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JAPAN: Lots of food, creds and lols

peep

CF Legend
^Ha, you're totally right, signage just looked so similar to me that I assumed it was the same thing.


Day 15 - Saturday 21st

I believe we started the day by grabbing some breakfast at a local cafe. We then made our way on to the trains until we arrived at Hirakata park. It was pretty easy to get to, once at the train station it was just a short walk to the park gates.

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Once inside the park there was this quite cool mountain attraction, we never really found out what happens inside though as it was an up-charge attraction.

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Still, we made our way through the very quite arcade area over to our first cred. The park seemed like it had some nice patches but was all a bit dated and not exactly well maintained. Oh and the park was pretty dead, looking back though I think this was down to the ridiculous heat.

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The first rollercoaster we came across was "Fantastic Coaster Rowdy". A random crocodile themed coaster. One of the trains is pink and one is normal green. Nic was pretty annoyed that we got on the green one.

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So what can I tell you about Fantastic Coaster Rowdy? I wouldn't say it was fantastic, more... peculiar. The layout isn't very exciting and there's a random tower that you go through that must have been a last minute ditch attempt at theming the ride experience or adding an extra thrill? However, for a family coaster it was ok and there was one kid that was totally obsessed with it. Like I lost count as to how many times he went round and each time he still had this massive grin of "that's the best ride in the World... must ride it forever" - The father didn't look as pleased and just let the kid re-ride by himself :p

I felt like I was dying from the heat so after taking a few photos for the CF park guide of some of the flat rides I forced Nic to let us dive into the nearest dark ride.

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derp

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We had no idea what would lurk inside this rather innocent looking building. First we boarded one of the little trains...

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Then our journey into mega-budget-small-world-but-not-circus? began and just... wow....

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It was so awful it was kind of awesome?

Outside some panic-struck Octopus action was occurring...

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The heat was still giving me grief so I dived into the haunted ghost train thing. Nic didn't venture into the unknown. It was another one of those creepy "wear headphones with oddly well designed creepy audio" ghost trains.

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The fun looking characters on the building are a lie

We then headed up some stairs. Urgh, it felt so burdenous. However at the top of said stairs was an Intamin drop tower... yay!

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Empty park meant we walked straight on and straight into a seat made out of molten lava. It felt like the rise to the top took forever, the views from the top were pretty great and then the airtime (not to mention that sweet, lovely cool breeze) on the way down was fantastic.

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Another odd Japanese Freezer attraction was lurking in the shade, it looked like a portaloo. Once inside we laughed a LOT. It literally was designed as if you were shrunk down and went into a fridge freezer so they had all these large vegetables and soy sauce bottles. It was also absolute freezing, pretty sure going from one extreme temp to the other is bad for you.

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So, now slightly frozen it was time to ride this thing...

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Red Falcon. Oh, Red Falcon. We managed to get in the front row for our first ride. I took the opportunity to film a POV. When I film them we try to keep quiet and omg to not laugh at some of the banking on this was just hard. I'll let you watch...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFR5dqdxqr0[/youtube]

Yeah I know, the video looks/sounds turd. That's me trying to fix it and actually making it worse. Anyway, yeah so the ride itself was a little pants but that stupid banking amused us so much we ran round and did it again.

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Next we jumped into what I have dubbed "fairy card walkthrough" because it's themed to fairies, you walk through the attraction and are handed a card where you then walk aimlessly around feeling lost, scanning your card at certain computers to play a game, totally not understand what the game is about or how to play it, lose said game, walk around lost a bit more before leaving. Basically, know your Japanese if you want to play in here.

On top of the building was the rather standard spinning wild mouse cred. So we climbed the stairs and rode it. It was exactly like you think it'd ride apart from it didn't spin. Oddly enough, I think it was one of the more popular attractions in the park.

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So what's next? It's hot, that looks like a log flume containing a splash into water where you get wet, decision made...

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It turned out to be yet another Japanese water ride that was reluctant to get you wet. There was a lot of meandering with this one, it sort of went amongst the supports of Red Falcon in a bid to feel like it was worth riding. I dunno, I was hot and bothered and needed a break.

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This area of the park loved having rides over-lapping

What's this? Vending machine has uber energy drink I had become obsessed with! *Purchases like a mad man and guzzles down very quickly* Now refreshed I was able to continue. Up some stairs was a couple of flat rides, then some more stairs to some child friendly rides themed to wizards. There was a cred, it was ridden.

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As you can see, this is clearly the most exciting coaster you'll see in this report. [/lies] It was a rather bare, standard kids cred and a lovely +1 on our goon lists.

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We have no shame

There was then lots more stairs, a sort of arena/show area and then this...

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Could this woodie be the gold hidden at the top of the park? With barely anyone else in the area we pretty much walked straight on and was able to film a POV...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD-Ti1yXwYA[/youtube]

The video may make it look shaky but it was a great ride. It was just really fun, some decent pops of air time and very re-ridable. We went round 3 times, annoyingly we never managed to get a back row ride though due to this kid and his father who kept running round like us, always beating us to the back row.

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We then found a long path which had some animal enclosures. It was a little random and the conditions the animals were living in wasn't fantastic.

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Ooooo, some rapids, they look good

We found our way back to near the entrance where a few indoor attractions were. We rode the 3D laser attraction first. For the amount of space it takes up it was quite impressive and was definitely the best version we saw in Japan. You sit in these little carts that face you inwards and it sort of does and oval track. So there are actually loads of animatronics and decent scenes of things you shoot at but inbetween the scenes are 3D screens with more things to shoot at. I think the combination of the two and the decent up-keep of it just made it really enjoyable. After getting off we noticed there were prizes, didn't take us long to make note of how high a score you needed and head back in to win something. We didn't win, but the possibility excited us and made it that bit better.

In the same building is another Pokemon-like card thing. Oh we were getting addicted to these. Turns out this was a version 2. It was also by far the busiest attraction in the whole park. No lie. If it wasn't for the massive queue of kids with wallets of these cards that kept going round building their collection we would have just been doing the same. The fact they actually had huge wallets of these cards we cottoned on as to how big this thing must be. To be honest, if I had loads of these places near me, especially when I was their age, I would be there all the time. This one was also a little different to the other one but I can't remember what that difference was now lol.

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We were losing interest in the park as a whole so we popped into the arcade. They had a cool Pikachu game...

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They had like a ball drop thing (hard to explain). Nic had a go and sort of failed. I thought it looked easy and then I saw they had Agent P cushions. OMG. "I TOTALLY NEED THAT IN MY LIFE!" I thought, without thinking of the consequences of having to carry it everywhere and somehow get it home. I pay the gentleman behind the counter 100 yen. I get the first ball in the slot. Yes! Just need another 3 and I have 4 more goes. I fail on the second one. Boo! Then my heart starts racing and before I know it I successfully get the last 3 in the slot and I am now the proud owner of an Agent P cushion. Go me!

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So much JOY!
The thing that made this all more awesome is that the guy behind the counter totally loved us and knew what I was on about as soon as I was like "AGENT P!!!!! ARGH!!!!" When he was making all these noises to sort of put me off (in a friendly amusing manner) I could have missed, but I didn't and he looked just as happy as me.

So after that moment of awesome I was like "those rapids looked cool". So we went and rode the rapids and they were not cool. They looked cool, wet, moist, choppy, exciting. But they weren't. It was yet more lies in the land of dry water rides. DRYPIDS WHY DO YOU EXIST!

Still, there was a tunnel, that was exciting.


We then proceeded to leave the park via the gift shop, cue an hour of Nic being like a big kid in a sweet shop when she discovers a whole area of Totoro toys. The below is a reanactment by a pony of Nic shopping for Totoro shizz....

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We then leave the shop where Nic's purse feels a lot lighter but we're both very happy with our new gifts. To be honest that evening my mind is a complete blank so I'm gonna go talk to Nic and might let you in on what we got up to if either of us can remember.


Thanks for reading.
 

peep

CF Legend
I'm not, it was just the first gif that I came across that worked :p

Sent from my C6903 using Tapatalk
 

Norma

Roller Poster
Thanks for your nice sharing, and i want to travelling in Japan, and during my travel i will visit in this area.
Its so beautiful and perfect for all travelling needs.
 

peep

CF Legend
Thanks for the kind comments.

I've talked to Nic who managed to get rid of my memory block so I'll finish off the previous report first...

As we left the park so early we decided to head back to the hotel and chill for a bit. The next day we had originally planned to visit Parque Espana for their sexy B&M invert. However we realised that it was going to be costly and annoying to get to by public transport. So we then spent hours on our tablets in the hotel foyer trying to find out what else we could do in our next area, Nagoya. The hotel foyer was playing this ridiculous album of Michael Jackson songs in a music box style which was amusing and also a little annoying. Anyway we finally discovered a zoo in Nagoya which had some creds and also looked like a decent zoo. With our new plan of action we went out in the search of food and entertainment.

We grabbed some ice cream at a place near our hotel which was nom before splitting. I went into the epic arcade and spent a fortune on coin push machines and Nic spent more money on tat in Daiso.

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Day 16 - Sunday 22nd

We got up at a semi decent time before we checked out and headed to the main train station to catch our train to Nagoya. The train journey is around an hour long from Osaka. Our hotel in Nagoya was only a small walk from the main train station (we're good at booking hotels). We left our bags at the hotel before catching a local train to the zoo.

We had arrived at Nagoya Higashiyama Zoo at a fairly decent time. To get from the station to the zoo was a very short walk. It was also a really busy day for the zoo so we had pretty much joined the masses heading round to the gates. The queue for tickets was a little burdenous but it was ok.

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Once inside the gates there was a monorail that took you over to the back of the park but we weren't interested about that area just yet. The zoo is split into 4 areas. The rides area, the childrens zoo, the main zoo and the botanical gardens. I'll talk more about the overall zoo soon but obviously we went straight up to the rides area. Oh and it was definitely up...

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I have never seen so many stairs. Up at the top of these stairs though Slope Shooter was awaiting us. This is certainly a "cred or not a cred" debate. But we still rode it and I filmed a POV...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haH76vM8K2k[/youtube]

It's a very bouncy little ride. I do love it's setting on the hillside.

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So yeah, do you think it's a +1 or just a fun ride? It certainly coasts.

So after that we climbed another set of ridiculous stairs (as you can see in the POV) to find the rest of the rides. First we took a breather at the top of the stairs on a bench because they were tiring. After a little break we continued onwards and joined the queue for Jet Coaster. This is the zoo's biggest rollercoaster and is just random, lots of straight track and the ending is very RCT...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr7_phBjtO0[/youtube]

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The extremely long queue

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The area was overall quite dated with a few flat rides aimed at kids spewn around the area. They also had more Togo animal things...

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They had a monorail ride themed to an old steam train...

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Down some more stairs was the zoo's third coaster, a powered family coaster themed to a bear. It was the newest ride and it was already 10 years old.

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Cute theming detail on the stairs up to the station

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Make of this what you will

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I have a theory that Japanese parks think it's a good omen to have a swinging ship ride and call it something to do with Vikings

I lied, they had a brand new ride for 2013, a swinging chair ride themed to a very happy giraffe. I liked the look of it. I should note that we had a limited amount of tokens so we didn't want to use them for this.

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Beware the bear witch

Nic does not care about the bear witch....

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They had another of those tiny and sickly fun houses but it was closed for one reason or another. Someone probably got so sick they threw up and drowned a fellow guest.

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Part of me felt like I was transported back into the 70s

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We then finally started to make our way around the zoo. It turns out the zoo is absolutely mahoosive and takes a lot of time to walk around. Oh and there are more stairs, lots of them. Have a mass of pics...

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Prairie dogs?

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Porcupine!

The above enclosure looks awful but it was in an area under a lot of construction and this was clearly not finished yet. Actually, it was fantastic to see so much funding clearly going into the zoo.

We came across a big building with a small aquarium in it...

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That big building was a separate attraction that we got included with our admission. It's just a huge tower with a lot of radio and broadcast transmitters. If provides some great views. But first we got distracted by some big ol' tortoise...

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Which led us back into the previous building to discover a whole floor of nocturnal animals kept in conditions so they tend to be happy and move about. We dubbed it the kawaii room...

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Obviously being dark that was the only decent pic I got and it's not even looking at the camera lol. But OMG we saw some Brush-tailed Bettong, we'd never seen them before but they were certainly kawaii material.

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The kawaii place led us out into this large greenhouse which was very tropical. They had an assortment of crocs...

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The bridge then led us back inside into a large reptile area.

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I don't know what it ate but it was massive

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Oblivion lizard

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Poison dart frogs are amazing <3

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Gross

So we then exited out of that building and went over to that large tower I was on about earlier...

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There's two lifts and a queue tends to form while you wait for the next one to arrive.

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The view was pretty awesome

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Japan loves it's elevated roads

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A small part of the zoo

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Amazing mosaic on yep.. another stairway

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I love that there's an old tale about the lake

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The lake was really busy

We took a little break from walking around and grabbed some ice cream. We sat by the lake and there were these fish making huge splashes (actually jumping out of the water) for food, it was very entertaining even if I never caught it on camera.

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Below is what Nic described to me as 'raccoons with balls' - some sort of Studio Ghibli reference - apparently they're a thing in Japan but this was the first time we saw them.

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Nic wanted this

I can't remember what the below are but they were entertaining. Excellent at climbing.

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WHAT DO YOU SAY???? - Probably 'bugger off I want some sleep' judging by it's expression

There was a massive monkey enclosure, you could get pretty close to them by going over to a glassed up viewing area.

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There was a large walk-through aviary with a few types of bird inside. I have no idea what the below are but their colour was striking.

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This Macaw wouldn't shut up and was very loud.

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A logo with a koala on it? Does that mean they have koala bears???? *Goes inside* "SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

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Oh and the park also had some polar bears. One was inside trying to keep cool. A keeper was feeding it through the fence.

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It was amazing being able to get so close.

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Nom nom nom said the giraffe

The penguins were really popular. They also had quite a few different species which I found exciting as in the UK we only ever see that one breed

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I'm fabulous darling

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Sad polar bear is too hot and hungry.

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Food!


They actually had quite a few bears. I was able to get some great pictures of them...

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The above was a queue for being able to get up close to the lions. I don't know if they actually saw any though because we went round to the side and found loads in the small cages at the back.

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The fab new elephant enclosure under construction

During the construction of the new enclosure you could still see them in their old cages. We timed it well and found a keeper feeding some of them.

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We decided to use up the last of our ride tokens so we went through the mirror maze which was fun and we rode Jet coaster again.

We then found even more animals.

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I ponder of the life outside of these walls

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OMG an actual Orangutan! Was there any species this zoo didn't have?

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Elephant just takes the fame in her stride

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We soon left and went back to the hotel to check in properly. Considering the visit to the zoo was so last minute you couldn't believe how happy we were to discover it's actually one of the best zoos we've visited. Just the sheer scale of the park was amazing and the amount of various species was exciting to discover. It's a shame the quality of the enclosures varied so much but it looked like something they were changing and if all the zoo soon gets the quality of their new elephant enclosure then it's going to be amazing in a couple of years.

Once checked into our very tiny business hotel room we went in search of food. Behind the large train station we found a cool bar restaurant. It was one of those typical Japanese places you might see in TV shows and films. The atmosphere was loud and the amount of sake drank was ridiculous. The food was great though.

We then got some more convenience store creds (to pick up some snacks) and headed back for some much needed sleep after our huge trek. Nic was very tired...

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I had read trip advisor reviews saying they just stacked the chairs on the table to make room. Until I saw the room I couldn't picture why lol


Until next time kids, thanks for reading!
 

Jordanovichy

Credit Whore 2016
Love it :D just so much wow and wooo. So many questions but right now I can't be arsed to quote everything and ask but I will soon ;)

Keep the days coming :p
 

gavin

Moderator
Staff member
Moderator
Social Media Team
That "fab" new elephant enclosure looks ridiculously small, the fact that you said "koala bears" annoys me, and your judgement on finding a ten-a-penny orang-utan in a zoo OMFG AMAZING makes me question your sanity.

That zoo looks vile.

Apart from that; carry on.
 

peep

CF Legend
Day 17 - Monday 23rd

Being such a large park we wanted to make sure we arrived for opening so we had a fairly early start, grabbed some grub at the hotel before making our way to the Nagoya bus station. The bus station is located in a building next to the train station and has several floors with a bunch of cafes etc attached to it. From there we caught a coach straight to Nagashima Spa Land which took around 45 minutes.

Once at the park there was quite a large group of people already waiting to get in and there was a whole bunch of English speaking teenagers which was interesting to listen to (I think they were Australian). This is also the point where I freaked out because in the rush to get ready I managed to leave my camera's battery in the hotel room so I had a camera with no battery, very frustrating. I still had my video camera but I hate taking photos with it, I caved in and used it later on but for now I'll be borrowing Nic's photos...

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The park has a slight obsession with Peter Rabbit

Once inside the park we made our way through the kids area picking up the two family coasters on the way. The first one was a standard Tivoli and the other one was a little powered coaster themed to Peter Rabbit. The kids area was actually nicely done with some areas looking fairly new.

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Opposite the Peter Rabbit cred was a huge indoor Pokemon thing (totally wanted to do it but it was an upcharge <//3 ). Outside Pikachu was outside greeting guests. My inner child went mental at the sight of him and we soon ran over to grab a picture. Oh and his ears totally moved which was amazing.

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It was then on to our first large coaster of the day, White Cyclone. We had to wait quite a while before we got on which was a little annoying. When we finally got on we managed to get seats in the back row. I really enjoyed it but if memory serves, Nic didn't. I thought there was lots of air time and a decent speed kept throughout the very long ride.

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Such a massive beast

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Glad we didn't have to queue all of this

We then went in search of the next coaster which turned out to be Corkscrew. I remember this not being very good but can't remember why.

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Still, as you can see in the above picture, the landscaping of the park is quite nice, basic but well kept. Next up was Steel Dragon 2000.

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To say we were excited about the new B&M trains would be an understatement but we had to wait out another fairly long queue first.

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The new seats were comfortable and very roomy which is great for a hyper like this. However the ride itself was similar to other Morgans I've ridden, poorly designed (doesn't know what a curve is), a little rough and not as fun as other coasters. I know this is all down to personal preference because I think Nic enjoyed it. We did both agree that the new trains didn't stop the ride from being a bit rough in places. I dread to think what it used to ride like.

Outside of Steel Dragon is a little area of old flat rides...

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They all seemed out of action too but some of them woke up later in the day. We soon found ourselves at Ultra Twister, a pipeline. Yay for pipeline coasters! It has very recently been moved to a different part of the park and given a new lick of paint so it looked great. It also rode as well as the other pipeline coaster we went on. There needs to be more of these crazy contraptions.

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We spotted this little animal running about, any guesses as to what it is?

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The station confuses me, the cars are only hanging on to track on one side

We were getting hungry by this point so went in search of food. There weren't many options but we finally agreed to eat at a very average restaurant in the centre of the park. Afterwards we continued the cred run by going on Looping Star, a Schwarzkopf.

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It was actually pretty decent and we both enjoyed it, have the foliage close to the track made it quite exciting.

The next cred was Shuttle Loop, a classic Schwarzkopf launch coaster. The only other one I've ridden is the one at Walibi Belgium which now has the new launch system installed so it was going to be interesting to see how different a flywheel launch would be.

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It was really good, the vertical loop was just as intense as on Psyke Underground and the launch was great.

So after two great Schwarzkopf coasters it was time for Jet Coaster, otherwise known as the oddest coaster in the park. It was made by Togo and it's just peculiar. I've dug up a POV because there's so many trees in the way it was hard to get good photos of...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLYHz-k9w54[/youtube]
The most exciting and intense ride you'll ever see

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Bored of waiting for the brown coaster

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Crazy caterpillar we found in the queue

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Was totally expecting a splash effect here

So yeah, Jet coaster is odd (just look at the supports).

Next to the park's lake was not just one Viking themed swinging ship...

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But THREE!...

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All right next to each other. Does it make any sense? Of course not, I'm assuming that Japan had some fantastic Viking themed swinging ship ride sale which is why every park has one and why Nagashima has 3.

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We then faffed around a bit including the huge tat shop.

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*Shrugs*

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Cred biscuits, what's not to love

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To continue the theme of poor coasters we queued up for both sides of the wild mouse coaster. Pretty standard affair, just frustrating that we had to waste valuable time queuing for them. Oh well, +2.

Now we'd ridden all of the coasters it was time to try out some of the other rides that the park had to offer. We started with Freefall, a 1st gen Intamin drop tower.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7_LVfyLOwU[/youtube]

Scary stuff. This is the second one I've ridden and it doesn't stop being terrifying (I'm fine with normal drop towers). The next flat ride we decided to go on was the new jet ski ride. I quite like these rides, you can get some decent forces on them when you fling out from the middle. We were lucky though as on our ride one of the skis wasn't able to pull back into the middle as the cable snapped, leaving a guy and his son looking a little worried and stranded out in the water. We thought it was hilarious though, mainly because the ride hadn't been open long and it had already snapped (unless this is a regular thing with this ride type?).

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Stranded

They finally managed to pull them in safely and later on we saw several staff members looking rather perplexed while trying to figure out how to fix it.

The next flat ride was the UFO flyer. It was quite well themed and it was similar to the awesome pterodactyl flyer thing at Parque de Attracciones in Madrid. I filmed it because it's awesome.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZDYDkv0krk[/youtube]

The sun was starting to set which created a really nice atmosphere within the park. We decided to hop on the ferris wheel. The views were stunning.

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We decided to go ride Bobkart next which was one of those electric bobsled things like at Toverland. It was really long and was quite fun to do in the dark.

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The Pipeline coaster had some fairy lights on part of it which looked really nice.

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It just looked so nice we decided to have 2 goes on it. It was getting close to when our coach was going to leave so we made a speedy dash over to the bus stop. I liked Nagashima Spa Land, it was a nice park and there's clearly been a decent amount of investment the last couple of years so it'll be interesting to see what happens in the near future. The park did feel really clean and nicely landscaped (if a little bland) but it's a nice day out. We had tried to have a second go on Steel Dragon but they closed it early for unknown reasons.

Thanks for reading, we're getting close to the end now!
 

Jordanovichy

Credit Whore 2016
Peep said:

Did you steal that child?

Peep said:
Yay for pipeline coasters!

I've always wanted to ride a pipeline coaster, where's the nearest to the UK?

Peep said:

For worry of jokes about Nic I'm gonna go ahead and say beaver...but I assume that's what you want us to say? ;)

Peep said:
The next cred was Shuttle Loop, a classic Schwarzkopf launch coaster. The only other one I've ridden is the one at Walibi Belgium which now has the new launch system installed so it was going to be interesting to see how different a flywheel launch would be.

What's the difference between this and the one at BPB? It's the other way round I know that, is it just the make? I forget the make of Revolution... (arrow dynamics?)

Peep said:

This picture is just amazing. The coaster looks absolutely fantastic. And at dusk? Wow or wow. The lights look amazing. Me wanna ride.

And to finish, another amazing report, John, it looks like the park you've covered so far that I'd most like to visit but in saying that I wanna visit them all :p
 

Nic

Strata Poster
Sorry to disappoint, but It wasn't a beaver - it had the wrong tail. Best guess is that it was a Coypu (or Nutria if you're a silly American)
 

Nic

Strata Poster
Forgot you're a fish goon.

The zoo has 3 creds. The aquarium has none. Simple maths.
 

TilenB

Strata Poster
Nic said:
Sorry to disappoint, but It wasn't a beaver - it had the wrong tail. Best guess is that it was a Coypu (or Nutria if you're a silly American)

It looks more like a marmot to me. It's hard to tell, since I'm not really sure how big the animal was...
 

peep

CF Legend
Day 18 - Tuesday 24th

After a fairly early start to catch our last bullet train back into Tokyo we dropped our bags off at our last hotel of the trip (the sadness of it all coming to an end was starting to kick in). Finding the hotel was a bit of a disaster. It was a combination of not printing a detailed enough map, tiredness and exiting the metro station in the worst possible way. How you might be thinking, well, the station was underneath the most complicated shopping mall which is crazy as the one at Shinjuku was pretty insane. This wasn't as big but it all looked the same, endless corridors of blandness and barely any decent navigational signage. After a while I think we started going insane. We did eventually find an exit only to become even more confused as we couldn't worked out where it chucked us out.

What a disaster, after some walking around we soon found the right area. This is where we made a huge mistake. We printed instructions on how to get to the wrong hotel! This is what happens when one hotel chain own loads of hotels in the same area. Judging by the expression on the person behind the desk this was a regular occurrence and it turned out we were only two streets away. Finally at the correct hotel (after way too much stress and faff) we covered our suitcases with some rope and left for further shenanigans.

As we'd messed our Tokyo plans around a bit from the first leg of the trip we didn't actually have anything planned for the day but as we had failed to gain the creds at Yokohama Cosmoworld we decided to head back and give it another shot.

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Yay! I'm a train!"

The weather wasn't as pleasant as our first visit but at least the park was open this time.

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We grabbed some ride tokens and got straight on to the Family Banana Coaster.

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Some lyrics to a song related to the coaster

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Helix of excite

It was a fun little family coaster, not too much to discuss. After riding it Nic realised it was her 300th rollercoaster!

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Most of the rides looked closed but it was more a case of no one was in the park. They had a good array of flat rides and whatnot.

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*squeals of delight* Yep, they totally had another card game forest thing. We were so excited about getting more cards! But first there were more creds to be ridden.

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Diving coaster vanish

After a huge climb up escalators and stairs we made it to the roof of the main building to get to the spinning mouse coaster. +1

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How exciting

Now seems like a good time to point out that we hadn't seen Diving coaster Vanish running since we arrived. Once at the entrance of the ride we saw a little sign saying it was closed. The train was in the station though and we saw people milling about so we decided to go grab some food. Over the road from the park is a large shopping centre and they had a fast food area dedicated to American chains. We grabbed some KFC awesome sauce burgers before going in search of a Mister Donut. I had been really looking forward to trying these donuts, especially after one of Nic's colleagues saying we can't go to Japan and not have one. Spoilt for choice we ended up going for the below...

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It was a bit disappointing. I prefer Krispy Kreme and traditional sugar ones. We then decided to go into a book store, not sure why but we were amused by the idea. I found some goonlicious Tokyo Disney magazines and guide books. I've never seen anything like it, for each new season they release a magazine with all the new merch and food and they even tell you how much everything costs, it was awesome.

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Derp. I'm a giraffe

The kids log flume thing had a terrifying polar bear...

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I have a video of Nic playing the above pop up pirate game. She failed in great style and I still haven't uploaded it. I shall get on that.

Then it was time for more foresty pokemon fun. I think the woman was a little shocked when we went in with a "move out of the way, we totally know what we're doing" attitude. Luckily it was only us inside so there were no small children to knock over. Running round as crazy loons we were at the end game in no time. I got a super awesome shiny gold card and I'm still uber proud of it...

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However a second card did pop out of the machine but the evil woman working there came and took it off me. I was very upset about that, I wasn't able to rub it into Nic's face that I had gained more cards than her.

Nic and her winnings...

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We then made our way back over to Diving Coaster Vanish...

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Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Determined it will open we spend some monies in the arcade. Nic tried her luck with an AKB48 themed pachinko game. Pachinko is these ridiculous constraptions that we just couldn't figure out. Like, we saw people with buckets and buckets of these little balls but when Nic gave it a go we got nothing. Still perplexed at how it works or why it's even so popular (so many arcades dedicated to these machines).

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So, at least we got to listen to some AKB48. I have just found a video which just perfectly sums up our experience (albeit with more luck than us) it's also scarily similar (in terms of the video portion of the game) to the coin games I got obsessed with....

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H78VLPqfbfI[/youtube]


In need of more Japanese arcade culture we decided to do another photo booth thing. It was all kinds of special....

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You can't see it that well but we were proud of our Japanese names which were a result of "I have no idea what I'm doing" *presses buttons* Also the weird poses were just us attempting to follow the very quick how to in the booth. It's all like "Hey, pose like this" 3 seconds later the camera goes off.

Bored of wasting our money on games we grabbed a drink and decided our new game called "watch the engineers in the small hope they'll eventually open it". The counter where we got our drinks actually had plastic versions just in case you didn't know what a drink looked like....

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I wanted the green one, Melon Fanta

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There is a man, by himself, riding the Thomas the tank engine thing. #Onlyinjapan

As we were sitting outside and enjoying watching the log flume boats go by this happened...

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Oh yeah, this waiting game just got to the next level. Anticipation levels of it possibly opening grew to a silly state. We knew it'd have to at least test a little bit first.

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As you might have guessed from the above collection of photos, it tested a lot. Sanyo man was on the case though and we followed his actions like a scary pair of stalkers. He had walked along the track to the break run to inspect it from there. It then tested some more.

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Thanks to the clock on the wheel we knew how much time we were wasting away waiting for this coaster to open.

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People were loving the log flume. I liked the fact that at night a light comes on when you reach the bottom of the drop, lighting up your splash. The water effect on Diving coaster was also better at night.

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Can't forget the random rainbow coloured lighting on the log flume drop...

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Sanyo man and his crew then left the coaster so I ran over to him and asked him about if they were going to open it. The answer was a no, but he was a nice gentleman about it and through a lot of sign language, pointing and broken English he told me it was closed as a planned engineering day. So yep, we waited hours for something that was never going to open. Feeling a bit sad about the lack of cred (more because it's quite well known, a good talking point rather than because it actually looks good) we left the park in search of more food.

On our way out we spotted a cool little light image in some bushes...

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OBVIOUSLY we wouldn't leave without one more go in the foresty game room...

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Maze of mirrors

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Looking for this creature on the next screen

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Clearly the middle one

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Correct!

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ALL the points

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End total

Some button mashing later and I got another card!

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You might be happy to know that I'm sad and do actually carry all these cards in my wallet.

Yokohama is a nice area...

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We found more food in a restaurant in a smaller shopping area. We found somewhere that does OkoNOMiyaki so it was a no brainer.

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Parcel of goodness

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Nic was ready to begin

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These light shades amused me but at the same time wanted one

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We were being adventerous again. I think this was literally chicken on a skewer covered in an omelette and in great Japanese fashion, absolutely covered in sauce.

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Another version of the okonomiyaki I think, Nic remembers these things better than I do.

It was then back to our hotel to find out what our new room is like. It was small. Nic drank some alcohol which made her happy.

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I took a photo which made me happy.

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This hotel catered for everyone.

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I think we soon fell asleep after a long and very weird day.


Once again, thanks to everyone who's still reading and leaving comments. You're awesome. There's not much left to tell you now, it'll be weird to finish this report.
 

Jordanovichy

Credit Whore 2016
Another fantastic addition. Glad you actually let me go to bed last night rather than posting it at 1am meaning I had to stay up.

Gutted for you that you didn't get to ride Vanish, it's one of those coasters that everyone randomly seems to know. I even had my history teacher show me a picture of it a while back saying 'bet you don't know what this is', he wasn't happy that I did, he'd just found a random picture of a coaster online.

Sad the overall report is nearly finished, just got to wait for ATTACKHAMMER to finish his now ;)
 

davidm

Strata Poster
This talk of Pachinko machines allows me to post a pic of what I have in my living room again...

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My first experience of them was not-unlike yours; utter confusion. Then one of our group started winning (essentially the machine goes into meltdown (aka "fever mode") and the machine starts hemorrhaging those silver balls) - he ended up winning a few hundred £ worth of balls (well because of the odd-gaming laws you only win the silver balls, then you exchange the balls for some small prizes at the pachinko parlour itself (shiny blocks of wood!) then go around into a back street somewhere outside the parlour and sell these prizes to a suspiciously conveniently located stall for real Yen - absolutely bonkers!)
 

peep

CF Legend
Ha, that's kinda awesome and I want it :p. It still amazes me how popular it is though and the gambling law I was totally unaware of until I looked up about the pachinko machines.

Sent from my C6903 using Tapatalk
 
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