Korea + Japan 08/18 – Nagoya
Challenge time. There’s a lot of smaller parks around Nagoya with not a huge amount going for them, but it’s always fun to see what you can mop up. So starting furthest out…
Day 6 – Enakyo Wonderland
A completely empty car park greeted us. This doesn’t seem to be the most popular of places but we may also have got the opening times slightly wrong and nothing is running yet.
We were allowed to enter the park first and have a wander, so took the opportunity to scout the number of pay per ride tickets required for each of the creds and spent some time faffing about with the machine trying to get the best deal.
Still don’t actually know when things were meant to open, but the staff were ridiculously friendly and went out of their way to find the right people and get the rides we wanted fired up for us anyway.
First up was the Cycle Coaster. Thought this one would be a bit of a stretch to add to the count as it runs like a cycle railway, but 2 chain lifts and a couple of ups and downs with the cycling itself not affecting the outcome makes it good enough for me.
Jungle Coaster had a bit of weird outwards tipping towards the edge of a cliff to give it a bit of a thrill. Otherwise your average, but sketchy, family coaster.
The camel is their signature jet coaster. Not much more to say on these medium sized ones, fun little sit downs at best.
On to the next destination.
Japan Monkey Park
The weather was ridiculously hot on this day and that alone was slowing us down quite a bit.
Particularly as the only available parking spaces for this place were up on a hill, near the monkey sanctuary and not particularly near the amusement park (spot the ferris wheel), it was rather difficult to be overly into the cred ‘running.’
Arrived at the ticket windows, where the staff were nice enough to check whether we did want the rides and not the monkeys. “Yup.”
Our first attraction here was Shooting Ride “Duel”, yet another of the same style of ride, done mainly to escape the sun for a bit. Back to generic looking weird creatures in this one, but at least they were all turning out to be unique in theming.
Highway Coaster was next. A fairly substantial looking jet coaster with a layout that follows the terrain rather nicely.
It wasn’t quite as spectacular as I had imagined sadly, the highlight being the moment it shoots under a bridge that had some cooling mist coming out of it (between these two pictures).
The monkey was a dull powered coaster, on which I spent the time looking at another cycle railway ride and questioning the consistency of this coaster counting malarkey.
We got lost finding the last cred and ended up back at the entrance to the park, which didn’t help with the heat situation.
Over a bridge and round the corner somewhere they were even hosing the ground to cool things down.
Here it is. The enthusiastic operator got us involved in shouting “go go” before it went went. If only all parks in the world were this open to strange adults barely fitting into kids rides.
On to the next destination.
Higashiyama Zoo & Botanical Gardens
This park supposedly had another massive walk to the amusement area, which we were dreading.
But we somehow ended up at a car park on the nearer side to what we were there for.
Still far too much hill though.
The jet coaster has had a ‘retheme’ to Jaguars with a new paint job on the cars and a sign with facts about big cats at the entrance. Cool.
Another dull powered coaster in the form of a bear. How many animal named rides have we had today?
Time for the legendary Slope Shooter. It was great fun with more enthusiastic staff, but nah, this ain’t no cred. Other than a lift hill, it runs on tarmac like a soap box race and I think we have to draw the line somewhere before those who count their rollercoasters start jumping in shopping trolleys and rolling down hills.
I do like the fear this ride generates that you might lose your arms on a wall if you naturally stick them up on the side bars.
On to the next destination.
Kariya-shi Kotsu Jido Yuen?
With the ‘bigger’ stuff out of the way, there were a few +1s to try and hit up. This was the first, but on arrival it seemed they had given up for the day, with a few locals hanging around just for somewhere to be, and no staff in sight.
Figured this may be a similar case for the other places and called it a day for creds, opting to go to album shopping in a mall instead. No regrets.
Day 7