Liked the birds, forget the snow

One of my companions from the Hong Kong tour bus held the grass up excitedly and the ostrich on the other side of the fence, his fierce eyes glaring at us, snatched the snack.

The man's girlfriend captured the moment with her camera.

Welcome to China's first experimental ostrich farm, on the outskirts of Xinhui in the Pearl River Delta and one stop on a three-day, action-packed tour of Guangdong province that was my Christmas in 1998.

Everyone loved the birds. Some had tried the meat - 'not bad, tastes like beef but a little tougher'.

But commercially the farm is another casualty of the Asian crisis. 'We started with eight birds from the United States at the end of 1994 and now have more than 2,000,' one of the staff said. 'We used to sell them as pets to overseas Chinese and for meat to hotels. But they cost five times as much as beef and, with the economy weak, the market has shrunk. They breed so fast. We have too many now.' Next stop was a more successful idea - a snow palace in the middle of a Guangzhou park. It opened with much fanfare at the height of the summer, with temperatures over 30 degrees Celsius, in the city's Liuhua Lake Park.

You put on a padded coat and plastic covers over your shoes and walk down into a temperature of minus 12. Inside, you find a stuffed reindeer, a wolf and plastic trees, with the floor covered in man-made snow. There are also ice sculptures and two small chutes to slide down.

'This is popular with southerners who have never seen snow,' our tour guide said with a twinkle in his eye. 'Of course, it is of no interest to those who have seen the real thing, but a smart idea, don't you think?' They run it here until attendance drops and then move it to another city in the south.