the heck out of there. As you might imagine, we are there for a while.
Finally, we get the car out of the parking space in a massive Rubick's Cube move, with one car pulling forward about 16 inches and then the car next to it moving back 16 inches and the third car pulling into the gap to turn around...etc. Now that we are facing the right way, we start to drive out, but cars are coming in and blocking the road. One of the peasants stops traffic for a moment and directs us to drive forward. We go about 50 yards and we are now up to where they stopped traffic, but we can't pass and the on coming cars can't get around us. We can't move back because all the outgoing traffic is backed up behind us, and the oncoming traffic has the same dilemma. One of Chinese guys in a car in front us starts moving forward as if it he playing a game of chicken and we will get our of his way eventually...the only problem with his plan is if we move more than 6 inches to our right we go off a 50 foot cliff. Finally, we are directed to back up and go up a rain gully hill to the left, which we do. We think this to allow the oncoming traffic to pass, they will stop the traffic further upstream and then we will back down and drive out...um, no. Now that the way is clear again, the oncoming traffic refuses to stop and continues flowing in, and since only about 5 spots opened up with us leaving and something like 50 cars driving in, they are having a had time finding spots for everyone to park.
We sit, trying back down, when a car goes racing by us up the gully road...and then another...and then another. Soon there is knock on our window and one of the family is pointing up the hill, for us to follow the other cars. We drive up and down impossibly tight and scary hills until we pull up behind the three cars that passed us. The drivers are all out of the cars, you see they have reached a dead end and another cliff. We sit, and without speaking we are all thinking...I can't imagine trying to back down what we just drove through. Soon, one of the cars in front of us moves and then another...they have found a way out...and we immediately follow...
Now not knowing where the gully exit has put us, we drive aimlessly until we can see the lights of a building we passed coming in on opposite side of the ravine. Eventually we find our way back to the Badaling Expressway, and drive home amongst the biggest night of fireworks of the Spring Festival. I try to see all the fireworks I can, and secretly think maybe a couple sparklers in my boots might help me regain some feeling in my toes.
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