Spring Festival 2014

Xinniankuaile – Happy New Year. Celebrated here in China on the 31^st of January heralding the year of the Horse. The year of the horse apparently brings health and prosperity, is an excellent time to travel and also brings good luck!  So bring it on is what I say!!

Our last week of teaching in early January was pretty hit and miss with classes being cancelled at short notice as the Chinese teachers often want to take a class to drill the students on the material.  It is common in the lead up to exams to have anything up to 30 kids in my office,- a standard classroom, during a break as various teachers herd them into groups and you get a low humming noise reverberating around the room as they quietly recite their vocab words in attempts to memorise the lists. In a lot of circumstances there is not so much understanding as remembering.  Anyway we do not have to set or mark exams so we get to finish early.

Our plans for the break have been a work in progress as we are meeting up with three other teachers who also work for the same company and are in a city called Lixian in Hunan province.  It has 950,000 people and you struggle to find it on a map!

First of all a little bit about Spring Festival travel in China;

The Spring Festival brings about the single largest human migration on the planet. In excess of 700 million people are on the move inside China over the Festival period.  Quite simply it creates chaos on a national scale.  There are more than 3.5 billion individual trips, -a person takes 2 buses and 2 trains = 4 trips; so you can see the scale of the people moving around here.  Trains are heavily booked and often over booked leading to people standing in the aisles, sometimes for journeys up to 30 hours.  I read how one guy found somewhere to stand with a bit of room – in the toilet on the train! Further, apparently the sales of adult diapers goes through the roof just prior to and during Spring Festival, doesn’t really bear thinking about does it.

Booking transport is a mission in itself.  First off the capitalist market principals of supply and demand are very much to the fore –yep they hike the prices.  You can book planes early and try and get a deal, standard trains are only available to be booked one month before travel and the bullet trains only 10 days prior.  You need your passport as a reference on any tickets you purchase and they are paid for online so we also need a friendly local who can help us and pay for tickets with their online account and we pay them back.  Luckily the local guy who looks out for us on behalf of the company we work for is able to sort this out for us – so it’s on with the journey!!

Its Monday the 13 January and we are off!!  Our first bus from Huaian to Nanjing is full so we have to wait a couple of hours for the next one, an auspicious start.  We make it and overnight in a small local hotel near the Nanjing airport as our flight to Changsha is at 8.30am, and…..it is delayed a couple of hours.  No problem we have plenty of time up our sleeve to get to Lixian.  An uneventful flight and we make our way to the bus station in Changsha and get touted for a bus, when this guy wants us to follow him and he heads off around the corner out of and away from the bus station we give him the flick as it is starting to look a little dodgy.  In the station we find a guy employed by the bus company in an “ambassador” type role who speaks English and is of great assistance.  So we finally arrive in Lixian and meet up with Michelle, (Kiwi from Rotorua) Stephen, (Ireland) and Raphy,(German –but speaks very proper English with next to no accent).  They were part of the crew we did our induction course with at Yangshuo and will be travelling with us over the next couple of weeks.

After a couple of days in Lixian we head to one of the parks in an area known as Zhangjiajei National Park.  It is listed as one of the premium parks to visit in China and the scenery is unique and pretty amazing.  (photos)  Our accomadation is a large hotel about a 2.5km walk to the park entrance.  It is the off season as it is winter and there are very few people around and we practically have the hotel to ourselves - with the downside being the hot water and aircon has to be turned on by the boss and we have to tell him when we want it on.  On the flip side he drives us down to the main street and drops us at the local restaurants, we call and he comes and picks us up!!  It is cold here but that doesn’t stop them leaving the restaurant doors wide open at all times and you need to remain rugged up inside as well.  We spend 4 days hiking around in the park as it is so big and several different highlights to take in from various entrances into the park.

A further part of the park shares the same name but is in fact about an hour away and accessed from the major town in the area.  A 45 minute cable car ride from downtown to the top of the mountain is simply amazing and once there we set off to do the hike around the mountain top.  Part of this features a glass floored walkway section of about 120 metres that has been built onto the side of a sheer cliff face with a drop of some 1500 metres –those with vertigo don’t bother!! Then there are further pathways again built onto the side of the rock face.  (photos) The whole thing is a little disconcerting if you have been taking notice of the standards of some Chinese construction……let alone stop to think how the hell they built these paths on the side of the freakin’ mountain.  This mountain is also where Tianmen Cave is located – have a look at youtube and search for “Jeb Corliss Tianmen”, this dude flies a wingsuit through the hole in the mountain.

After Zhangjiajie we make our way to Hong Kong via Changsha and Shenzhen, and another ride on a bullet train, yeehaa!!  The Metro from Shenzhen to our hostel in HK was an introduction to the subway for Michelle who; got caught in the door when it was closing, dropped her ticket between train and platform, got stuck and tangled in the turnstyles a couple of times with her luggage and had to be let through the wheelchair access once.  Luckily she took it all with a dose of humour as it was all just too funny for words.

Hong Kong sights, sounds and smells jogged some distant memories for me as I had visited here as a fresh faced 16 year old.  Was great to wander around this city that is a mix of east and west and forever on the go with plenty to see and do.  Have to say we really noticed the difference in costs coming from mainland China to HK, it is expensive.  Further the people in HK are always on the way to somewhere else and the place is not that big.  Also when we returned to mainland China we notice again that the people are more likely to come up to you and try and help you out - I think perhaps the novelty of foreigners has worn thin in HK.

A day trip to Macau was also part of this trip and is very easy to do.  Probably has something to do with making it easy to go to Macau and spend your money at the huge casinos that are there.  If you were to think of large gambling cities - chances are the first one to spring to mind would be Las Vegas and then maybe Monte Carlo.  How about Macau? - it has a revenue take seven times that of Las Vegas, leaving it for dead in terms of spending/gambling.  The Chinese do love their gambling and the casino we visited was full at 3pm on a weekday.  Visited the Macau tower which looks surprisingly like the Auckland Sky Tower and even has an AJ Hackett bungy operation at the top.  Pretty good views as well. (photos)  The Chinese style beef jerky here is really nice and you can walk down the street sampling the goods without pressure to buy – but I did anyway,- that is try and buy.  Also had what may well have been the best pancakes ever at a little place tucked away on a side street.  Did so like their placemats with the logo “Eat your way around the World” (photos)

As we had missed out on train tickets to Haikou on Hainan Island we have to catch a bus.  So it’s a sleeper bus and takes 12 hours overnight including the ferry crossing and we save on a nights accomadation.  OK, let’s just say the whole bunk thing is pretty tight for a bloke my size and I cannot even sit upright as the roof of the bus curves in at the sides – we both get zero sleep and read our e-books, listen to music and try to find a less uncomfortable position. Good luck!!  (photos)

On Hainan Island the weather is great and we do a bit of relaxing and looking about.  It is here that we see in the Chinese New Year and it is an absolutely amazing scene as fireworks continue to explode for hours on end causing a smoky blue haze to view the world through. (photo)  This night is simply the culmination of events as they have been practising for a few nights prior to and then warm down on the nights after as well.  I do my bit as well and set off a box with 20 sky-rockets, rather than in front of an apartment block I head to the side with a solid wall as I’m not sure what height these things will go to.  Turns out about 6 storeys high which is the top of the block next to our hostel.  Most others just let rip with their rockets out front and let’s just say I suspect those on the upper floors get mighty sick of rockets exploding right outside their windows for hours and nights on end.

A day trip to Sanya on the bottom of Hainan Island using the bullet train, yeehaa! This is where we originally were going to spend the 6 days on the island but had our accomadation cancelled on us 1 week out – once again TIC!!  The temperature here is about 4 degrees hotter than the other end of the island and is a nice 28 degrees and brings on a compulsory swim in the South China Sea along with several hundred Chinese -most of who can’t swim and use waterwings, wetsuits and even a ropeline to go for a “swim”.  There is a heavy Russian influence in Sanya and the first language used by most of the street hawkers/vendors when trying for your business is Russian.

The trip from Haikou to Guangzhou was another overnight sleeper bus leaving at 7.30pm and supposedly arriving at 7.30am and from there we had booked on a plane to fly to Huaian at 4.30pm –plenty of time to spare right??  I think the TIC factor must be multiplied by about 10 during the Spring Festival as this is how it panned out.

We arrived early at the bus station where we had bought our tickets from a couple of days earlier, the station was next to the port where the ferries departed from.  After checking best we could with a couple of people that we were in the right place it was now 6.50pm and the crowds were pretty big and the traffic was bumper to bumper on the roads.  Checked again with a lady who spoke a little English to be told “wrong bus station-you need to be at East bus station”.  Holy shit!  “Jules we’re at the wrong bloody station, let’s go!” A frantic dodge through the traffic and a taxi appears, luckily some people were getting out and others were angling towards it – they didn’t stand a chance as we were in that taxi in a flash and showing the driver on my phone where we needed to go.  Think he got the picture that we were in a hurry and by back alleys, as the roads were jammed up, we got the 3-4kms to the proper station at about 7.10pm and straight onto the bus.  Damn that was close.  Well the bus then took over 2 hours to travel back to where we had been and onto the wharf where we waited till 2am to get onto a ferry – it was chaos.  By this time we were starting to wonder about making our flight connection.  Yep, it got worse.  Once off the ferry onto the mainland the traffic was nose to tail on the motorways and often at a standstill.  So we finally got to the check-in at the Guangzhou airport at 6.15pm for our 4.30pm!! Spoke to the guy and he asks for our names and checks the computer, “flight delayed, now leaving at 8pm”.  We have never been so glad to hear that a plane was delayed.

Our 12 hour bus trip had taken 22 hours.  We were subsequently told this day was the last day of the main Spring Festival travel period where the Chinese government make the highways toll free and people use this as the main day for travelling on the roads, - awesome timing huh!!

Arriving back in Huaian at around 11pm late on Thursday 6^th February we land and……it’s snowing!!  I can tell you this, we were so glad to get back to our apartment and were again thankful for a delayed plane as not really sure what we would have done as we had a flight booked from Huaian to Harbin leaving on Sunday at 10am, once again thinking we had given ourselves plenty of spare time.  Didn’t fancy trying to get from Guangzhou to Huaian at last minute rates let alone trying to find available seats…..on anything!!

At home a couple of days to get sorted and ready for a 5 day trip to Harbin to check out the Ice and Snow Festival.  I know there are those of you thinking –there is no way Julie will go somewhere that cold.  In the end it was a simple matter of her seeing some photos of the Festival and she decided it was a ‘must do’.

This time our plane departed……..early! Harbin is the last of the major cities as you travel up the eastern side of China and is in fact further north than parts of Russia.  And yes it brings a whole new meaning to the word cold for us.  Overnight lows of -33 degrees and in the mornings when we head out it is……..-25 degrees!!  In the space of 5 days we experience a temperature range of 61 degrees.

It is the 30^th anniversary of the Ice and Snow Festival and it is quite a spectacular series of displays, sculptures and ice monuments. (photos)  The size and scale has to be seen to fully appreciate the effort that goes into this spectacular event and the major venue is best seen at night as the ice monuments have coloured lights built into them and are a riot of flashing colour……all in -25 degrees!! 

It is quite the destination for Chinese and foreign tourists alike and well worth the visit.  We treat ourselves to a very nice hotel, warm, and very central.  It even has a half decent bar and there is a Phillipino couple performing – live music in English and we know practically every song they sing – a couple of nice evenings were had in the bar!  The hotel had the first set of scales we have seen in 6 months and pleased to say it only said nice things to us both!!  Harbin is another city with a strong Russian influence, in particular its architecture and the food on offer, which we did try and really liked the Russian sausages on a stick.  However we could not get over the crowds of Chinese lining up in the street, literally going all the way across the main pedestrian street, to buy…….ice blocks!!  People of all ages were consuming them in massive numbers, go figure.

Harbin is also home to the Siberian Tiger Park and when in Harbin is on the list of “must do’s” so we dutifully head there.  As far as parks go there is a series of very large open spaces which you drive through in a caged bus passing negotiating a series of automatic security gates.  The Siberian Tigers are absolutely huge, and there are hundreds of them, literally!  Even saw some white Tigers which are quite rare – and a “Liger”- somewhere along the line someone has let the Lions in with the Tigers and…….well it looks more like a Lion with faint stripes.

An evening flight saw us return to Huaian on Saturday the 15^th February and a day to clean up and recover for school on the Monday. Huaian at -2 didn’t seem so bad anymore after being out and about in -25. 

By my reckoning we; stayed at 8 different hotels/hostels, travelled on 27 buses, 4 planes, 16 taxis, 7 ferries, 4 cable-cars, 2 trams, 3 bullet trains, 4 mini-vans and about 60 different trains on various metro subway systems.  All things considered an excellent trip and some great experiences.

Till next time,  J2 on walkabout.