Difficulty: Summiteer (Level 3)
China’s annual Ice and Snow Festival opened in Harbin, in northeastern China, on January 5, attracting crowds of tourists.
This year, the ice park spans 810,000 sq metres with 250,000 cubic metres of sculpted ice. The ice was harvested from the nearby frozen Songhua River and lit up at night with colourful lights.
The sculptures, some a few storeys high, featured Chinese-style buildings and bridges, fairy-tale castles, and one fashioned after Beijing’s Temple of Heaven. Several ice slides were built for children and adults around the park.
Over the New Year holidays, the festival park received five times more visitors than a year ago, at 163,200 people. It also generated nearly six times more income than last year, one Heilongjiang TV station said.
The park helped draw some 3.05 million tourists to the city during the same period. Heilongjiang’s culture and tourism department called the tourist boom an “ice and snow miracle”.
