I went skiing with my family over the Christmas break. My expectations were pretty low as I had heard that skiing in China is a pretty basic experience. I had also been regaled with lots of stories about how the slopes were dangerously crowded with rank beginners dressed in business suits hurtling down the slopes and crashing into other skiers. As ever with China (or anything for that matter, but particularly with China), conventional wisdom wasn’t so wise. We went to a place called Wanlong in Hebei province . It’s in the hills (duh!), about 250 kilometers northwest of Beijing and about 50 k from the city of Zhangjiakou, where the Great Wall comes down from the mountains into the plain.
First impression in arriving at the resort: cold. It was colder than pretty much anywhere I have been, around minus 25 degrees Celcius, with gusting wind and snow flurries mixed with ice bringing a wind chill reading that was off the scale. But still, some brave (foolhardy?) souls ventured out to ski, as you’ll see from the video clip below. You’ll also find that, perhaps blessedly, most of my inane commentary has been literally blown away and that for some people fashion always trumps comfort, regardless of the weather.
Anyway, the next day dawned gloriously clear and just as cold but without the bonebreaking wind.
The resort has five runs of between 1.5 and 3 kilometers, very well maintained. There’s also a small hotel, which is comfortable and clean. Perhaps my expectations were low but I was very happily surprised and thought the skiing was great fun. (There doesn’t seem to be a separate web page but you can book the hotel here if you read Chinese).
In fact, if I was in the business of giving investment advice (which happily I’m not, given past misjudgments), I’d say that buying one of the numerous holiday apartments that are being constructed in the nearby town of Chongli, would be a pretty good bet. There’s another provincial government sanctioned skiing area nearbt, while an Italian-Chinese joint venture has just opened their own project–called Dolomiti– just down the road. Dolomiti in particular is hugely ambitious and aims eventually to have a hotel in the center of a bowl of hills and connecting series of lifts and ski runs.
For the moment, there’s only one lift and a couple of runs and the day we got there, it was closed due to, you guessed it, high winds. There are a couple of young Italian guys there who can whip up a decent pizza. Or you can go with local delights such as “round slice of oil rinsed potato” or the mysterious “brake smash with hot oil pepper.” (Enough menu jokes already!). It’ll be interesting to see how this project goes. At the moment it’s very much a start up stage (a door handle came off when I tried to go outside) and does bring to mind the problems that have bedeviled other extravagant Chinese-foreign joint ventures of the sort. For selfish reasons, I certainly hope they succeed.
Meanwhile, if you are planning on buying that apartment in Chongli, just remember that the condos are mostly still on the drawing board and life remains very much that of rural Hubei, where no one is living high on the hog, least of all the hogs.
