About two hours' bus journey (¥35) west of Harbin via a brand new road, National Highway 301 (also known as the "HaDa Expressway"), sprawls the boom-town of DAQING , home of China's largest oil reserve and now Heilongjiang's second city. Daqing is a nice place in which to spend a day and is certainly unique in China. It's interesting in a quirky way, with road names such as "Calgary Street" and oil pumps, called ketouji (literally, "kowtowing machines"), everywhere. China's oil wells are owned by the government, but Western companies have a stake here as vendors of drilling equipment, and so foreigners aren't that rare a sight. The town has an older western half and the new, gleaming eastern portion, with a billboard of Deng Xiaoping gracing the entrance to the government offices. Buses #23 and #30 go from the train station to the new section of town, where the Daqing Hotel lives up to the boom-town image of overpriced rooms, liquor and prostitutes. There's no skyline in Daqing, save for some cooling towers, but folks are friendly and the connections on to Qiqihar and Harbin are constant; trains are many and buses leave every fifteen minutes from outside the train station.