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Chongqing PTR - Part 4: South Hot Springs Park

gavin

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I’d been to Chongqing before, and hated it, so wasn’t really ecstatic to find out that Happy Valley were opening there, but decided to just suck it up for a weekend. Flights from Hong Kong are regular, so I coulod go to the airport straight from work on Friday and fly back on Sunday evening, meaning that I didn’t have to “waste” a long weekend on a place I didn’t like.

I liked it much more this time around though. On my first visit, I’d got a decent deal on a room at the Hilton, which was fab, but in a crappy area. There was one area of the city that I’d liked before, so made sure to stay in that area this time. Much, much better. Anyway, the next day was pretty full on.

Happy Valley

The park is on the metro, and on the same line as my hotel, so that was very easy. The park’s transport hub, including a new metro entrance/exit was still being built though, so it meant using a different exit quite far away and walking for about 10 minutes. All very easy though and hard to miss this:

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The entrance, with the Ferris wheel just inside, is on top of a hill, with rides at a few lower levels and most of the park on a flatter, lower area, apart from the woodie which sits on top of a different hill to the right.

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The whole thing is connected via escalator. They wouldn’t merit a picture, but…

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The mine train is partway down the hill. RCDB had it down as not open yet though.

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Some stuff I didn’t bother with:

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I headed straight for the B&M wing coaster first, at the far back left of the park.

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Ah f**k. That fence obviously didn’t seem good.

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Convinced I’d been spited, I kept walking around to the woodie, only to find that it didn’t open until 11, so just walked around it and took some pictures instead. Because of its position on top of a hill, it’s a pain in the arse to get decent pictures of. It was quite hazy in the morning as well, which didn’t help.

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View back across the lake.

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So, two coasters spited and about 45 minutes to wait for the woodie, I was trying to find the 4th coaster when this happened:

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It turns out that there’s a whole different path past the mine train to get to a completely different area. The closed path from earlier will make the whole thing easier when it’s finished since, currently, you’ve got to walk three quarters of the way around the whole park to get between the wing coaster and the woodie. With that other path being open, it would be a 5-minute walk.

Heading that way, this also happened:

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Yay for the +1 that I thought hadn’t opened yet, but a Golden Horse mine train can still wait. The path behind the mine train led to a typical “Wild West” area, with a top spin and massive water chute thing, and an “Old Chongqing” area.

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The final coaster was here as well. A decent family ride, but a +1 by this point since this was the third of these I’ve done now.

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There were also 3 attractions that weren’t ready yet, a flying theatre (whatever), what I think was a haunted walkthrough (these are always bad at Happy Valley) and “Game Ride”, which I don’t think could’ve been anything too major based on the size of the building it was in.

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Just going to bung a bunch of pictures in of the wing coaster.

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This part of the park was dead at that time. There had been a lot of people going into the park at opening, but once they’d spread out a bit, it was fine. They were all concentrated on the rides at the front of the park though, and I think, like me, it took a while for a lot of people to work out how to get down to that area.

Anyway, this meant that Soaring Wings was a walk-on. There was still the usual Crappy Valley operations to contend with though: gates being left empty while they cleared the station etc.

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I got 4 rides in in a row, walking straight back around and onto the next train, but it still took close to 40 minutes to do that. It was very good in terms of flowing really well, but, as with most of the ride type, still felt quite sedate.

My first ride was front right, second ride was back left, and then the other two around the middle, all on outside seats. The back left seat was much better for the wingover drop, but it had a bit of a rattle. Overall, the front was a better experience.

This place had also done an amazing job with their ride signs, copying and pasting English signage from the Wuhan park. This was on Soaring Wings:

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The woodie also had a “Dauling Dragon” sign, complete with spelling mistake, and the mine train had “Monte Carlo”, all ride names from the Wuhan park. Idiots. It’s funny, but it also annoys me that’s there’s such a lack of basic attention to detail in such a major chain.

Some more pictures. I’m not even sure if I’ve thrown them in already since Imgur is being a twat and not ordering pictures properly.

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The woodie had been open for a while by this point.

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The queue wasn’t big, but I knew what to expect from Happy Valley: one train operations and faff, so I knew I was looking at about half an hour. You have to get a lift to get up to the station.

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It wasn’t as faffy as it could have been. When I saw the lift, I was expecting to be confronted by an empty train and station, but they had a train’s worth of people at the air gates while the train was out. Could’ve been much worse.

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I don’t often buy ORPs, but Happy Valley’s are very cheap and I liked this one.

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The “hidden Mickey” bag it came in was almost as fab.

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I went straight back around for another ride, waiting about half an hour again. I would have liked to have got a few more in, but the queue was getting longer and I wanted to get some other stuff done in the afternoon.

Oh, the ride then. It’s excellent. It doesn’t seem very big when you look at it, but it feels a lot more substantial when you’re riding. The layout doesn’t really let up from start to finish, with decent airtime in places. It’s very smooth as well, but we’ll see if that lasts. As far as GCIs go, I’d put it behind Python in Bamboo Forest and Wood Coaster, but otherwise it’s probably the best of theirs I’ve done.

I polished off the mine train on the way back up to the top. Meh.

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I finished up with the Ferris wheel. I checked the stats later, and at 120 meters it’s joint 7th tallest in the world along with 5 others.

I’ll just bung some pictures in from the wheel. They’re not great thanks to crappy glass/plastic windows and reflections.

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Overall, I liked this place. The location/layout is very different from others in the chain, they’ve got two excellent coasters and went with a massive Ferris wheel over the usual Happy Valley flying islands. Obviously, it’s not quite finished yet, with a handful of seemingly major rides not ready, along with a few paths which would make navigating it a lot easier, but that’s all coming soon I suppose.

It’s definitely, for most people, a full-day park. I just wasn’t interested in doing any generic flat rides or water rides when I had other stuff to squeeze in on that day. It had, however, a large water chute, rapids, flying theatre (not yet open), haunted walkthrough (not yet open), what I think is a shooting ride (not yet open), 4D theatre, “Magic” theatre, giant frisbee, Disc-o, Air Race, Unicoaster, Top Spin, Energy Storm, Two shot/drop towers, Tagada, Top Scan, Sky Drop, Pirate Ship and a bunch of kiddy stuff.

It was a taxi to the next place, which was an even newer park. I was fully expecting to have problems, and had my phone out ready to just use the GPS since I knew the location, but it was fine. I could’ve just got lucky, or it could be that the place wasn’t too far away and was a lot more substantial than I’d been expecting.

Going to shove it into the next part.

Oh, quick question. How's the image size? I had problems with Imgur pictures crashing the forums before, but I think it's because I'd uploaded pictures at full size (did that by mistake with the first picture in this report). Since then, I've been resizing them as they're uploaded, but they look a bit **** on my laptop, so might go for the next size up after this report. Probably fine on a phone?
 
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Hixee

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That ORP makes my laugh. I saw it on FB the other day and am glad to see it again! Excellent!

As for the photos - loaded very quickly, but I agree I can see some notably loss in quality on some.
 

HeartlineCoaster

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I f*cking love it when they act like the woodies are killing them. Looks so uncomfortable and ridiculous.

Photos look weirdly square now, for this day and age, but they still paint a good picture.
 

Coaster Hipster

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Is that really an on-ride picture? :eek: It really looks like some random phone picture xD


Really valuable TR as always, and I appreciate the very nice overview pictures from the Ferris Wheel. That GCI looks massive and its layout quite exciting too, glad you enjoyed the ride quite a bit!

How was the weird inversion on the B&M Wing coaster though? Its shape is so funky, I'm quite curious to hear someone's experience of riding it.
 
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gavin

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^Do you mean that second-to-last inversion? Nothing to report really. It didn't feel unusual on-ride at all.

The next place was an even newer park, which had popped up after I’d planned this trip, so yay for the bonus. I was ready to have a bit of a ‘mare getting there given that it was brand new, but the taxi driver knew it immediately. It wasn’t too far away from Happy Valley anyway, and it was a lot more major than I’d been expecting.

Shengming Universal City

RCDB had had this place listed just as “Universal City”, but refereces to “Shengming” were all over the place.

As I said, it was much more substantial than I’d expected, while not being too big, and included shopping/restaurant areas as well as quite a lot of rides. I’ll just check in a bunch of general park pictures first.

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As you can see, the place was rammed, just ridiculously crowded. Although it wasn’t a public holiday, it was some kind of Chinese festival day, so the park had some promotion where they were offering free rides. A good business move I guess to get people to know about the place, but if I’d have known, I’d have just gone back the next morning and paid the few quid each for the coasters.

I waited about 45 minutes for the first coaster, and about half an hour for the second, which wasn’t too bad given the huge crowds. Most people seemed more interested in the more sedtae stuff though, like the Ferris wheel, train, water chute etc., which I had no problem skipping.

The first coaster was something pretty unique, a Golden Horse spinner, but totally unlike their usual model, with a different layout, different cars, and an inversion.

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It was pretty good! There’s a block/trim brake before the inversion, so it’s only taken quite slowly, meaning it’s comfortable. The rest of the layout/track work was decent as well.

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So yeah. Well done Golden Horse for (mostly) designing something yourself rather than directly copying an existing design.

The second coaster was just a stock model “Crazy Skateboard” from Beijing Jiuhua. Weird choice to have two spinners within a two minute walk of each other really. These are better than Golden Horse’s stock model spinner, but still nothing to get excited about.

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There’s also a third coaster under construction, Suspended Coaster. So far, it’s just the station and footers, so it’s not exactly clear what it is. I’d guess at a Golden Horse Hanging Coaster (an inverted wild mouse type of ride – a copy of that thing that appears at Hyde Park) based on the size of the plot.

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All in all, a decent little addition to Chongqing then. I’d have liked to have had a look around inside – there was some indoor stuff, but not sure exactly what – but because of the crowds I’d been there for much longer than I’d planned and wanted to get out to revisit a park I’d done before to knock off a new coaster and an old one that I’d missed last time.

Next up: Foreigner Street revisited.
 

Hixee

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I saw you post the inverting spinner on Facebook and it peaked my curiosity! :p I think it actually looks (aesthetically) pretty great - the yellow trains and red track make it look pretty good. Was it spinning a lot as it went through the inversion, or did the trains just end up sideways from the corner before? I imagine the dynamics of the spinning and inverting would be pretty cool - you could say "stunning". ;)

Looks like a pretty park, lots of nice colours and plants. And at the very least a +2 (soon to be +3).
 

gavin

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I saw you post the inverting spinner on Facebook and it peaked my curiosity! I think it actually looks (aesthetically) pretty great - the yellow trains and red track make it look pretty good. Was it spinning a lot as it went through the inversion, or did the trains just end up sideways from the corner before? I imagine the dynamics of the spinning and inverting would be pretty cool - you could say "stunning". ;)

Looks like a pretty park, lots of nice colours and plants. And at the very least a +2 (soon to be +3).
It doesn't really spin as it hits the inversion. It's brought close to a stop on the brakes, and it's not spinning much before that anyway.

It's more of a rotation of the cars as it moves with the track, rather than the proper spinning you get with the wild mouse layout.
 

gavin

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The third park of the day was a revisit, but I’d missed a cred there before – it wasn’t on RCDB at the time, but was probably in the park since it was in an area I didn’t go into – and another one had popped up since as well.

Foreigner Street

It’s not really a park name, but more the name of the general area. It’s a really weird place since it is just a bunch of attractions along a bunch of different roads, rather than having any real entrance and exit. Everything is just thrown in all over the place as well, so it’s very easy to miss stuff.

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I’d somehow completely missed the world’s biggest public toilet on my last visit. F**kin’ stank.

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I’d done the motorboike coaster and spinner last time, so didn’t bother again

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I’d also “discovered” this last time. It was all bright, shiny and new then, and a lot more open. It’s only been there a few years, but looks like s**te now. Just a kiddy thing anyway.

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The coaster which had definitely been added since my last trip was this amazing thing with a rotating Jesus* in the middle. When I saw the “unknown” coaster on RCDB, I thought it might have been one that I’d missed, but you can’t miss this thing on top of a hill, so it’s definitely new, though it didn’t seem it based on the state of the trains.

*May not actually be Jesus, but f**k knows what it's supposed to be.

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Quite annoyingly, it was inside the waterpark area rather than being a standalone attraction like most things. It was only a few quid to get in though, which was actually decent value considering you could stay in as long as you wanted and there was a fair bit of stuff. All of the water slides were running, but people were wearing full on wetsuits to ride them. I didn’t do any of the slides, but gave this thing a go because it looked hilarious.

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All very safe as well:

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I just had the kiddy coaster I’d missed last time to track down, but very close to it found this whole undercover kiddy area WITH A BONUS CRED!!!!!!!!!

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It was just a jungle mouse, but with a weird custom layout.

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Found the foreigners!

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Amazing souvenir painted terrapins.

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And the cred I probably missed last time.

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I’ll just chuck in some other stuff of the area. I’d hated it on my first visit, but I think I “got” it a bit more this time. It’s all just so f**ked up and weird, even for China.

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I was getting a taxi back to my hotel, but got the driver to drop me off at the nearby bridge but on the opposite side of the river so I could have a bit of a look.

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This was the area that I’d liked before, so I got a hotel just a few minutes’ walk away this time.

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It was a very good day then. Two brand new parks and three new creds at a revisited place for a total of nine new coasters, including an amazing woodie, one of the better wingriders, a f**ked-up inverting spinner, Jesus Coaster and an unlisted cred. Plus, I actually appreciated the city itself a lot more this time around.

One more short update for the next day.
 

gavin

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My flight back on the Sunday was in the early evening, giving most of the day to do other stuff. Coast2Coaster had an alpine coaster listed for Chongqing, but the website is usually s**t when it comes to pinning them properly on the map, usually just using a business address.

This one was no different, being pinned right in the city centre, which clearly couldn’t be right. Anyway, I managed to track it down – the people at Wiegand were very helpful when I emailed. They didn’t even know themselves where it was, so contacted their Chinese broker and got back to me.

South Hot Springs Park

There was a metro station a 10-minute taxi ride away, but I just got a taxi there since I didn’t know how much time I would need. Turns out it was fine. As soon as you arrive in the area, you can’t miss the cable car station and end of the alpine coaster track.

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The taxi had driven through a nice area right before hitting the cable car, so I backtracked slightly to have a look since I’d found the coaster already.

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It was all very quiet, which meant no waiting time for the cable car. There are a bunch of different options – one-way cable car, two-way cable car etc. – with the cable car up and coaster down option costing around a tenner.

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The cable car itself was pretty epic, taking around 15 minutes to get to the top of the mountain.

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The alpine coaster was difficult to photograph seeing as it winds down the mountain and through the forest. It was excellent though. It’s only the third one I’ve done, but was by far the best of those three. At 2,000m long, it’s China’s longest.

I’d seen pictures of some Chinese Alpine coasters having a “guide” at the front, with a train of cars behind, keeping the speeds down, so I was worried that might happen here, but it didn’t. I was just sent off by myself and had a perfect run at full speed with nobody else on the track at all.

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I had a wander around the area for about an hour. All very pleasant, and not many people around.

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I had quite a bit of time left, so had another run on the alpine coaster. At a tenner a pop, it was pricey, but then I figured that the one in Wales is the same (3 runs for 20 quid, but whatever), but is nowhere near as long. Plus you’ve got the cable car ride. It would be possible to walk up and just pay for the coaster down, but that wasn’t going to happen.

I decided to film this run. I don’t usually film anything since you can find videos for everything anyway and I only use a simple stills camera, so the quality for videos isn’t great. This thing was very much an unknown entity though.

Rather annoyingly, about three quarters of the way down there was a complete moron going stupidly slowly who ruined the run, so I haven’t even bothered to upload the video, but I suppose I could if anyone’s arsed.

Seriously, I’d been hanging around the top for a good 15 minutes with nobody going down, so she must’ve taken at least that long to get that far. I gave her a bit of a “nudge” at the end of the run. It ends with a fairly steep drop into the station, and she was just sitting at the top of it, the stupid twat.

I still had plenty of time and nothing else to really do, so decided to just use public transport to make a slow trip up to the airport. There were regular buses to the nearest metro station, which was on the same line as the airport but right at the other end, so it took about 90 minutes. Not sure why I’ve bothered including that information, but there it is anyway.

The end.
 

HeartlineCoaster

Theme Park Superhero
Coast2Coaster had an alpine coaster listed for Chongqing, but the website is usually s**t when it comes to pinning them properly on the map
This bothers me quite regularly. Even ones that would be in the same park or resort as stuff with regular coasters, the white pins can be miles off, but never by a consistent distance. The Nagashima Bobkart is in central Nagoya.
Good find. Great story.
 

gavin

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This bothers me quite regularly. Even ones that would be in the same park or resort as stuff with regular coasters, the white pins can be miles off, but never by a consistent distance. The Nagashima Bobkart is in central Nagoya.
Good find. Great story.
Yep, this one is pinned about 25km away slap bang in the middle of a busy city centre area surrounded by roads and buildings.

Same with the Alpine Coaster and Bobcart (world's longest) at Hot Go Park: just shoved in the middle of Shenyang.

Not that bobcarts count of course...
 
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