China 08/23 – Hot Go Jungle World
A few days later an overnight flight with no sleep (there were a lot of these) had us scooting over to Shenyang. I’d used this Northern city as a starting point before, with one primary purpose in mind, and it hadn’t gone well at all. But that’s just the China way.
Things got frustrating immediately upon landing. While the requirements for covid testing before flying had literally just been revoked, there’s still a health declaration that has to be filled in prior to travel into (and out of) China. The airline had sent this to me the day before, with the option to click a link or use WeChat to scan a QR code to click a link, to fill it in. Filling the form in gives you your own QR code to be presented at the airport upon arrival. Yet it turns out the non-WeChat one simply doesn’t work. We were gruffly met with the response that the code was no good and shunted to one side where there was a huge kerfuffle of people who hadn’t even bothered to do their forms up until this point.
A lone woman was at a desk providing ‘assistance’ with this and, after a short queue to question her about why our code was no good, casual racism kicked in and she couldn’t be bothered to deal with us, shunting us even further to the side and saying wait until she’d dealth with everyone else Chinese first. Everyone else Chinese just kept on coming, from multiple planes, and becuase they’re eternally useless, so I just took a guess at the WeChat thing being the issue, used that link, the form was ‘ever so slightly’ different, filled it all in again, got some new codes and got through. Thanks for nothing I guess.
More classic rubbish continued at the immigration desks where a batch woman checked our arrival cards and kept insisting that we needed a local contact in China, even though it was literally written as optional on the form and it had the address and phone number of our hotel instead. Three further immigration officers had to have a lengthy discussion about this ramifications of this procedure themselves once at the desk, I’m guessing none of them had this job back when tourism was actually a thing out here.
After that, it took an hour to get our pre-paid sim working properly on the 4G network, and on the various apps needed, without a local number, as literally nothing technological works properly any more. Old mate Didi was fired up, and a car booked straight to the first park. No more time for faff.
Day 1 – Hot Go Jungle World
April, 2018. My first time in Shenyang brought the discovery that some parks in China are seasonal. Until that point everywhere I had visited had operated (to a limited capacity of course) all year round. Thus, we were driven to this place only to find it closed, and the best I got was seeing the Gravity woodie out the window, before being driven to another park where literally every ride was closed because of ‘wind’. That place has since gone. This one is still clinging on.
The driver was an idiot and kept doing laps of the mostly empty car park, ‘worrying’ about a 5 minute drop off rule that an attendant had explained to him on the way in. He wanted to drop us off at the arse end of the tarmac for some reason, as if he was being covert, with the man literally watching him, bemused, a good half mile from the literal entrance he had just driven past, but we convinced him to take us to the front steps.
Luggage in tow, it was to the ticket desk.
Is the woodie open?
Yes, but rain is forecast. Then it will close.
Can we store our luggage?
Yes, free at that building just round the corner.
Two tickets please.
And breathe.
Or not, the threat of rain in the sky look genuine and this park is stupidly massively spread out, so it was a nervous 10 minute power walk over to the very far left end where the singular reason I was here was lying in wait. So many of these trips hinge on tiny moments like this that make or break the ridiculous effort involved and this was a brutal reminder of that fact.
#1 Time Travel was open. As I skipped down the queue, the much more heart-warming reminder of when it all works out just so hit just as hard. This is why we do it.
A handful of other guests were milling around in the station as I received the usual incredulous look from the ride staff. The hell is this guy doing here? I parked myself in the back row and waited for them to bother to run the thing. All the usual quirks came flooding back, the way it takes other people 10 minutes to sit down because they can’t comprehend loose item policies, or what they’re about to experience, or the implications of what row they sit in (front and back seem ‘scariest’) so they’re not even sure they want to do it, at the expense of other people’s time. I was specifically instructed to ‘hold on’, sometimes this is endearing, other times obnoxious. Let’s see.
The train chucks a right and heads up the lift before a straight, but steep and reasonably kick ass first drop that dives under a bridge. At the base of this I was immediately woken up to the fact that this thing has not been looked after. It’s riding rough as hell, but in a manner that I’d argue enhanced the experience. In the moment it felt like it was absolutely wrecking me, and by every right should have been in my sleep deprived state, but no noticeable harm came of it afterward, so I guess it was just right.
Anyway, the layout is very terrain based and winds its way through the jungle, with several more surprisingly steep drops chucked in throughout the layout. Several legitimate, cling to the restraint with terror big drops happen while dodging trees, so the instruction was justified. It brutally rattles around some corners at high speed off the side of a hill, reminding me a bit of Jungle Dragon (now amusingly known as Jerome’s Wooden Dragon and themed to a cartoon plane, as a 150ft intense woodie). Eventually it pops back under the bridge directly alongside the lift structure and does a Gravity favourite of several poppy hills on the bounce, some really good stuff. Back station-side it does a few more dives down into a valley before lurching up high into a brake run.
The pacing was a little off in places, but it delivered a bunch of fantastic moments amongst the insane rattle and roar of a woodie crying out for some maintenance in the jungle heat. I really liked it, far from my favourite amongst the Chinese collection, but I prefer it to any of the stateside ones that spring to mind. Hades without the the hideous lack of doing anything for at least a third of the ride (and deafening) basically.
Gave it another go to be sure (and safe, for weather reasons) and encountered a brand new procedure to me. There’s been discussions on here before about upper age limits to ride rollercoasters, and I’ve seen 60, 65 thrown out around a lot of Asia, but always questioned whether they’d actually verify or act on it.
Well sure enough, for my second lap I was asked to verify my age. Wasn’t sure whether or not to be worried, being half that, were they really implying I look that old (I’m generally guessed under) or do they not have a frame of reference? This will come up, once more, in the direst of circumstances. Anticipate.
With a hideous walk on the card back to any other attraction of interest, jumped on the chairlift things they have running parallel to the path and out over the trees on this side of the park. The views are pretty good and it’s one of those scary ski lift type ones that would be very easy to fall out of, should you want to, so was decent fun.
From here you can also see the weird patches of not amusement park that make the place so much bigger than it needs to be.
Upon touch down, there was a second one that headed out in the other direction, over some dinosaurs, towards a hideous looking SLC that I didn’t want to ride.
As such, put that off too for a minute and walked over to the mine train from there.
It was gone, train tarped up in the station. First spite! Will it be the la..ha ha no, where are we again?
At the literal opposite far end of the whole establishment from the woodie, lie two Wiegand creations. Jumped on the Mystical Hex, #2 Jungle Walk, which was open, and very surprisingly free and easy about loose items, bags, you name it. What did Wiegand tell them?
It was pretty good, backwards especially, got a bit fruity in parts when I couldn’t see what was coming and lurched downwards, swinging wildly a few times as it followed the hillside. Is the Alpine open too? I asked aloud, at the exact moment we happened to spot the track of it running alongside ourselves, deeply overgrown in jungle. I think that’s a no.
Are the two B&Ms in the other park open? I nearly got shouted at by a security guard for daring to look at them through a fence here. I think that’s a no.
4D Cinema was next door, but timeslots were awkward and there was still a cred to be had, can’t be arsed with that stuff out here when time is at a premium.
The weather suddenly got real dangerous looking so I literally sprinted towards the SLC (why?). Walked into the station with a handful of others, sat down, restraint down. Faff, more faff, slow attendant, slow attendant, a clap of thunder. Suddenly she wasn’t slow any more, running back to the op box. Ooh, a cheeky sense of urgency? Am I going to get this? Of course not. Restraints released. Asked to leave.
Sure enough, 2 minutes later the heavens opened and absolutely drowned the place. It was a double edged sword, as I really didn’t want to ride the thing, but of course wanted the cred. There’s also the consideration that, had this been somewhere that operated things efficiently, I might have bagged that. But also, had this been somewhere that had efficient weather prediction, I might not have even got that far. On top of that, I may have got it, and the Wiegand, had I done them in the other order. Or had the driver not been an idiot. Or had the 4G worked. Hinging on those tiniest of moments.
Oh well, rain, that’s game over for the day. We headed straight back to the exit with a whopping 2 out of 7 desired attractions experienced. Only one of them mattered though! Never mind, there’s a completely indoor Hot Go park just around the corner. We enquired about it with the staff upon leaving, only to be told it had only operated for a couple of days this whole year, it was gone.
Well there’s another 3 spites straight off the bat. The joke for this trip was that if literally everything went perfectly, I’d hit 1600 by the end of it. I knew that was never going to happen, but being 6 down on the first day is pretty special. Good work, China.
Picked up the bags, bagged another Didi over to the railway station and were soon Beijing bound for the evening.
And breathe.
What’s new with the trains in China? Well everything is ID based now, they don’t bother to use paper tickets any more and instead, as a foreigner, your passport is your ticket. This both works for and against you, you can’t use the standard machines to either let you into the station to begin with, or at the final gates before the platform and train, because they only process ID cards. The only way in is with human, manual verification, putting you in a separate queue that often times does let you skip past all the locals, but is also a hideously slow procedure because none of the humans know what to do with a passport. Many locals also try and beat the system by pretending they’ve got issues and sliding into your much shorter queue as well, so that’s a pain. If they ever had 10-20 tourists at once, they’d probably miss the train. Luckily they don’t.
Security wise, they were running a very tight ship in all locations. There was a time when I’d be factoring in an extra half hour just to get into these stations, with the long queues for bag checks and pat downs, but those waits seem to be a thing of the past. Getting something right at least.