The first thing to do on arriving in a Chinese city during the spring festival is to buy a ticket out. We had arrived in Harbin in the far north east of China (old Manchuria) the previous day. We arrived planning on seeing the ice festival and without accommodation. So had most of the population of Northern China. Katherine had got chatting to some students on a bus and as a result we had spent the night in an unheated university dorm discussing politics with the students. The first thing to do the next day was to ensure we could leave Harbin.

The cold was incredible. Harbin is north of Valdivostock and in January minus 30 degrees Celsius during the day is considered warm. The mucus in my nose was frozen and, despite five layers of clothing including space age thermals, standing still was potentially terminal. Despite that I was enjoying Harbin. It’s mix of Russian and Chinese placed Orthodox onion domes above oriental bazaars and Chinese street traders selling Soviet military binoculars. A jazz band played the saxophone in the street in front of peasants selling live chickens whose necks the peasants would happily wring if someone simply enquired about the price (as my brother had discovered earlier to his horror).

Harbin station is a huge Stalinist cavern with the ticket offices on the ground floor and trains leaving from the first. During the spring festival (Chinese New Year) most Chinese head home to their families. As a result the station was in pandemonium with peasant families sleeping in the station with what appeared to be their entire belongings and thousands of people milling around.

Our problems started at the luggage lockers. The attendant wanted to charge Katherine the western rates for storing luggage (twice the normal rate) on the grounds that my brother had touched her bag. We were forced to comply and entered the dimly lit half world of the station interior past the airport style baggage scanners and paramilitary police at the doors. Inside the seething mass and general chaos is better described by Dante. A group of prisoners were reciting their crimes and punishments to the waiting passengers on the first floor, while the queues were policed by men with electric cattle prods. On the ground floor rows of counters were besieged by screaming hordes waving bits of paper. We approached what appeared to be the most orderly of the queues and eventually reached the front to be told that we couldn’t buy a sleeper ticket without a permit to travel. The answer to the question of where to obtain one was "Not here, try the foreigner’s desk".

Searching the station turned up a couple of fellow foreigners but no desk. Paul was a Canadian who, like my brother, was spending a year teaching in China. Milan was a Slovakian who had spent 6 months in England to learn English so that he could learn Chinese. When we met him he had spent six months in China studying Qi Gong in Sitzchuan and both his Chinese and English were near perfect. We now had in our group two people who could speak fluent Chinese, two who could manage and me with none. Armed with these skills we approached railway officials and asked. The eventual reply involved changing bus twice and a short walk. The railway office, the place to get a foreigner’s permit to travel, was on the other side of town.

Reaching the impressive railway administration buildings we entered an office and asked if we had reached the correct office. The guard on duty replied that since it was lunch time there was no point answering. After lunch he told us it wasn’t but directed us to the correct office where we were able to get our permit to travel. We still had to get the tickets however.

Returning to the station we plunged once more into pandemonium. Now we organised ourselves as a unit. Katherine and Milan queued for the tickets whilst Nick, Paul and myself policed the queue. The queues in the station consisted of a ‘head’ around the ticket booth and a tail of the weak or timid trailing behind. At the ticket booth a semicircle of people stuck their travel permits through the gap and screamed at the poor attendant while another group, behind the front line, attempted to climb over those in front and join in the chorus. The timid tail was flanked by metal barriers. Walking to the front Nick, Paul and myself peeled the climbers off and sent them to the back of the queue. Since the three of us were all bigger than anyone in the melee and the queue loved the fact that we weren’t barging no one argued. Barring any further queue jumping and repelling half hearted attempts at scaling us the queue operated as all good queues should, with Katherine and Milan moving forward at the same rate as everyone else. Finally after two attempts (wrong queue again first time) we emerged after 5 hours of battling with our sleeper tickets to Beijing.