Ice and Snow World

The following night we got tickets to the Ice and Snow World across the river. We bought them at the hotel and it included a tour bus that picked us up at the front door. It seemed a bit pricey, but I'm not really sure, but the tour was full so it seemed like the way to go. Anyways this was the big thing we had been planning to see so it didn't really matter. The parking lot to this place was filled with buses; it was quite a contrast to the empty tourist sites we went to in Datong. At first the place didn't seem very big but it kept on going and going. We had about 4 hours to roam around, which was pretty long to be out in the cold (it was somewhere in the vicinity of -15˚F). We covered almost ever inch of the park, found an ice maze, several ice slides, a ski slope, a hot air balloon, some kinda of cheesy performance with robot backhoes, a party yurt, ice skating bikes, white yaks, and we somehow even ended up walking through the back end of the place. Our scarfs became frozen stiff and we had frost on our eye lashes and hair, so we dipped into a little cabin coffee shop to warm up. When we returned to the bus we found the whole group waiting for us but they just laughed as we got on board. All in all the sculptures where pretty impressive and we had a good time, but man was it hard keeping my camera batteries warm all night.