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:
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.
The whole thing is connected via escalator. They wouldn’t merit a picture, but…
The mine train is partway down the hill. RCDB had it down as not open yet though.
Some stuff I didn’t bother with:
I headed straight for the B&M wing coaster first, at the far back left of the park.
Ah f**k. That fence obviously didn’t seem good.
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.
View back across the lake.
So, two coasters spited and about 45 minutes to wait for the woodie, I was trying to find the 4th coaster when this happened:
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:
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.
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.
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.
Just going to bung a bunch of pictures in of the wing coaster.
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.
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:
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.
The woodie had been open for a while by this point.
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.
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.
I don’t often buy ORPs, but Happy Valley’s are very cheap and I liked this one.
The “hidden Mickey” bag it came in was almost as fab.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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.
The whole thing is connected via escalator. They wouldn’t merit a picture, but…
The mine train is partway down the hill. RCDB had it down as not open yet though.
Some stuff I didn’t bother with:
I headed straight for the B&M wing coaster first, at the far back left of the park.
Ah f**k. That fence obviously didn’t seem good.
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.
View back across the lake.
So, two coasters spited and about 45 minutes to wait for the woodie, I was trying to find the 4th coaster when this happened:
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:
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.
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.
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.
Just going to bung a bunch of pictures in of the wing coaster.
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.
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:
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.
The woodie had been open for a while by this point.
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.
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.
I don’t often buy ORPs, but Happy Valley’s are very cheap and I liked this one.
The “hidden Mickey” bag it came in was almost as fab.
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.
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.
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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