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Making tracks at a Chinese Nordic skiing extravaganza

travel

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 12, 2012|By Mike Ives

Hao Wang races in the 17.5K cross-country event at Vasaloppet China 2012,… (GEORGE HENTON FOR THE BOSTON…)

CHANGCHUN - I attended college in Middlebury, Vt., where on winter weekends I drove to a Nordic ski center in the Green Mountain National Forest and spent long afternoons whizzing across freshly groomed snow. Every winter I still feel the urge to lace up my skis.

When I moved to Vietnam in 2009, two years after graduation, that urge got considerably harder to satisfy. But last year, when I searched the Internet for Nordic ski events within striking distance of Southeast Asia, I discovered Vasaloppet China, the 10-year-old cousin of a historic Swedish ski race.

The Chinese race, I learned, takes place every Jan. 2 near Changchun, a provincial city about 600 miles northeast of Beijing, and is open to both competitive skiers and the general public. Bingo! I registered online for a 17.5 kilometer (10.9 miles) race - an easier version of the 52.5 kilometer (32.6 miles) main event - and agreed to pay my $32 race fee on arrival.

On New Year’s Day, I flew from Hanoi to Guangzhou, a megacity in southern China, and then to China’s sprawling capital, where I met my friend George Henton, an English photographer based in Bangkok.

George and I boarded a plane to Changchun, and when it landed, a taxi whisked us downtown. We didn’t know what to think; the city of 7.5 million was full of buildings, and although the outside air temperature was well below freezing, there was almost no snow on the ground in this dry region of the country.

It was nearly midnight when we checked into a nondescript hotel on an unmemorable street. Staring through my window at the Gotham-like cityscape, I wondered if this event was really an elaborate hoax.

But at 7 the next morning, we walked to the upscale Shangri-La Hotel and saw dozens of tourists wearing colorful spandex and carrying ski bags. We followed them and climbed into one of six gold-colored coach buses. I struck up a conversation with Lasse Hulgaard, a competitive skier from Copenhagen.

Hulgaard, 20, said he is on Denmark’s national ski team, and that the other competitive skiers on the bus - most of whom hailed from Scandinavia - were traveling around northeast China for a week competing in a series of accredited races called China Tour de Ski. The others, I learned, were paying their way for about $150 per day.

“When I told my friends I was going to China to ski, it sounded kind of exotic,’’ Hulgaard said.