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Shanghai Disneyland PTR

Gavin

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I’m sure everyone has now seen craploads of pictures of this place by now, but get ready for craploads more and loads of pesky words as well. I’m going to get this report in while I’m sitting around at work with nothing to do and before Sneaky Peep gets around to it since he managed to get there a week or so before I did. I promise that nothing will be described as “random” or “casual” because none of it is.

My original intention with this place was to hold off for a bit, but I figured that the crowds are unlikely to calm down anytime soon, if at all, so decided to get it done this weekend. Friday was a public holiday here in Hong Kong, but not in Mainland China, so it seemed like a good idea to try it, flying up to Shanghai on the Thursday evening. I gave myself the Saturday, too, but managed to get almost everything done on that first day.

I’d only recently “done” Shanghai, so this was all just about Disney and there was no need to really go into the city. I’d originally thought to stay on site, but I got 3 nights in a four-star hotel halfway between the park and the airport for less than one night at the “cheap” Toy Story Hotel, which I didn’t fancy much anyway. The decent hotel was pretty ridiculous really.

Anyway, the park opens at 8am, and I got there right at opening, taking about 15 minutes to get in after a bag check and ticket gates.

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There’s no Main Street USA here. Instead, there’s Mickey Avenue. It’s really short and leads to a massive semi-open area in front of the castle.

Contrary to popular belief, it's not Chinese "culture" to pop a squat and s**t willy-nilly, and people don't spend every free second not sh**ting everywhere to vandalise stuff, so it doesn't actually look like the final day at Glastonbury.

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I headed straight into Adventure Isle to get a fastpass for Soaring, with a “g”, knowing that it would have horrible queues like the others and that I wouldn’t like it enough to wait for it. People are onto this already, and there was a queue for the fastpasses which only took about 5 minutes since there are loads of machines and plenty of staff around. I got a return time of 5:30pm. This was a little after 8 in the morning, so the fastpasses would have been totally gone very shortly after.

A note on the fastpasses if anyone’s interested. The machines aren’t situated at each individual ride, but have a bigger area in each land that has the rides with fastpasses available: Adventure Isle for Soaring and the Rapids, Tomorrowland for Tron and Buzz Lightyear, and Fantasyland (two locations) for Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh and Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. You scan your ticket and select the ride you want. It sounds a bit of a faff, but is actually very good.

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My plan was to then single rider the rapids, but they weren’t using the single rider queue. They never used it for the whole two days I was there which was annoying. I’ll moan about that a bit later, but I ended up doing the rapids on the second day since the queue was already at 90 minutes by that point and never dropped below that for the rest of the day, usually hovering around the 2 hour mark.

The park was busy, but not too bad at all. Soaring and the Rapids had 90-minute minimum waits all day, but I didn’t see anything else get above around an hour, with most things hovering around the 30 minute mark for most of the day. The app is very good at keeping waiting times updated, as well as “temporarily closed” notices, which were frequent and across a lot of rides, though never for too long.

Anyway, I moved around to Treasure Cove, but Pirates of the Caribbean hadn’t opened yet. The area is fab though.

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I moved into Fantasyland to get Seven Dwarfs done while I waited for Pirates. This also had a single rider queue, but it wasn’t yet open, so I joined the regular queue. It was only 20 minutes at this point, so no biggie. Annoyingly, by the time I got on it, I ended up sitting next to some American woman who’d just walked up the recently opened single rider line. Bitch.

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It’s exactly the same as the Orlando version, except that the music is sung in Mandarin in the indoor section. I like this coaster though. I’d have preferred to see a Big Thunder Mountain or equivalent, sure, but it’s a solid family ride. I did a quick walk-on reride through the single rider queue.

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Pirates was open by this point. They have a single rider here, too, but the main queue was only at 15 minutes (actually more like 10), so I did that to get the “full experience”.

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Queueline pictures are a bit blurry. Soz.

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I’d purposefully avoided watching any videos, which was REALLY hard considering all the comments I was seeing about it, but I’m so glad I did. It’s an absolutely amazing ride and 100% immersive. On most (all?) other dark rides you can break the illusion by looking up and seeing black ceilings, air-conditioning ducts, lighting rigs etc., but not on this. Well, you could maybe spot edges/tops of screens if you really tried, but other than that, no. Even the ceilings are projected onto; the “underwater” sections are stunning, a perfect combination of physical sets, lighting and projection. The “battle” section is probably the most impressive scene of any dark ride I’ve been on; it’s f**king massive, or at least gives that impression.

I did another single rider walk-on here and then moved on to the castle, coming back to Pirates at the end of the day.

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There’s a walkthrough here which I had no idea existed, Once Upon a Time Adventure.

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It’s basically Snow White. You go through in small groups to various scenes, following some sparkly “magic” s**t that’s projected onto the walls and guides you from scene to scene.

It starts with this book, behind an invisible glass screen, which comes to life and is very cool.

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Then it’s up some stairs with various princess sculptures.

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The magic mirror has some stuff on it and then opens up for you to walk through.

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The other scenes are also all screen-based, but kind of 3D. I’m guessing it maybe uses the same technology as those Nintendo 3DS things, only much better quality obviously, as there are no glasses involved, but there are very clear “layers” between various parts of the scenes.

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At the exit, you can look through the castle windows. It gives you an idea of how big the area in front of the castle is.

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Some more Fantasyland stuff.

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By this point I was good to pick up another fastpass. Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh had the same waiting time – about 30 minutes – so I picked up a fastpass for Pan and did the regular queue for Pooh.

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It’s exactly the same as the Hong Kong and Orlando versions (I think there’s a slight difference with California’s, but there’s not much in it. I was hoping for at least some improved effects or something, but it’s literally the exact same. Well, apart from being in Chinese where the others are in English. Meh.

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Have some more Seven Dwarfs since the photos are uploaded in this order and I can’t be f**ked to scroll back:

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This Frozen Singalong thing was going to be left until the second day, if I was going to bother at all, but it was about to start as I was passing, I had a bit of time until the Peter Pan fastpass could be used and I was making good time with everything so far anyway.

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It’s gash. Hong Kong had basically the same thing as a temporary show in the summer, but they’ve made it permanent here, thrown a few extra dancers and an extra song or two in, and built a massive theatre for it.

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The “singing” is all mimed - the actors are just miked-up for the spoken bits – and it’s understandably all in Chinese. There’s some decent projection on the walls of the theatre though I guess.

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Obviously, this bint shows up at the end and there’s a bit of fake snow on the audience:

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S**te.

Back to the boat ride later:

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Peter Pan then.

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It’s better than the others, but only in that it feels more modern and with updated effects and scenery; it’s essentially the same thing. Meh.

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The 1st parade – they do the same one twice during the day – was just finishing in that area, so I just cut across to the end of the parade route to catch the whole thing as it moved around. It was much quieter watching it in that area anyway.

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It was alright. It was just nice to be able to watch it without trying to avoid eye-contact with people I’ve shagged like during the Hong Kong one.

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The Mulan float was the best, with fire effects and s**t.

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The final float is a massive anticlimax though. They should probably switch this and finish with Mulan to be honest.

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I passed back through Adventure Isle to see if they’d opened the single rider on Roaring Rapids. They hadn’t, and I was told that they wouldn’t.

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The Tarzan show was about to start though – they actually run their shows about 7-8 times a day, which is excellent – so I popped into that.

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I didn’t take any pictures during the show. I thought I’d just watch it this time, and probably go again on the second day for pictures, but I ended up not bothering.

It was pretty good, but didn’t do much for me. The stage/set is impressive, but it’s basically just a circus show dressed up with a Tarzan theme. I was kind of expecting a live musical thing, but it’s not. Honestly, take away the theme, and you can see the same kind of tricks at a lot of local Chinese parks, with some (Fantawild for example) going even more all-out with the production values.

It’s good, it really is, but I’ve just seen it with different - and sometimes better - dressing a hundred times before.

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Onto Tomorrowland:

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I picked up a fastpass for TRON, even though it has a single rider queue. Single rider was being posted at 45-minutes (70 minutes regular queue), so I figured I’d still do that, but use the fastpass for a reride later.

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I didn’t bother with the orbiter thing. It was different from the others in that it has suspended seating, but that’s it. Through construction/rumour topics, I’d thought that the seats could be tilted into a flying position, but looking at it, that’s either not the case, or that function, if it exists, was f**ked, since nobody was doing it.

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There’s some crappy show where they pull kids up to dance on stage. The same stage has a DJ and lasers and stuff after it gets dark.

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Buzz Lightyear, which I took basically no pictures of, was the best version of the lot.

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The targets are just a lot better, both visually and in terms of responsiveness, as is the scoring panel in the car. Getting a higher score is less “secret” than the others too (I never tell friends in Hong Kong about that and invariably kick their arse every time) in that he targets are different sizes. It’s common sense that the smaller targets will give higher scores. It seemed a bit shorter than the others though, but that might just be me.

TRON then. I used the single rider, which actually only took about 20 minutes.

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It’s excellent as an overall package. The launch feels more forceful than the other Vekoma Moto-Coasters, and it’s a lot smoother overall. It’s by far the longest and tallest of the bunch, and also the fastest. There’s a duel loading station and 7 trains as well. The others are crap with their throughputs, but this one doesn’t have an issue. Trains were being launched every 20-30 seconds.

Thinking about it, I think the launch here is magnetic as opposed to the hydraulic launches on the others, which would allow for quicker dispatches I guess.

As a coaster, it’s nothing fantastic, but the launch is very good and the lighting and effects in the indoor section make it something pretty special really.

I’d walked past Voyage to the Crystal Grotto a couple of times, but decided to leave it for a bit since the queues seemed to stay at a steady 20-30 minutes all day, so there was no sense of urgency.

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I’d seen pictures, but no video, so was pleased to see that it’s not just a bunch of static scenes. Each scene is basically its own water show which is synched with the onboard audio of the boat.

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The Tangled scene was f**ked though. Nothing happened.

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It’s always good to experience some real Chinese culture on these trips.

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The actual Crystal Grotto at the end is cool, but I didn’t/couldn’t get decent pictures. It’s basically a cave with very cool lighting and projection effects right at the end of the ride.

Just going to do a bit of a photo dump here:

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Eye of the Storm is a major show in the Pirates area. Annoyingly, it was delayed by close to half an hour, but I stuck it out anyway.

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There’s long, tedious preshow in the theatre lobby.

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The building is amazing though. The whole set up is of a Victorian (?) theatre, with the premise that the “actors” are going to be putting on a crappy play. At least I think that was the premise. The whole style certainly suggested that anyway.

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Then Chinese Jack Sparrow interrupts by flying in over the audience, followed soon after by some bad guy, speaking Chinese in a “posh English” accent. Weird.

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The bad guy orders cannons, which appear through the sides of the auditorium to blow s**t up. The whole place fills with smoke and lighting effects, and when it’s cleared the stage looks like this:

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The final section is a very good stunt show, including an amazing scene using hidden giant fans in the floor – those things you get at indoor skydiving places – with Jack Sparrow and the bad guy having an aerial fight with no wires/harnesses. All very clever.

My fastpass for Soaring was ready by that point,

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The queueline was the best bit.

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I’m not a fan of the original, and likely would’ve skipped this if it was a copy and paste, but it’s a different film. It’s world-focused rather than just USA, and the projection system seemed a lot better/clearer, but it’s still the same thing: gash basically. They’ve kind of f**ked up here as well I think. Parts of the film have very tall, straight landmarks – the Eiffel Tower and Shanghai skyscrapers for example – but these are on a curved screen, so they’re totally bent. It’s not just a slight curve either. I guess it may depend on where you’re sitting, but it seems like a massive oversight to me.

Anyway, just as with the others, I f**king hated it. It just seems like such a pointless addition when soooooooooo many Chinese parks have similar rides now, even if the quality varies dramatically between them.

The Alice in Wonderland Maze was a nice 10-minute distraction and had no queue. I wouldn’t have waited for it.

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There’s some cool stuff hidden in the rockwork though, like clocks and the Cheshire cat’s smile.

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I REALLY wish they’d used the animated version though since the Burton version is f**kin w**k. Helena Bonham Carter is the only redeeming feature.

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I didn’t do the “teacups” ride, but liked that they’d gone for an original theme on them.

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I headed back over to TRON to use my fastpass from earlier.

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The whole area looks so much better at night.

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I got a decent spot for the fireworks, but it got very crowded and pushy-shovey quite quickly, so I f**ked that off after calling out some rude Korean c**ts and moved off to the side slightly, getting up to a railing next to the water so nobody could get in front again.

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It was a good enough view anyway. The show was excellent. It’s a mix of projection mapping and laser work, with some amazing laser effects like lightning striking and running down the whole building. It’s kind of lacking a bit in fireworks though.

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The show finished a little before 9 and most people headed out then, but the park was still open until 10, so I had a bit of a wander around.

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Pirates was a walk on at this point, so I did two quick rides.

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Reflections in water are artistic. See.

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I was back the next day as well, so I’ll post overall thoughts on the place when I post that bit in later.
 
Treasure Cove really does look so well themed. Hope you had a chance to explore the area. I'm impressed you abstained from watching any pirates videos beforehand, but the important question is: does it top Mystic Manor? :P
I've seen bits of the Once Upon A Time Adventure, but I don't think it looks great at all :/ hate the CGI. Unlike Pooh, I don't think Peter Pan deserves a meh/10 :P It looks great! The Evergreen Playhouse facade is really awful, they didn't even try. Shame the shows weren't better. They put a larger emphasis on them than usual for this park, so you would have thought they would have put out something more unique and engaging. Most people have given the Voyage to the Crystal Grotto a negative review, so it''s nice to see something more positive. I think the simplicity of it looks nice. I hate Burton Alice too, but I'm so impressed the way they've pulled it off. Looking forward to the final verdict!
 
Wow! What a great looking park!

I'm still most in love with Tron, but the whole place does look good. I look forward to hearing your closing thoughts in the next part.
 
Pink Panther said:
Treasure Cove really does look so well themed. Hope you had a chance to explore the area.

I’ll get onto that in more detail when I sum up the place, but there actually isn’t a lot to “explore” at the park when compared to other Disney places.

I'm impressed you abstained from watching any pirates videos beforehand, but the important question is: does it top Mystic Manor?

It’s on a massively different scale, so absolutely. Mystic Manor is fab, but actually quite small. It also suffers from what I mentioned before in that if you look around a bit, especially looking up, you can see how it’s all working, there are some obvious emergency exit signs etc. Obviously, most people just follow the natural sightlines, so it’s not a problem, but with Pirates it was just total immersion, even if you did stray away from where they were trying to make you look.

I've seen bits of the Once Upon A Time Adventure, but I don't think it looks great at all :/ hate the CGI.

Yeah, it’s certainly not “great”, but as a little filler attraction that I didn’t even know was there, I thought it was quite cute. I certainly wouldn’t queue for it.

Unlike Pooh, I don't think Peter Pan deserves a meh/10 It looks great!

The thing is, it’s really not all that different from the original rides, which I personally find incredibly overrated and pretty dull. It’s essentially the same thing, only with better/updated effects. For example, there’s a layer of “cloud” over London in that section. It’s still very short. The newer ride system doesn’t actually feel any different to the old one either. I remember it first getting labelled as a powered coaster. Absolutely not. It’s basically just an update rather than an overhaul. Unlike in the other parks, it really wasn’t that popular either. Again, more on that later.

The Evergreen Playhouse facade is really awful, they didn't even try. Shame the shows weren't better. They put a larger emphasis on them than usual for this park, so you would have thought they would have put out something more unique and engaging.

To be fair, the audiences loved the shows. As I said, for me, the Tarzan thing was a bit dull since I’ve seen it in a different wrapper countless times, but I think that’s probably a good thing for the local audience. Give them what you know they like.

Thinking about it, that Evergreen Playhouse seems to be a venue where they can change shows up. I’d assumed the Frozen thing was a permanent attraction, but thinking about it, that’s almost certainly not the case. The theatre façade is just general Fantasyland rather than Frozen, and the show itself, as I said earlier, isn’t a big production. It’s an LED screen and some projectors which could easily be repurposed. The fact that it existed in a smaller capacity as a temporary Hong Kong show would fit that idea. In that respect, it’s good that they’ve got a large venue for changing events/shows.

Most people have given the Voyage to the Crystal Grotto a negative review, so it''s nice to see something more positive. I think the simplicity of it looks nice.

I liked it because it was the most “Disney” ride there, in terms of using things like Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, Aladdin etc. along with the relevant soundtracks. I wouldn’t wait more than 20-30 minutes for it, but it was better than sitting through yet another Small World.

Hixee said:
I look forward to hearing your closing thoughts in the next part.

Here you go then…

I’ve got another morning at work with nothing to do – every single one of my trip reports over the last 3 years has been done “at work” – so I’ll just hammer out this second part. It shouldn’t be as long as the first one since I’d taken enough pictures on the first day and I didn’t stay as long.

I got there about half an hour after I had the previous day, and I could see immediately that it was going to be a lot busier.

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The only ride I hadn’t done the previous day – well, apart from Dumbo and the carousel and s**t that I’ve never even bothered with in Hong Kong – was Roaring Rapids. On the “quiet” day before that queue had stayed constantly between the 90-120 minute mark, so I grabbed a fastpass for it. Luckily it gave me a return time of around 1pm – I was expecting much later – so I guess most people were getting them for Soaring.

I wanted a bit more TRON in my life so headed over there. The normal queue was already posted at an hour, with the single rider at 30 minutes. I decided to suck it up, but the reality was that the single rider was a walk-on.

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I forgot to mention it earlier, but the fastpass queue has a cool feature. I only used it once the previous day and had no need to use it again, so was unprepared to get any pictures. You get batched into small rooms behind these screens:

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From inside the room there’s various s**t on the screens, but then they become completely transparent and you’re looking down at the launch track. This is all timed impeccably with a train arriving and launching before the doors open and spit you back out into the queue line.

From the single rider line, you get this view:

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Well, you walk past it anyway.

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I did two more walk-ons, and then a 4th ride where the single rider was building up slightly, so left it after that. The crappy kiddy show was in full swing again as I left.

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I single ridered Seven Dwarfs a couple of times, waiting about 5 minutes each, before that too started building up a bit.

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It’s good that they have a SRQ on this. Orlando doesn’t, but it would really benefit. It’s a fun family ride, but not worth a long wait if you’ve already done it.

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These pictures are probably the same as the first day. Whatevs.

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I never bothered with Explorer Canoes over the two days. On the first day, the queue didn’t get above half an hour, but it just wasn’t a priority. On the Saturday, it was at least double that and I just wasn’t going to do it.

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I knew I wanted another ride on Pirates. Annoyingly, they weren’t using the SRQ. “We don’t use it if it’s busy”. What sort of f**ked up logic is that? The regular queue was at an hour, so I just sucked it up since I had time to kill before my fastpass could be used anyway. In reality, it took about 45 minutes.

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I had a quick walk around Camp Discovery, assuming that the actual ropes course would be heaving, but it was actually walk-on. I don’t usually do these, but this one was all very scenic compared to most of them which are just plonked above a patch of grass.

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And onto Roaring Rapids.

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It was good – a Disney rapids is going to be better than the vast majority elsewhere – but I preferred the ones in California Adventure and Animal Kingdom to be honest. The animatronic whatever-it-is was cool, but doesn’t really suit a rapids ride where things like that can be largely missed depending on the rotation of the boat etc.

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The queue times were also ridiculous. It had been at 2 hours for most of the “quiet” day the day before, but was up to two and a half on the Saturday within an hour of the park opening. The boats are, inexplicably, the smaller variety with fewer seats than the rapids at the other Disney parks. Makes no sense.

It was only around 1pm by this point, but I decided to call it a day. The intention had always been to spend the full day on the Friday doing as much as possible, using the Saturday to mop anything up, get some re-rides, take pictures etc.

I’d reridden Pirates, TRON and Seven Dwarfs, but had no intention of queuing up for an hour minimum to redo anything else. Even the Alice in Wonderland maze was at 30 minutes. That’s not a complaint since I know it would be busy on that second day – it would be stupid not to expect it on the weekend at any park, let alone a brand new one which has been constantly in the news for the last year – but nothing really warranted re-doing at that point.

As I said earlier, I’d intended to watch the two main shows a second time and take pictures, but I just didn’t fancy Tarzan again, it’s only the last 10 minutes of Eye of the Storm that’s interesting, and because the park was so much busier, I’d have had to make sure I got to them early to ensure getting in, rather than just rocking up as they were about to start as I’d done on the previous day.

I could’ve spent some time looking around tat shops, but I don’t buy tat anyway. Instead, I decided to look for any Shanghai +1s that I’d missed out on last time, deciding on Joypolis which had added a coaster since I’d last been in Shanghai. This turned out to be a good idea since it started pissing down soon after I left the park and didn’t stop for the rest of the day/evening.

Sorry, loads of words. Have something to look at:

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Overall thoughts then. This will get “slightly” wordy…

It’s obviously a stunning park. The Adventure Isle mountain is possibly/probably the most impressive set piece, visually, from any of the Disney parks, except, perhaps, for the volcano at Disney Sea. The volcano is a lot more 3-dimensional though, as in there’s a whole “hidden” land inside it, it sits at the centre of the park etc. Adventure Isle is very much an “end-on” visual, but it’s still stunning and more realistic than the volcano, though you could argue that realism really isn’t the point in a Disney park.

Treasure Cove is also gorgeous and very immersive, though surprisingly small. It’s also one of very few (the only?) areas with a bit of a side area to look around, though that’s also very small.

I’d say that’s one of the issues I had with the place. It’s mostly all open space, with very few little side areas to explore, which all the other Disney parks seem to have. Like I said, the only example I can think of is the little area at Treasure Cove, or, I guess, around the mountain/ropes course, though even that has turnstiles, so there’s very much a feeling of going in and out of an attraction rather than stumbling across a little area.

It’s somewhat understandable since they’re designing with massive crowds in mind, but the other parks still manage to cater for huge crowds and still have those little “secret” areas/pathways that massively improve the atmosphere. I found the place, despite having some amazing theming, to be a little soulless in all honesty, and it’s largely due to big, open spaces and huge pathways.

There’s also not a lot of distinction between most of the lands. Only Tomorrowland really feels like its own distinct area. Adventure Isle leaks into Treasure Cove which leaks into Fantasyland. I’m sure that’s deliberate, but I personally didn’t like it. What I love about Hong Kong is that the lands, while mostly tiny, are very distinct. There’s a definite wow factor as you move from Grizzly Gulch into Mystic Point for example.

It’s well-known that the place was designed as the “least Disney” of the Magic Kingdom style parks, and it really is. It’s probably for the best for the local market to be honest, but perhaps for Western visitors it could leave the place feeling a little lacking. It makes sense though. The “Disney” attractions seemed to be the least popular ones at the park. Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Crystal Grotto and even Pirates, for example, never went above 30 minutes on my first day, usually hovering around 20 minutes. At other parks, these rides can get ridiculous queues. Yes, they were longer on the second day, but still much shorter than other attractions.

The busiest rides, by far, were Soaring and Roaring Rapids, both ride types that most of the guests would have done before. Flying theatres and rapids are in almost all major, and a lot of minor, parks here. As I’ve said before, Tarzan went down really well with the audience, despite it being a repackaged version of something they will have seen before. Disney got it right. The local audience want what is already familiar.

Operations are, as you would expect, excellent, though there were a lot of breakdowns over both days and over a lot of rides. These were only for short periods of time though, and I never experienced any first-hand, just noticed them on the mobile app. Pirates was down for a couple of hours on the Saturday morning, but most other things seemed to get back up and running quickly from what I could see.

Operations were also often hampered by the customer base. As I’ve said before, this ridiculous idea that Chinese parks are just full of people pushing, shoving and queue-jumping are largely exaggerated. You’ll definitely see it on public transport when people want to make sure they can get on a bus, or get a seat on the Metro, but in parks it’s really no different than anywhere else. If people see a space, they’ll fill it rather than wait, sure. You do get the odd person moving through the queue to join friends/family further down, or a group somehow getting split up while the queue is moving, and it’s annoying for sure. However, it’s not a big problem, it happens everywhere, and doesn’t affect anything really. You don’t get groups of people trying to skip queues for rides. I’ve seen much, much worse in Europe.

This whole thing about people pissing and s**ting everywhere is, at best, ignorant and just not true. Yeah, you might see some parent letting their kid piss against a tree in the street if there’s no toilet nearby, but it’s not an issue in theme parks. Believe it or not, I saw people leave queues to take their kids to a toilet, rather than do the “cultural” thing of letting them piss on the floor.

Yes, you’ll see various stories/examples/pictures of it happening, but that’s because it’s actually worthy of a story when it happens, and Chinese people are generally equally appalled by it. A lot of that will come from Taiwanese and Hong Kong news sources. People here love to paint themselves as “better” than the mainlanders, and pictures of parents letting their kid take a piss in a Hong Kong park flowerbed is an easy way to do that.

Smoking and selfie sticks were a bit of an issue, but not massively. With so many smokers in China it’s always going to be difficult to get people to use smoking areas, though I think it really is getting better.

Having said all that…

Chinese people LOVE to faff. They f**king love it. It’s everywhere, not just parks. They seem largely incapable of just getting on with something. At supermarkets, they’ll ask the checkout bint a hundred questions, checking receipts and quibbling over pennies. At train stations, they’ll spend ten minutes quizzing the ticket seller rather than just buying a f**king ticket and reading the information boards. At a busy theme park, this can obviously hamper operations, especially a place like Disney.

A couple of examples. Apart from those couple of walk-on rides late on the Friday, the boats on Pirates were constantly stacking at the end of the ride. You’ll see s**t in the stations like people doing the whole “you sit there” “No, you sit there” crap while ride ops are just trying to get people to sit down quickly and get the boats out. I also saw people getting into the boats and then standing and taking pictures of their friends/family, holding everything up.

The massive queue times for the rapids would also be partly down to this, though having those small boats certainly doesn’t help. I was annoyed by the refusal to open the single rider line since so many boats were going out with empty seats, and not just one or two. Some were half empty. Again, it’s down to customer faff. A continuously moving turntable requires people to listen to a basic instruction, and just get the f**k on with it. But no. Let’s question the ride op about the ride. Let’s faff around taking pictures on the turntable. Let’s stand there discussing who gets in the boat first. The result? The boat you were assigned to has gone, with the seats you were supposed to be in now sitting empty.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to really remedy the problem. There’s only so much the ride ops can do while still remaining polite.

Right, enough now. Yeah, I know that the last few paragraphs make it sound like I disliked the place, or that I didn’t have a good time, but that’s really not the case at all. It’s an amazing park and I had a great time, but it’s a weird one to place up against the other Disney parks as it really bears so little resemblance to the others for the most part. If I was going to rank the parks, I’d struggle with where to put Shanghai as it kind of exists as its own entity.

Anyway, f**k it I’ll get the other park shoved in here now as well. There were a couple of +1s around that I hadn’t got before, but I decided on just doing Joypolis since it was on the same Metro line as Disney – admittedly almost an hour away – and looked a bit more interesting than yet another city park with a jungle mouse.

The Disney Metro Station. Bland. It’s an extension of an existing line rather than a distinct Disney addition, but still.

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Joypolis is inside this massive shopping mall, Shanghai Global Harbor. It’s actually very close to the area I stayed in last time I was in Shanghai, but didn’t have a coaster at that time.

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I’ve done the Joypolis park in Tokyo, twice, and f**king hated it. Same with this one.

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It was really expensive. I’m sure there are various options, and it seemed to be cheaper after a certain time I think, but I paid about £25 for an all-inclusive wrist band. Bear in mind that the Happy Valley and Fantawild parks charge around 20-22 quid. Dirty, evil, robbing bastards. I say £25, but that’s going on old exchange rates. It’s probably now more like £75.

It wasn’t as big as Tokyo’s, and luckily wasn’t busy since they have the same appallingly s**ty operations. For example, with the coaster, which has a train with four cars, they load one car at a time, making the people for the other three cars just stand there waiting. They pulled the same bulls**t with the simulators, loading one row at a time rather than just opening the gates and filling the three rows simultaneously.

What was slightly better here was that they didn’t spend five minutes explaining safety s**t before every single dispatch; they just drew your attention to the posters and that was it.

Anyway, the coaster, Music Coaster feat. Violet (who the f**k is Violet) was a weird spinner in a box, with music and tv screens.

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The cars were just f**king stupid. No idea what purpose the roof served other than to cause additional faff. Actually, knowing Joypolis, that was probably exactly why they were added.

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It was alright for such a small thing really, and you get two circuits on it. More interesting than a Jungle Mouse at least, or a regular Golden Horse spinner.

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This thing was opposite and was vile:

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I came off feeling like s**te.

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Luckily though, they had another one, but with a Transformers theme.

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Didn’t do this:

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Did this:

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It was f**king s**t, lasted about 2 minutes without anything actually happening.

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The 4D theatre was, as with most of them, a waste of time. It had some Sonic werewolf film.

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They had the same trio of small simulators that Tokyo has. I’m assuming that the other Joypolis places have them, too. Lotte World has stupidly added them recently, which is an amazing idea considering the tiny capacity and the huge number of visitors they get.

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I actually quite like them though. They’re clearly a very dated style of attraction, but the vehicles sync very well with the screens. Wild River is the best, followed by Wild Wing, with Wild Jungle being a bit cack.

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I only stayed about an hour, then headed back to my hotel, which took another hour since it was on the other side of Disneyland, leaving the next morning to fly back to Hong Kong.

Yeah, that’s it then. The quick update is now on page 13 of Word. Fuxake. I can go home in half an hour though, so I've filled up my "work" day (half day) quite nicely.
 
Some interesting stuff in there amongst all those pesky words - a very productive time at work then :) ; ta.

+1 and done to the Disney Park count then.

--

Oddly during the construction of this place, the only thing that I thought looked really interesting was the rapids (for some reason I was all a bit "meh" about Tron) , thought that they looked rather vast wrapping themselves around the fake-mountainside. Since its been open though its obviously Pirates thats the big deal and I've not read anything any good about the rapids.

How much coverage has there been in HK about the new park - I could imagine that the local HKDL really not wanting to even acknowledge its existence! There was some stuff here on the mainstream media the weekend it opened but more in a look-at-modern-China type way than any Disney-expansion way (fair enough really).
 
^ There was a fair bit of coverage in the 6 months or so leading up to the opening, with quite a lot of articles discussing it in relation to HKDL. It was all, predictably, quite misinformed though, written by people with no real knowledge of theme parks.

There's been a lot of coverage of Wanda recently as well, mostly because the owner, China's richest person, is claiming he'll take down Disney with his chain of parks. Again, all quite ridiculous and written as if he's the only person to open a park in China, with no mention of the already successful Happy Valley and Fantawild chains that have been around for years now.
 
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Incredible. ^^This is what I wanted more of. There seems to be too many flat, expansive areas that don't feel cosy or allow you to be lost in that little world.
There are attractions like Siren's Revenge and Shipwreck Shore to explore, but they are more directed at kids. I think. Pirates is popular, but it's got amazing throughput, which is why the lines are lower. What did you think of Camp Discovery btw? I think it looks fab! I don't think Roaring Rapids looks particularly good. I'm not after detailed sets, just something more than rock work. Mickey Avenue is so fab though, a great change from Main Street. Thank you for this report and I'm glad you enjoyed the park.
 
^That picture shows basically the only "off-to-one-side" area in the whole place really. It's gorgeous, but tiny.

Siren's Revenge and Shipwreck Shore are basically kiddy play parks - very nice ones, sure - rather than areas to have a proper look around though.

Camp Discovery is cool. I thought it would be a nightmare for capacity, since most rope courses seem to be, but because there are three different trails, and they're pretty long, it seems they can really hammer loads of people through. Having said that, it may have had no queue because it was really hot and sticky and a lot of people wouldn't want to spend the time climbing around on stuff.

Mickey Avenue I thought was a bit poor. It's good to see something different, but it's really, really short and also too wide to have that "street" feeling. Mickey Square would be a more apt name. At the other parks, you get a real sense of actually heading somewhere as you walk down Main Street. With Mickey Avenue, you've got from the main park entrance to the end of it in 20 seconds, then getting faced with that massive open area in front of the castle.

Don't get me wrong, they need that area, and it works very well for the nighttime show; there's loads more space that at any of the other parks, with various level for excellent vantage points from so many areas. At the other parks, unless you're pretty much dead centre and towards the front, you're likely to miss out on quite a bit. It's just that for the whole day leading up to that, you've got this massive open area with nothing going on.
 
Fab report! I always enjoy your reports, obviously because they're hilarious but also because they're places not frequently visited by CFers. I didn't really follow the construction of Shanghai Disney so this was kind of nice to see and get me up to date on the park :P . I agree with Chinese people faffing... I've never been to China, but I see a lot of Chinese tourists in places like Niagara/Toronto and it's awful especially for someone who actually has a sense of urgency. Couldn't imagine a whole park like that!

Tron looks amazing, but I don't like the idea of no Main Street simply because it's such an iconic part of the Disney parks!
 
Shanghai Disneyland looks fantastic. Excellent pics, Gavin! Tron is hands down the best looking coaster I have seen. Another interesting yet nice addition was the Camp Discovery ropes course. A good looking park, of course.
 
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