Visiting Harbin: A Light in the Ice

“It’s astonishing to me that there’s always at least one human who will look at a freezing, inhospitable corner of desolation and think, ‘Welp, I could probably set up shop here.'” – Old Sean

Flung North

After two weeks back in Beijing, it’s time for another trip.

My next journey was completely divorced from any sort of work-related trip. Instead, I’d be taking a vacation with my roommate Kat while visiting Harbin, China. Specifically, we were visiting Harbin to see the amazing International Ice and Snow Festival.

I was very excited for this trip. I have an odd relationship with festivals around the world. In my mind, I believe I like them. They’re interesting, novel and engaging experiences.

In reality, I don’t actually like crowds. I often get frustrated with expensive lodging and huge hoards of people.

So overall, it was good that Kat was willing to take the reigns on planning our mini-vacation. I would have been grumpy at the idea of humans otherwise.

Visiting Harbin Chills

Kat and I began by visiting Harbin separately, each taking flights when our work-week ended. I packed my usual warm-weather gear for the trip: My Beijing winter jacket, my merino wool sweater, a set of thermal underpants and a few more layers of clothes. For the past few months, I had been skirting around Beijing in the winter with nothing but a sweater, coat, chinos and boots, so I assumed I’d be fine.

I was wrong. Very cold and very wrong.

The cold was extraordinary. Within my first few hours in the city, I was shuddering and shivering my way towards my hotel room, stopping at public restrooms to put on more clothing. Sadly, layering up didn’t help. My body vented heat no matter what I did.

Dear frost gods of Niflheim, why? By the time Kat arrived, we had opted to stay at an indoor mall, desperately shopping for attire that would make our visit bearable. The chill forced me to buy a supremely cozy fur hat, four pairs of socks, two extra layers of undershirts, a thermal face-mask and twenty hand warmers. Amazingly, by all that is frosty, it wasn’t enough. 

Visiting Harbin in the winter is so cold that winter-specific gear is necessary.  No amount of layering was able to help me.  

I found out later that apparently we had arrived on the coldest week of the decade.

Frost Festivities

After we were reasonably fortified against the weather, Kat and I got our tickets for Harbin’s Snow and Ice Festival. 

This massive event, held in several separate locations along Songhua River, boasts towers of enormous ice buildings alongside some of the largest snow carvings in the world.  The harsh climate which Kat and I struggled with preserved the massive ice-structures during the festival season.

The snow festival is nearly beyond description.  It’s brilliant and wondrous. I was so amazed, I’ll likely never be impressed by anything made of ice for the rest of my life.

For first-time visitors, the venue can be a bit confusing.

For example, the Snow and Ice Festival isn’t located in one spot. There are expos spread over three areas, all fairly close to the river.

The first one is the International Ice Sculpture at Ice and Snow World. This is where visitors can see huge blocks of ice with colored LED lights inside forming entire frozen buildings.

The second is the Sun Island’s Harbin International Snow Sculpture Art Expo.  Instead of ice, the building-high structures here are compressed snow sculptures. This is where most of the snow sculpting contests take place.

The final official venue is Zhaolin Park’s Ice Lantern Show, which is an ice-world half-composed of frozen water and half-made of Chinese lanterns.

International Ice Sculptures

Kat and I started our visit at the International Ice Sculpture Venue.

The location is beyond impressive. The venue is an entire town of ice-constructed buildings. And these aren’t tiny, rounded igloos. Instead, these are chunks of ice, each larger than a grown man, stacked into towers and citadels.

The theme of the year was “Temples” so many of the buildings were ornate and modeled after famous landmarks. One structure was an to-scale copy of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. There were also rounded domes of mosques, cathedrals and walkable bridges and causeways.

Nothing looked real. All the ice had sunlight spearing through it, making even the most solid tower appear translucent and fairy-like. The festival is drastically different from day to night. In the sunlight, everything looks like compounded glass out of a fantasy novel. But at night, the structures begin to glow.

All buildings are build with colored strips of LED lights inside. These lights can illuminate and refract within an entire block, causing the transparent surface to become and opaque, living hue. In just the few hours in which Kat and I explored, the winter wonderland turned into a frostbite rave sensation.

Surviving the Chill

As mentioned before, Harbin this time of year was cold. Kat and I bought a lot of extra winter gear, but there were certain things we couldn’t replace. My boots, for example, were still just faithful all-terrain boots.

Despite having on three layers of merino wool socks, my toes would frequently go numb. I would stump around on oddly dead legs if I was outside for too long. Kat had frost form on her eyelashes if she didn’t blink frequently enough. Additionally, both of our masks had a habit of freezing to our cheekbones after too much condensation gathered.

We had to stop frequently and duck into the shops and restaurants around the venue. There, we would wrap our hands around mugs of hot choclate, take off our shoes and massage blood back into our feet.

This actually took up a fair chunk of time. We had to find a warm recovery spot every forty-five minutes or so.

I took relatively few photos during our visit. The weather was so cold that it threatened to damage our phones. Our batteries bled energy with startling speed. After taking a photo, it was necessary to turn off a phone and place it somewhere inside a jacket, touching skin.

Elsewhere on the Ice

To be clear, the Ice Festival goes well beyond just awe-inspiring ice buildings. There are a lot of extra activities around the festival.

There were domesticated artic foxes hanging around in an ice plaza, pure white fur floofed against the incumbent cold. I’ve always been fond of the foxes in the United States, but seeing a snow fox in a winter wonderland has a type of magic I doubt I’ll ever recapture anywhere else.

The venue also had a race track made of ice, set up for bicycles. Naturally, these weren’t normal bikes. Instead, the wheels were replaced with skates and the gears were hooked up to ice-gouging spikes. Riding the bikes was strange, since forward momentum relied on heavier weight causing traction to spike the ice.

I’m substantially plumper than my roommate, so riding was a bit easier for me.

The venue also has ice-sculpting competitions. In the main entrance, the plaza is decorated with elegantly carved ice masterpieces with colored LED lights shining upon them. There are classic ice-swans, translucent samurai warriors posing with swords, sailing ships surrounded by stylized-Chinese clouds and geometric mermaids.

My personal favorite sight was the ice-block flowers. Tucked away past a towering ice wall, these huge cylinders of ice held pristine frozen flowers suspended in the liquid, unwitting as long as the frost held.

Harbin the City

Kat and I didn’t spend all of our time in the festival. The late afternoon was the best time to visit to avoid crowds and the evening was excellent to see the buildings light up.

But during the daylight hours, we walked around Harbin itself. The city is stunning at night, but it has a lot of charm in the daylight as well.

Kat and I walked down an impressive Russian pedestrian street filled with traditional restaurants and cafés. The cobbled roads were packed with people and snow and ice blocks were carefully pushed into daunting piles along the walls. Apparently, people weren’t worried about these toppling, since they’re sprayed down with water, further encasing them in stabilizing ice.

This part of China is visibly Russian. The style of the architecture, the items in the tourist shops and even some of the script is Russian. Kat and I had an excellent lunch as Café Russia 1914, where we got restorative traditional borscht and other warm pastries.

Further in the city, we also saw the elegantly rendered St. Sophia Cathedral. This huge Russian-styled structure graces an entire plaza with all her holy pigeons.  This tourism area was also filled with various ice and snow sculptures on every street corner. I spotted carved polar bears and giant frozen water bottles. 

Sweet-Tooth Frost-Bite

One thing I was very interested in trying was Harbin’s unique ice cream popsicles. These are narrow white milk-based treats filled with a creamy and rich frozen texture. The shop selling the treats boasted an impressive line jutting out onto the street.

You know what tastes great after braving the cold winds and sub-thermal temperatures of a Northern front?

Not sure, but I can promise it’s not ice cream.  By the Boreas, the (admittedly tasty) treat gradually became more frozen as I ate it.

Departing Harbin

Since this was just a weekend trip, Kat and I didn’t have long in the winter wonderland. By the end of the festival, both of us were ready to return to Beijing.

Anyway, my advice when visiting Harbin is simple: Put on layers until you’re round. Make sure your shoes are caked in enough fur to make a Komondor jealous. And then collect hand-warmers like they’re life-saving candy.

My flight back to Beijing leaves in a moment. Next, my company is discussing sending me to Vietnam for a curriculum development program.

Until then,

Best regards and excellent trails,

Old Sean

Written January 24th, 2018

Planning on visiting Harbin for the International Ice and Snow Festival? Read the full guide here

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