A couple of weekends ago, I ended up taking a four-day trip to China to get some new parks. Originally, the staff from school were taking a trip to Guangzhou on the Friday and Saturday, and we were given Monday off. I booked a train up to Ganzhou for the Saturday evening, after the work crap, coming back to Hong Kong on the Monday night.
We’d done a trip like this before, 5 years ago, and while it’s kind of bending my tourist visa, it would be easy enough to argue “tourism” if anything happened, which is unlikely, but still. However, a few days before the trip, I found out that we were also taking a huge group of students. This totally tipped the trip from “arguably tourism” into definite work, so there was no way I was going to risk it. I told the vice principal that I was very worried that the school might get into a lot of trouble if they asked me to break Chinese immigration law, and she very apologetically told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to join them. Result!
I decided to keep the Ganzhou stuff, but I now had a couple of extra days to play with, so I got a flight to Nanjing on the Thursday night. I’d been there before, but it was quite a while ago and, despite it being a major city, there hadn’t been any major parks at that time.
First stop then:
Happy Valley
I got to the park a little after opening to be greeted with quite a lot of coaches and crowds of kids on school trips. Not a great sign, but it turned out to be absolutely fine. They only had one ticket window open (most people just buy online now), and of course the solitary arsehole in front of me had to faff with countless questions. Just pay the money, get your ticket and f**k off!
It turns out that I was at the group booking window, so the ticket bint sent me to another, empty window, which she then came over to herself to sell me a ticket. Happy Valley nonsense.
There was also only one ticket gate/scanner open since others were being used for the school trips. People were also causing faff here by getting up to the gate and only then deciding to dig out their phones from the bottom of bags, find the relevant app and f**k about with QR codes. Every one, one after the other, despite seeing the exact same thing happening to every person in front of them. Why are people like this?
The school trip kids were very young, so I figured that low-capacity kiddy/family coasters needed to be done first. The Vekoma family boomerang was testing, but not due to open for a bit.
Have some pictures I took on the way to the next thing:
Nearby was a Vekoma family suspended coaster, which was due to open in 10 minutes, so I waited until they opened the queue line and got straight on to a front row ride. This turned out well since a huge group of kids arrived a couple of minutes before it opened as well.
Next up was Wilderness Escape, a very well-themed Jinma mine train which you can’t really see much of at all from off ride. It shares part of the theming with the ubiquitous Happy Valley huge water drop thing. The school kids were around here as well by this point, but not many were actually riding, so it was still basically a walk-on.
Time for a proper cred then: Forest Predator, a B&M wing coaster. I think this is a clone of the one in Chongqing. If not, it must be pretty close.
Happy Valley nonsense time! You’re stopped in the queue here, nowhere near the station. After a train has emptied and the station has been cleared of people, a miserable bitch of a ride-op slowly makes her way down here and does you the massive favour, which is clearly ruining her day, of actually letting you onto the coaster.
It was dead, so whatever really. It’s just funny at this point.
I was at the front of the queue to get into the queue, so headed for a front row ride first, then did a “quick” reride and headed for the back. One good thing here is that they weren’t assigning seats. I’ve mentioned this before, but if there’s no assigned seating on Chinese coasters, it’s often fairly easy to grab front or, especially, back row rides. This is where the faff works in your favour. I had a weird ride experience on the first ride when the random guy I was sitting with in the front row (two girls he was with were behind us) grabbed my hand on the way up the lift hill (“Sorry, my English is not good, but I’m very scary now”) and held it for the whole ride.
I’d had no idea but it turns out that the back row has backwards facing seats. There are no signs, no upcharge, no separate queue, no nothing. They’re just there. It must come as a bit of a shock to a lot of people if they haven’t been paying much attention.
It was my first backwards ride on one of these, and I’m glad I’ve had the experience I guess. Forwards is better though.
I had a look in here, which was a horror walk-through themed to Cthulu. Kind of.
I stood in the following spot for way too long to try and get some pictures. Worryingly, no trains were coming through on the Intamin, Light of Revenge.
In previous posts, a couple of us have pointed out the improvements in OCT’s / Happy Valley’s websites, which now have scheduled ride closures clearly announced. You can happily ignore these:
According to the website, the ride was open from 11am. Nope. Closed for “maintenance” a nearby flat ride was also unexpectedly closed for maintenance, but there were actually a couple of people doing maintenance, and the sign out front had an expected opening time. Not here though. This is purely speculation on my part, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because of the accident on the S&S launcher at their Shenzhen park a few days prior. Different manufacturer, different launch system and no way that a second train needs to be worried about, but this is Happy Valley, so…
Anyway, it’s close enough to a Cheetah Hunt clone, which won’t excite many people, but I’m one of the few people who seem to really like it. I would’ve been more pissed off if it hadn’t been a near clone, but this was still a total bummer.
At some point I went back to the family boomerang, which had a whole train’s wait, but was actually being operated somewhat efficiently.
I’ll just chuck some other pictures in. I didn’t do the 5D cinema thanks to just missing one show and not being arsed to wait around for the next one. At least I think/hope it was just a cinema and not a dark ride. The signage seemed to suggest so. There was an aquarium/indoor zoo which was different for a Happy Valley park.
I didn’t hang around after that, getting out of the park in the early afternoon. Despite Happy Valley’s infamously crappy operations – admittedly no worse that most other Chinese parks - I usually quite like them. This one just didn’t hit right with me at all though. Even taking the closed coaster out of the equation, I found it all a bit dead and soulless. I really liked the B&M though.
Not too far away was an indoor park from Wanda, inside one of their massive shopping malls. They sold all their parks to Sunac, but it seems that some (all?) of the indoor parks still keep the Wanda brand.
Wanda Theme Park
It goes without saying that I went into the mall at completely the wrong end, so it was a good 10-minute walk to find the park. First impressions were good though; it looks gorgeous and is a bit of a wow moment when going from a bland shopping mall into this:
There was nobody here. I caught the Disk-O running with a couple of people on it, but otherwise I pretty much had the place to myself.
There’s a Zamperla motorbike coaster.
Which wasn’t open.
Up an escalator, there’s another coaster, a family spinner thing:
Which wasn’t open.
F**k this place then. The spinner seemed quite clearly SBNO. I asked about the motorbike coaster opening later, but was getting quite evasive answers, which I took to mean “No, but we can’t say that.” The park was too far away from the city to bother taking a gamble on a return visit, so that was that.
It was still early, so I did a revisit to an “if there’s time” park, a zoo I’d been to before, but which has since replaced a cred with something new.
Hongshan Forest Zoo
This is a really decent zoo, not just by Chinese standards.
The animals have really good enclosures. Spot the pandas:
They’re also very good on education, with information in both Chinese and English including lots about the cruelty of certain Chinese practices regarding animal welfare, bulls**t “medicine” etc.
I already had this cred and didn’t need a reride:
They used to have a Jinma spinner, but that has been removed and replaced with a Jinma spinner. The old one was the ZXC-24A model, and the replacement is the ZXC-24C model. It was massively different.
There were some +1s that I’d been planning to tick off the next day, but decided to get them out of the way since they were pretty much on the way back to the hotel anyway.
Pu Tien Island Paradise
I didn’t spot that name being used anywhere, but it’s a small amusement park section of the quite massive Xuanwu Lake Park. It’s also really far from the main entrance, but being on a separate island has no easy way to get to it more quickly than a 15-minute walk. The park itself was lovely, though School trip central again.
The cred was closed, and, judging by the dead leaves in the cars, had been for some time.
15 minutes back to the park entrance then, and onto the final place of the day.
Baima Park
Again, I came in at the wrong end, so had a bit of a walk to the amusement park area.
The place was dead, and didn’t even seem open, but it was.
The cred looked pretty closed, but there was a ride op in the booth. Excellent. I asked her where to buy tickets and she pointed me towards the main entrance (I’d come in from the opposite side). Yep, there’s a ticket booth with two windows open, something which Happy Valley couldn’t manage.
The front of the glorious park, massively overstaffed ticket booth to the right:
I did what I always do at these ticket booths, held up a picture of the cred and held up a finger for “one”. It was “closed for maintenance”. Why is there a ride up sitting up there then? Why did she send me to the ticket booth? Ok, technically she had answered my question of “where can I buy tickets”, but why the f**k did she think I’d climbed the stairs to her booth to ask her specifically?
I missed out on this, which actually looked ok for a crappy Chinese +1.
It was back to the hotel after what had been an exhausting, but ultimately very unfulfilling day. There was the potential for 10 new creds that day, and I only ended up with 5. It had to happen sooner or later I guess. I’ve been considerably lucky with the small, crappy parks in the past, so this day was always going to happen at some point. The only real disappointment (apart from a crappy cred count boost) was Light of Revenge, though I guess Wanda really pissed me off as well.
So yeah, not a great day and made me worry for the following day in Nanjing as well. That’ll be the next bit.
We’d done a trip like this before, 5 years ago, and while it’s kind of bending my tourist visa, it would be easy enough to argue “tourism” if anything happened, which is unlikely, but still. However, a few days before the trip, I found out that we were also taking a huge group of students. This totally tipped the trip from “arguably tourism” into definite work, so there was no way I was going to risk it. I told the vice principal that I was very worried that the school might get into a lot of trouble if they asked me to break Chinese immigration law, and she very apologetically told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to join them. Result!
I decided to keep the Ganzhou stuff, but I now had a couple of extra days to play with, so I got a flight to Nanjing on the Thursday night. I’d been there before, but it was quite a while ago and, despite it being a major city, there hadn’t been any major parks at that time.
First stop then:
Happy Valley
I got to the park a little after opening to be greeted with quite a lot of coaches and crowds of kids on school trips. Not a great sign, but it turned out to be absolutely fine. They only had one ticket window open (most people just buy online now), and of course the solitary arsehole in front of me had to faff with countless questions. Just pay the money, get your ticket and f**k off!
It turns out that I was at the group booking window, so the ticket bint sent me to another, empty window, which she then came over to herself to sell me a ticket. Happy Valley nonsense.
There was also only one ticket gate/scanner open since others were being used for the school trips. People were also causing faff here by getting up to the gate and only then deciding to dig out their phones from the bottom of bags, find the relevant app and f**k about with QR codes. Every one, one after the other, despite seeing the exact same thing happening to every person in front of them. Why are people like this?
The school trip kids were very young, so I figured that low-capacity kiddy/family coasters needed to be done first. The Vekoma family boomerang was testing, but not due to open for a bit.
Have some pictures I took on the way to the next thing:
Nearby was a Vekoma family suspended coaster, which was due to open in 10 minutes, so I waited until they opened the queue line and got straight on to a front row ride. This turned out well since a huge group of kids arrived a couple of minutes before it opened as well.
Next up was Wilderness Escape, a very well-themed Jinma mine train which you can’t really see much of at all from off ride. It shares part of the theming with the ubiquitous Happy Valley huge water drop thing. The school kids were around here as well by this point, but not many were actually riding, so it was still basically a walk-on.
Time for a proper cred then: Forest Predator, a B&M wing coaster. I think this is a clone of the one in Chongqing. If not, it must be pretty close.
Happy Valley nonsense time! You’re stopped in the queue here, nowhere near the station. After a train has emptied and the station has been cleared of people, a miserable bitch of a ride-op slowly makes her way down here and does you the massive favour, which is clearly ruining her day, of actually letting you onto the coaster.
It was dead, so whatever really. It’s just funny at this point.
I was at the front of the queue to get into the queue, so headed for a front row ride first, then did a “quick” reride and headed for the back. One good thing here is that they weren’t assigning seats. I’ve mentioned this before, but if there’s no assigned seating on Chinese coasters, it’s often fairly easy to grab front or, especially, back row rides. This is where the faff works in your favour. I had a weird ride experience on the first ride when the random guy I was sitting with in the front row (two girls he was with were behind us) grabbed my hand on the way up the lift hill (“Sorry, my English is not good, but I’m very scary now”) and held it for the whole ride.
I’d had no idea but it turns out that the back row has backwards facing seats. There are no signs, no upcharge, no separate queue, no nothing. They’re just there. It must come as a bit of a shock to a lot of people if they haven’t been paying much attention.
It was my first backwards ride on one of these, and I’m glad I’ve had the experience I guess. Forwards is better though.
I had a look in here, which was a horror walk-through themed to Cthulu. Kind of.
I stood in the following spot for way too long to try and get some pictures. Worryingly, no trains were coming through on the Intamin, Light of Revenge.
In previous posts, a couple of us have pointed out the improvements in OCT’s / Happy Valley’s websites, which now have scheduled ride closures clearly announced. You can happily ignore these:
According to the website, the ride was open from 11am. Nope. Closed for “maintenance” a nearby flat ride was also unexpectedly closed for maintenance, but there were actually a couple of people doing maintenance, and the sign out front had an expected opening time. Not here though. This is purely speculation on my part, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because of the accident on the S&S launcher at their Shenzhen park a few days prior. Different manufacturer, different launch system and no way that a second train needs to be worried about, but this is Happy Valley, so…
Anyway, it’s close enough to a Cheetah Hunt clone, which won’t excite many people, but I’m one of the few people who seem to really like it. I would’ve been more pissed off if it hadn’t been a near clone, but this was still a total bummer.
At some point I went back to the family boomerang, which had a whole train’s wait, but was actually being operated somewhat efficiently.
I’ll just chuck some other pictures in. I didn’t do the 5D cinema thanks to just missing one show and not being arsed to wait around for the next one. At least I think/hope it was just a cinema and not a dark ride. The signage seemed to suggest so. There was an aquarium/indoor zoo which was different for a Happy Valley park.
I didn’t hang around after that, getting out of the park in the early afternoon. Despite Happy Valley’s infamously crappy operations – admittedly no worse that most other Chinese parks - I usually quite like them. This one just didn’t hit right with me at all though. Even taking the closed coaster out of the equation, I found it all a bit dead and soulless. I really liked the B&M though.
Not too far away was an indoor park from Wanda, inside one of their massive shopping malls. They sold all their parks to Sunac, but it seems that some (all?) of the indoor parks still keep the Wanda brand.
Wanda Theme Park
It goes without saying that I went into the mall at completely the wrong end, so it was a good 10-minute walk to find the park. First impressions were good though; it looks gorgeous and is a bit of a wow moment when going from a bland shopping mall into this:
There was nobody here. I caught the Disk-O running with a couple of people on it, but otherwise I pretty much had the place to myself.
There’s a Zamperla motorbike coaster.
Which wasn’t open.
Up an escalator, there’s another coaster, a family spinner thing:
Which wasn’t open.
F**k this place then. The spinner seemed quite clearly SBNO. I asked about the motorbike coaster opening later, but was getting quite evasive answers, which I took to mean “No, but we can’t say that.” The park was too far away from the city to bother taking a gamble on a return visit, so that was that.
It was still early, so I did a revisit to an “if there’s time” park, a zoo I’d been to before, but which has since replaced a cred with something new.
Hongshan Forest Zoo
This is a really decent zoo, not just by Chinese standards.
The animals have really good enclosures. Spot the pandas:
They’re also very good on education, with information in both Chinese and English including lots about the cruelty of certain Chinese practices regarding animal welfare, bulls**t “medicine” etc.
I already had this cred and didn’t need a reride:
They used to have a Jinma spinner, but that has been removed and replaced with a Jinma spinner. The old one was the ZXC-24A model, and the replacement is the ZXC-24C model. It was massively different.
There were some +1s that I’d been planning to tick off the next day, but decided to get them out of the way since they were pretty much on the way back to the hotel anyway.
Pu Tien Island Paradise
I didn’t spot that name being used anywhere, but it’s a small amusement park section of the quite massive Xuanwu Lake Park. It’s also really far from the main entrance, but being on a separate island has no easy way to get to it more quickly than a 15-minute walk. The park itself was lovely, though School trip central again.
The cred was closed, and, judging by the dead leaves in the cars, had been for some time.
15 minutes back to the park entrance then, and onto the final place of the day.
Baima Park
Again, I came in at the wrong end, so had a bit of a walk to the amusement park area.
The place was dead, and didn’t even seem open, but it was.
The cred looked pretty closed, but there was a ride op in the booth. Excellent. I asked her where to buy tickets and she pointed me towards the main entrance (I’d come in from the opposite side). Yep, there’s a ticket booth with two windows open, something which Happy Valley couldn’t manage.
The front of the glorious park, massively overstaffed ticket booth to the right:
I did what I always do at these ticket booths, held up a picture of the cred and held up a finger for “one”. It was “closed for maintenance”. Why is there a ride up sitting up there then? Why did she send me to the ticket booth? Ok, technically she had answered my question of “where can I buy tickets”, but why the f**k did she think I’d climbed the stairs to her booth to ask her specifically?
I missed out on this, which actually looked ok for a crappy Chinese +1.
It was back to the hotel after what had been an exhausting, but ultimately very unfulfilling day. There was the potential for 10 new creds that day, and I only ended up with 5. It had to happen sooner or later I guess. I’ve been considerably lucky with the small, crappy parks in the past, so this day was always going to happen at some point. The only real disappointment (apart from a crappy cred count boost) was Light of Revenge, though I guess Wanda really pissed me off as well.
So yeah, not a great day and made me worry for the following day in Nanjing as well. That’ll be the next bit.
