Getting the Seasons Wrong in Wudalianchi

“Can we see the cranes?” I ask Zhang Wei, in my still resolutely rubbish Chinese.

“They’re not here,” he replies, driving at a pace so glacial I wonder whether he’s secretly Australian.

Bugger!

Spring has come late to this part of China, which means we’ve come to Wudalianchi early.

Way too early. The cranes aren’t just not nesting. They’re still migrating.

Why? Because the wetlands are still frozen.

Gah.

“July and August are good,” Zhang Wei says helpfully. “Everything is green.”

Which is precisely what one wants to hear after seven hours on a bus including a bathroom break at a spot which, thanks to a winning combination of communal long drop, heavy blood staining and an open, flooded cesspit, currently holds my personal award for “worst Chinese toilet ever”.

Siberian birch forests frame vast lava fields, a temple nestles in a volcano crater and an avenue of lava jets frozen in mid-eruption leads down to a web of reed-fringed lakes.

It’s still a beautiful place, Wudalianchi. Fourteen extinct volcanoes stud these northern flatlands, a bare 200k from where the Trans-Siberian and the Trans-Manchurian meet.

Siberian birch forests frame vast lava fields, a temple nestles in a volcano crater, the freshest spring water I’ve ever tasted bursts from dragon-head fountains, an avenue of lava jets frozen in mid-eruption leads down to a web of reed-fringed lakes and…

Well, it’s just a shame that a landscape that should be a whirl of velvety greens, mirrored blues and jet black is currently dull and muted, all blacks, greys, browns and dusty gold, the leftovers of autumn, freshly released from snow.

Insanely, in fact, even in May, there’s still snow on the ground in places. Many of the lakes are still frozen.

And, irritatingly, both the lava tunnel with its “year-round” glacier and the crystal cave with its “year-round” ice sculpture are firmly shut.

And, yes, I had been looking forward to more ice sculptures. Not to mention a lava tunnel with a glacier.

But, d’oh, we are just too early.

I don’t really get the way that seasons behave at these kind of latitudes. And, yes, I know Harbin is considerably further south than London, but we have the Gulf Stream, and China doesn’t.

You see, I’m British. I don’t really get the way that seasons behave at these kind of latitudes. And, yes, I know Harbin is considerably further south than London, but we have the Gulf Stream, and China doesn’t.

I knew that winter would be cold here – -30 is really not uncommon – but I didn’t realise how long it would go on for.

Yes, they have snow in April. Lots of it. And sometimes May.

Nor did I realise what spring meant here.

Out in these vast plains spring comes quickly, virtually overnight, and fades equally rapidly into summer.

In England, spring is about green, new life, the rains, a tentative type of to-ing and fro-ing and false dawns, of alternating grey and blue skies, that can extend from February into May.

Here, where the days are almost always blue and bright, it’s a bewildering couple of weeks when the snow retreats to reveal the yellowed grass and golden leaves it covered in the equally brief autumn.

Then – blam! – the green and flowers appear, the temperatures soar and you can only really think of it as summer.

“A FACTORY? In a NATIONAL PARK?” It’s actually a brewery. Go figure.

Which isn’t to say that Wudalianchi is a total bust. The town has that certain type of crazy that only happens when China meets Russia.

Or, as the boy puts it, “A FACTORY? In a NATIONAL PARK?”

It’s actually a brewery. Go figure.

There’s a museum. Some rather lovely crater views. Some very pleasant boardwalks winding over lava fields and lakes reflecting golden reeds. Endless jade shopping opportunities.

And a puppy! In a jacket and bootees!

And, further, some classic old-school Soviet sanatoriums favoured by sturdy Siberian matrons with aggressively dyed hair, retreating from the frozen north to the relative warmth of Wudalianchi.

Which, on the “When in Rome….” principle, I resolve to investigate.

“No,” I say helplessly. “I can speak Chinese but I can’t read Chinese. I can read Russian but I can’t speak it.” The girl, clearly despairing of my sanity, rattles off a stream of options in Chinese.

“No,” I say, in rubbish Chinese, grappling with a menu of treatments helpfully written on the wall in, yes, you guessed, it, Russian and Chinese. “I’m not Russian. I’m English.”

The girl looks at me curiously, and points me to the treatments on the Chinese menu.

“No,” I say helplessly. “I can speak Chinese but I can’t read Chinese. I can read Russian but I can’t speak it.”

The girl, clearly despairing of my sanity – because what kind of imbecile learns to read a language but not speak it, or speak it but not read it? — rattles off a stream of options in Chinese.

The thing is, a lot of key spa vocab, from the obvious сауна, массаж and терапия to the more specific стоматология – and, no I don’t know what “stomatology” is in English – are pretty much the same in Russian as they are in English, and not remotely the same in Chinese, even if you leave the script out of it.

And, no, my Chinese vocabulary does not extend to spa treatments.

I find Chinese vocab incredibly hard to acquire organically, not least because I’m rarely sure where a word begins or ends until my interlocutor has kindly isolated it and repeated it to me at least five times at stupid-foreign-moron pace.

I weigh up whether my Chinese is up to talking my way out of an enema – or whatever the hell it is that they do with the sink plungers — should I inadvertently order one.

We compromise, in the end, with a Russian brochure, replete with alarming machines equipped with dials, cables and what appear to be repurposed sink plungers, and ranks of ample ladies with capacious bosoms and mottled upper arms enjoying defiantly retro and visibly sulphurous baths.

“What ARE those machines?” Zac asks. “It’s like they’re breeding zombies for the zombie apocalypse or something. Or designing some weird disease.”

“It is a bit Doctor Strangelove, isn’t it?” I say.

I weigh up whether my Chinese is up to talking my way out of an enema – or whatever the hell it is that they do with the sink plungers — should I inadvertently order one by pointing, and conclude that I’d rather not risk it.

“Maybe we should try another place?” I say.

Frankly, when a city like Harbin has not only Louis Vuitton and Rolex but a bloody Bentley dealership it’s fair to say that Mao’s ghost has left the building some while back.

The splendidly-named Worker’s Sanatorium, a gigantic Stalinist Butlin’s surrounded by Russocentric stands selling vile souvenirs, looks likely to hit the spot on my quixotic quest to track down communism in China.

It’s a rare beast, communism in China. You’ll spot it in the historical narratives at museums, with bonus points for older translations such as “running dogs” or “disgusting imperialists”, and you might catch a glimpse of it when, for example, endeavouring to register with police or do pretty much anything at a bank, but, frankly, when a city like Harbin has not only Louis Vuitton and Rolex but a bloody Bentley dealership it’s fair to say that Mao’s ghost has left the building some while back.

Anywise. As I am handed my spa uniform of mini-hospital gown and culottes, then told not to put it on – I’ve mentioned the Chinese attitude to nudity before, but there’s something very weird about walking around stark naked but for shower shoes while surrounded by fully clothed Chinese – my hopes are high for an authentically communist experience.

The therapy room is at a suitably bracing temperature, with ranks of tables surrounded by showers, which take an impressive 15 minutes to warm up, time that I spend staring forlornly at my overhanging gut in the merciless all-round mirrors and making implausible promises to myself about sit-ups.

But… No dice. The girl is firmly capitalist, clearly self-employed, and by the end of it I’ve dropped about 500 kuai through helplessly agreeing to treatments that “Your old man will love”.

It would, I think mournfully, have been nicer enjoyed fresh from the lake at one of the lakeside fish restaurants that open up in season than in our hotel from a tank downstairs.

The massage was good, though I’d have preferred to have had a mud treatment out in the mud baths in season. (The hot springs, for the record, would apparently be better described as “tepid”.)

And, we learn over dinner, the “cold water fish” that’s a speciality of Wudalianchi is absolutely bloody delicious.

“You know,” says Zac. “I’m not a fish person. But this is really very good.”

It would, I think mournfully, have been nicer enjoyed fresh from the lake at one of the lakeside fish restaurants that open up in season than in our hotel from a tank downstairs.

But it’s still rather splendid.

“It’s a nice place,” Zac remarks philosophically. “But it would be better if it were green.”

Wudalianchi takes 5 to 7 hours on the bus from Harbin, at least until the new road opens. Most buses drop you at Wudalianchi town. There are connecting shuttles from the town to the park town (also Wudalianchi) in season, or taxis year-round. You’ll need a driver to get around the park – prices are 150-200 kuai per day.

If you’re doing the Trans-Siberian route, you can get off at Bei An, from which it is an hour and a half on the bus. There are absolutely tonnes of hotels at different scales and pricepoints in the park: if you’re after facilities such as wifi, it’s probably better to book through a Chinese travel agent as rack rates are steep. Guesthouses are signed in Russian as Гостиница.