05/01/10 - Singapore to Harbin‏

The penny really dropped today, but before that.

I flew out of Singapore in one hell of an old airliner. The entire cabin shook and swayed as we took off and the drop down TV's were of the old cathode ray type and none of them where clear or even correct colour. I think I may have gotten a hour sleep somewhere there, but at least the food was good.

We landed at Shanghai airport at around 6am or so. I had about 2 hours stop over there and most of this time was spent walking to the other terminal and getting through security.

The flight to Harbin I had two hyperactive men besides me, whom I am guessing were on their first flight, and found it very amusing to be sitting next to me with my shorts on. Even the hostess warned me on the way in Harbin was very cold.

The flight there was fairly straight forward, the airplane made two major turns about mid-way, to avoid North Korea I would guess. There was thick cloud cover all the way and when it finally broke we must have been somewhere over the coast, with large numbers of large ships everywhere. Food was being served at the time, so I couldn't get my camera from the overhead compartment. Boo!

Getting closer to Harbin, it was either mountains or large expanses with the occasional village to break up the bleakness. From above, it really looked like the view from above when Emerald got flooded a few years ago, even the colours looked close.

We finally landed in Harbin and while it was an enclosed walkway, it was indeed cold, though I had my jacket. There was a change room available right after luggage claims and I got into my suit as such. Though I didn't put on thermals or change socks, as I thought it would be easy to get to the hotel, and wasn't concerned about the cold too much. That was a mistake.

I found out my phone doesn't work in China, neither does the phone's GPS, even though I was told it would. It's now a glorified alarm clock.

Through some translation via one of the chinese ladies at the airport, I managed to get into a bus for the ride into the city. There are no road markings viewable through winter, and the roads are multilane here, so you have cars, trucks and buses just weaving in and out of each other, honking their horns to let people know they are there, passing with in centimetres of each other.

I'll condense the next bits. I basically ended up lost at a train station I didn't know where it was, with no phone, no working pay phones, no cabbie could read the english address of the hotel and I had dubious private taxi dudes approaching me at every turn. And I was cold, freezing out of my mind.

Eventually after walking around in circles at the station's outside park, looking for buses or other information, I went to the biggest hotel I could see to try my luck. Using my iPod to translate, I managed to get myself into an internet bar upstairs and look up the address of the hotel. I took photos of it with my camera, the chinese address and chinese map. As the english maps were not even remotely correct. Exiting there I made my way to the taxi line up, waited for about a hour in the cold, stamping around to keep heated and eventually got to the hotel.

I was overstressed and hungry and really thought about getting a plane home after this day. Room service dropped off some fruit which I ate, then I went to bed, exhausted.

I never want to be this cold, this hungry or this worried ever again.