Day 4: And if the drive to Snowtown seemed bad enough, the drive out of it was worse. Nine whole hours. Made even more horrid by the roads through the mountains, which our tour guide optimistically dubbed the “massage chair roads”, but put frankly was more like being rolled downhill in a barrel half-filled with apples while simultaneously being hit with a big stick. The view was pretty though, driving in the snow on empty roads lined with white pines, even if we practically had to freeze our hands off every half a minute to wipe the frost off the bus windows. (They’re actually not that tacky, white pines, when they’re not made of plastic and plonked in the middle of someone’s living room as a Christmas tree.)

We stayed just outside another of those almost anonymous little suburbia-esque cities, and after dinner went out with about three-quarters of the tour group for supper. Everyone was eager to get out of the hotel, so we piled into a place the tour guide recommended and spent 248 Yuan on meat and fish skewers and got drunk. It was only about nine or so when we went back to the hotel but everything was already closed and the town was literally deserted, except for about forty-five taxis prowling the streets and stalking our every move. Can anyone say tourist trap?

Day 5: I made my first snowman today. He was about a metre seventy-five tall and just as wide, with a rotund belly and a flaring back because we couldn’t be bothered rounding him out. He had four pinecone buttons, orange peel eyes and branches of wheat for arms. He wore a jaunty red scarf and a woolly hat that we nicked from another snowman nearby. The snowman took half the tour group two hours to build, and who-woulda-thunk-it but we all broke out in a sweat in the -15°C chill.

We spent the night in a place run by Chinese-Korean ethnic minority people right by the hot springs at the base of Long White, the mountain range separating China and Korea. It was kind of dodgy. The ran the water from the springs through the walls as heating and sealed the windows shut, so it was absolutely boiling, and there were only five channels on the TV – all in Korean. If you sat down properly on the toilet your knees would have been somewhere around your shoulders and your face would have been squished into the wall. Korean people must be really short.

Day 6: 10 HOURS OF DRIVING. Everyone on the tour bus went stir-crazy so we started singing karaoke and make handprints with eight fingers on the frost-covered windows. Otherwise, we slept. A five o’ clock wake-up call following a stifling, sleepless night does not a cheerful tour group make. More roads piled with snow and pine trees, a mountain in the shape of a sleeping Buddha, and a lake with water that was still running, as if to spite the winter. We had a stopover Changchun, in a hotel that was nearly perfect except for a toilet that didn’t flush. (We had to call in the plumber. Twice.) The TV had 56 channels including HBO, ESPN and CNN, which was really random as we were in the middle of China. But who cares! English TV!!!!! And the Fashion Channel, which showed fashion shows and celebrities and models getting their hair done 24 hours a day, which I became totally addicted to. Good, vapid fun.

Changchun itself is a nice city, very regulated, with the streets in a grid pattern and cops directing traffic at practically every intersection at the city centre. The traffic lights and pedestrian crossing lights are soooo cute – each light has a timer showing you how much longer it’s going to be green or red. The Don’t Walk sign is a red hand that gets bigger and smaller like someone’s pushing something towards you, and the little green man actually walks – if he’s walking slowly, you’ve got plenty of time, but when he starts to run, you should probably start doing so too. The cars still drive through red lights when the coppers aren’t around to see them but at least they actually stop to let the pedestrians cross the street, unlike back in the south.

Day 7: Directly underneath the big red No Smoking sign in the aeroplane toilet is a slot marked ‘Ashtray’. WHAT THE???

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