Korea + Japan 04/17 – Lotte World
Having only had the 72 hour transit period through Seoul, of course we weren’t done with Korea yet.
Day 9 – Lotte World
The park website had confirmed that their infamous Intamin Aquatrax was back in business. “Let’s hit it on the weekday” we said, “it’ll be quieter” we said…
We were back in business ourselves with the tourist card. It was supposed to give us another 30% off here, but through some happy miscalculation, it made the ticket price 30%.
By the time we had sorted the tickets and moved swiftly through the indoor section of the park, the queues had already started to explode. We grabbed a Disney-style fastrack slot for already pushing 17:00 and joined the already pushing 50 minute queue for Atlantis Adventure.
It must get them on a regular basis, but it isn’t built to take a big queue. They batch at the entrance gate for a short walk and a 10 minute wait by the station, the rest of the queue is made up of a roped off section of one single straight and then just masses of guests forming an orderly line throughout much of the outdoor section of the park, round shops and even other queues. At the point it had reached 200+ minutes in the early evening, it was hard to distinguish it from the scream shield gyro swing line of 100+ minutes. No thanks.
Loved the station. There’s a sign up saying 140 phones have been lost on this ride so far today, which I could have believed from the locals (it stayed the same number all day, so just for effect sadly). To save you clambering over the cars, a trolley is pushed up to the vehicle for your loose articles. The staff then clap and sing you out as the ride dispatches.
The coaster itself is a bit of a mixed bag. It has a fantastic start with the launch and vicious indoor airtime hill and there are some other really strong moments throughout but these are punctuated by some dodgy pacing issues. There are trims galore, some of which completely kill momentum, then there’s a weird middle section of slowly drifting past theming + the transfer track and a seemingly redundant slow LSM lift hill.
An hour into the day now and the other coaster in the outdoor section (though it’s an indoor coaster) had run out of fastrack already. Queued at least 90 for it, spending most of the time trying and failing to figure out where the ride fits.
This ride was a surprise hit. The confusion/mystery as to what it is and where it came from only adds to the fun. We think it’s an Intamin, we know it spins and thats all you need to know.
As soon as it starts leaving the station, the crazy spinning begins and never lets up. The ride is a long blur of theming, intense dizziness and laterals and from the many brief glimpses you get of your neighbouring cars you can see everyone is absolutely loving it.
Headed back inside for a 2 hour queue at the Vekoma looper. Opted out of the Virtual Reality, why miss all the intense indoor interaction?
It had an interesting layout and rode quite well, just wasn’t particularly good because of what it is.
All the creds, which had all the big queues, were now ticked off. Time to see what else was on offer.
Dragon Wild Shooting was a great little dark ride and seems to be underappreciated. Took a second lap but failed to get the winning screen at the end on both occasions. Don’t mind losing to those cute dragons.
The Adventures of Sinbad was a really impressive story-telling dark ride in boat vehicles. I didn’t expect much from the size and indoor location, but theyve definitely worked some magic to pack so much goodness in there, particularly a seemingly huge drop.
There was even more magic afoot with a full blown rapids ride being somewhere halfway up a building. This was also great for the novelty.
Pharoah’s Fury was closed. I’ll take that as a reason to return.
Fantasy Dream was one of those classic dark rides full of slightly out there characters and sets with a love it/hate it song containing the name of the ride, sung many times. Once was enough.
By then it was finally time for the fastrack reride on Atlantis, sneaking past a good 3 hours of queue.
Loved it, but it didn’t do anything to sway my earlier opinion.
That rounded off the day nicely, it was all very enjoyable in spite of the queues. Again the locals always seem to have a good time in their parks regardless, so it’s not really an issue as long as you join in with the spirit.
Some obsessive album hunting/shopping began that evening and consumed most of the following 72 hours. Life changing stuff, but I won’t go into detail.
We also went to the ‘rainbow bridge’ that night, which was meant to be one of the wonders of the world supposedly, but were hilariously underwhelmed by the spectacle. As part of a ‘show’ it played some traditional music while the fountains supposedly shot water and blinked LEDs in time. The music was bland, you couldn’t really tell what was happening and every time a song ended and we thought it was over, another one came on with exactly the same effect.
Day 10