It’s been a couple of weeks since I went, and I didn’t take a great number of pictures since I’ve been a few times now and am, frankly, sick of the place, but a group of friends and I went to Ocean Park for the Halloween s**te at the end of October.
Getting there was a pain in the arse because the demonstration thing is still going on, meaning that the shuttle buses had to leave from a station further away, which meant that the MTR ride to get to the buses took twice as long, as did the bus itself. I can get there in half an hour door-to-door usually, but took about an hour thanks to some selfish people demanding democracy.
Since it’s ridiculously busy during Halloween, or always, and the operations can be - or are always - crap, we opted to fork out for VIP tickets, which costs about double the normal entry price. They only do them for Halloween, and they’re definitely worth it since you get to go right to the front of the majority of the queues, including all the Halloween stuff.
This show was absolute w@nk.
It was supposedly a hilarious parody of a “Got Talent” kind of show, but suffered from the usual Asian bollocks of failing at any and all attempts at humour. Judging by the natives’ reactions, a man in a dress is the height of comedic genius, so maybe it was just me.
We did the Grand Aquarium next, which is always an exercise in anger management since it’s full of mainland Chinese people pushing and shoving to have a look at what they must think is a menu. It’s gone a bit crap really. They’ve opened up a new shark exhibit at the other end of the park and moved most of the sharks from the main aquarium up there, leaving it all a bit empty at the moment. No pictures, since they never come out and they’re boring anyway.
We got the cable car up to the other end since my friends wouldn’t believe me when I said the train/funicular thing would get us to the “big, yellow one” quicker. I wasn’t going to be a goon and argue about it though.
Big, Yellow Thing had a two hour queue, quickly reduced to 5 minutes thanks to the pass. It’s definitely a ride that’s grown on me, and I think it’s up there with the best of the floorless coasters, despite a bit of a rattle and being very short.
Arctic Blast is also among the better of the Zamperla powered things. Admittedly, that’s not saying much.
A few of the flat rides weren’t on the pass to the annoyance of my friends who wanted to go on some, and to the joy of myself who really couldn’t give a f**k about them.
North Pole Encounter (seals, sea lions and walruses) was closed for some renovations, but we had a quick look at the South Pole thing (penguins) next door. I didn’t take any pictures. In case you haven’t seen one, penguins look like this:
This was billed as the most intense of the Halloween walkthroughs:
But it was reservation only, which had been booked up months in advance, thanks to only letting very small groups through at a time. The bint at the gate said that there was a standby queue where people could take the places of no shows, but it would take between two and three hours. F**k that.
The rapids are horribly wet thanks to free water guns mounted on a number of bridges.
The first walkthrough we did was themed to a local horror film from last year that none of us had seen, Rigor Mortis. It was decent enough, with good sets and some decent effects.
As with all of the mazes this year though, they weren’t leaving enough time between groups. It’s obviously to get queues down, but on every one of these, we always caught up to the group in front of us, which obviously spoils a lot of what’s happening.
Rainforest thing:
We went down to the log flume and Mine Train, which I didn’t take any pictures of, so here are some old ones. It was actually dark by the time we got down there.
We also did another walkthrough called Forest of Doom, which was labelled as two attractions in one. Before 5pm, it was Enchanted Forest, and designed as a family/kiddy thing, and then after five they change it to make it scary. Again, it looked good with a few decent scares in there, but even though it was only the second walkthrough, it was all starting to get a bit predictable.
Heading over and across to the older area of the park:
The jellyfish exhibit is quite fab, mostly down to the overly-dramatic Vanessa Mae soundtrack in the final room. I know it’s Vanessa Mae ‘cause I’m cultured and s**t. It’s this one in case you’re interested:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euOu89d3npA[/youtube]
Eerie Nippon Journey was in the “mild” category of walkthroughs, being of the more WTF variety and featuring various bastardisations of Japanese culture, including a room with naked people in a sauna.
The new shark aquarium, Shark Mystique is pretty impressive. The building used to house the park’s main aquarium, but was sitting empty for a few years after Grand Aquarium was built down by the entrance.
There are a bunch of different levels going down from the surface of the water and down the floor of the tank. It’s cool since different species swim at different levels, so they’ve put some decent thought into it.
I rode Dragon for the first time since I visited the park in 2007. It’s rubbish and I took no pictures, but here’s an old one:
Chinese Mad-icine Hall was one of the more intense walkthroughs, themes to a mad doctor’s office/clinic.
I’ve never actually ridden the Condor ride here before, but it was walk-on and my friends wanted to try it. They’re crap and make me feel ill. Yay.
We headed back down to the entrance, this time using the train even though we were a lot closer to the cable cars since one of my friends s**t himself on them on the way up.
We’d skipped passed the walkthrough near the entrance since, like Forest of Doom, it was a kiddy thing until 5pm and we wanted to wait and do it properly later. This one, called Horror-Wood Studios, was really dark and very hard to see where you were going, having to rely on glowsticks that they gave you as you went in. You could also hire chest-mounted cameras (probably a GoPro thing) to record your trip through, which seemed like a cool idea, but we didn’t bother. There were also night-vision cameras throughout the walkthrough, with the video being played on screens just outside the exit, again a cool idea.
That was it. I’m kind of over Ocean Park to be honest. The location is amazing, and there’s some decent stuff there, but it’s an absolutely knackering park and it’s always heaving, mostly with tour groups of rude mouth-breathers from across the border, though why these tours always insist on bringing coachloads of pensioners to a place like this is beyond me.
I’ve got to go again on December 5th for a school trip. We let the kids decide where to go and since they’ve got all the imagination of an Wetherspoons chef, they chose the same place as the last 10 years running. Sigh…
Getting there was a pain in the arse because the demonstration thing is still going on, meaning that the shuttle buses had to leave from a station further away, which meant that the MTR ride to get to the buses took twice as long, as did the bus itself. I can get there in half an hour door-to-door usually, but took about an hour thanks to some selfish people demanding democracy.
Since it’s ridiculously busy during Halloween, or always, and the operations can be - or are always - crap, we opted to fork out for VIP tickets, which costs about double the normal entry price. They only do them for Halloween, and they’re definitely worth it since you get to go right to the front of the majority of the queues, including all the Halloween stuff.
This show was absolute w@nk.
It was supposedly a hilarious parody of a “Got Talent” kind of show, but suffered from the usual Asian bollocks of failing at any and all attempts at humour. Judging by the natives’ reactions, a man in a dress is the height of comedic genius, so maybe it was just me.
We did the Grand Aquarium next, which is always an exercise in anger management since it’s full of mainland Chinese people pushing and shoving to have a look at what they must think is a menu. It’s gone a bit crap really. They’ve opened up a new shark exhibit at the other end of the park and moved most of the sharks from the main aquarium up there, leaving it all a bit empty at the moment. No pictures, since they never come out and they’re boring anyway.
We got the cable car up to the other end since my friends wouldn’t believe me when I said the train/funicular thing would get us to the “big, yellow one” quicker. I wasn’t going to be a goon and argue about it though.
Big, Yellow Thing had a two hour queue, quickly reduced to 5 minutes thanks to the pass. It’s definitely a ride that’s grown on me, and I think it’s up there with the best of the floorless coasters, despite a bit of a rattle and being very short.
Arctic Blast is also among the better of the Zamperla powered things. Admittedly, that’s not saying much.
A few of the flat rides weren’t on the pass to the annoyance of my friends who wanted to go on some, and to the joy of myself who really couldn’t give a f**k about them.
North Pole Encounter (seals, sea lions and walruses) was closed for some renovations, but we had a quick look at the South Pole thing (penguins) next door. I didn’t take any pictures. In case you haven’t seen one, penguins look like this:
This was billed as the most intense of the Halloween walkthroughs:
But it was reservation only, which had been booked up months in advance, thanks to only letting very small groups through at a time. The bint at the gate said that there was a standby queue where people could take the places of no shows, but it would take between two and three hours. F**k that.
The rapids are horribly wet thanks to free water guns mounted on a number of bridges.
The first walkthrough we did was themed to a local horror film from last year that none of us had seen, Rigor Mortis. It was decent enough, with good sets and some decent effects.
As with all of the mazes this year though, they weren’t leaving enough time between groups. It’s obviously to get queues down, but on every one of these, we always caught up to the group in front of us, which obviously spoils a lot of what’s happening.
Rainforest thing:
We went down to the log flume and Mine Train, which I didn’t take any pictures of, so here are some old ones. It was actually dark by the time we got down there.
We also did another walkthrough called Forest of Doom, which was labelled as two attractions in one. Before 5pm, it was Enchanted Forest, and designed as a family/kiddy thing, and then after five they change it to make it scary. Again, it looked good with a few decent scares in there, but even though it was only the second walkthrough, it was all starting to get a bit predictable.
Heading over and across to the older area of the park:
The jellyfish exhibit is quite fab, mostly down to the overly-dramatic Vanessa Mae soundtrack in the final room. I know it’s Vanessa Mae ‘cause I’m cultured and s**t. It’s this one in case you’re interested:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euOu89d3npA[/youtube]
Eerie Nippon Journey was in the “mild” category of walkthroughs, being of the more WTF variety and featuring various bastardisations of Japanese culture, including a room with naked people in a sauna.
The new shark aquarium, Shark Mystique is pretty impressive. The building used to house the park’s main aquarium, but was sitting empty for a few years after Grand Aquarium was built down by the entrance.
There are a bunch of different levels going down from the surface of the water and down the floor of the tank. It’s cool since different species swim at different levels, so they’ve put some decent thought into it.
I rode Dragon for the first time since I visited the park in 2007. It’s rubbish and I took no pictures, but here’s an old one:
Chinese Mad-icine Hall was one of the more intense walkthroughs, themes to a mad doctor’s office/clinic.
I’ve never actually ridden the Condor ride here before, but it was walk-on and my friends wanted to try it. They’re crap and make me feel ill. Yay.
We headed back down to the entrance, this time using the train even though we were a lot closer to the cable cars since one of my friends s**t himself on them on the way up.
We’d skipped passed the walkthrough near the entrance since, like Forest of Doom, it was a kiddy thing until 5pm and we wanted to wait and do it properly later. This one, called Horror-Wood Studios, was really dark and very hard to see where you were going, having to rely on glowsticks that they gave you as you went in. You could also hire chest-mounted cameras (probably a GoPro thing) to record your trip through, which seemed like a cool idea, but we didn’t bother. There were also night-vision cameras throughout the walkthrough, with the video being played on screens just outside the exit, again a cool idea.
That was it. I’m kind of over Ocean Park to be honest. The location is amazing, and there’s some decent stuff there, but it’s an absolutely knackering park and it’s always heaving, mostly with tour groups of rude mouth-breathers from across the border, though why these tours always insist on bringing coachloads of pensioners to a place like this is beyond me.
I’ve got to go again on December 5th for a school trip. We let the kids decide where to go and since they’ve got all the imagination of an Wetherspoons chef, they chose the same place as the last 10 years running. Sigh…
