Worth a visit, despite the high temperatures and partly closed attractions.

End of January 2019, just before Chinese New Year, we visited Harbin, a city in the far north of China near the Russian border.

Every year the world famous “Snow and Ice Festival” is held there for several weeks. Unfortunately, at this time, the temperatures where too high (around -5°C to 0°C), so most of the buildings, which are built entirely from ice blocks, were closed due to risk of collapsing.

We didn’t check the weather just before we went there, so this came as quite a surprise to us. The good thing about it was that there were almost no tourists. The bad thing was that most of the “Ice City” (and all the bars, attractions and events) was closed. We could however visit the snow sculpture park. Even though some of the sculptures where already a little melted, it was still an astonishing display of craftsmanship.

So what did we do? Since we only had a short weekend (arrived Friday night and left Saturday early afternoon), we had a look at the sculpture park and explored the city.

By the way, as every major city (Harbin is the capital city of Heilongjiang province), Harbin is very well connected by high speed train network. It took us merely 4 hours to travel almost 1,000km from Dalian by train.

The city has strong cultural influences from Russia (given its proximity and history), which you can see in the architecture and many Russian shops.

We found some nice places including a “German style restaurant”, several Russian style restaurants and other nice places.

Harbin also is home of one of the biggest indoor skiing areas, as you can see below. We were not able to get in without buying a ticket (around 240 RMB) which includes skiing. We skipped it. From the looks of the website, it has to be amazing though!

There are many other places to see, such as the Siberian Tiger park and many Scenic areas. As we couldn’t come back in 2020 due to COVID, we will definitely come back in 2021! If you plan to travel to Harbin, it is really cold in winter, dropping to -30°C or even colder!