China 09/23 – HB World + Suzhou Amusement Land
Not only did the health declaration spite us on the way in, it also caught us at Jinan airport when trying to leave. Obviously there were other more important things on our mind and it escaped our attention that you even needed one, to leave. Even worse in the outbound direction was that the WeChat link led to a Chinese only version of the form, making it somewhat more difficult to fill in, though there was a modicum of assistance from the airport staff this time around.
It’s a very nosy form and once again slightly different to the previous two versions, and also like the immigration staff had a mandatory ‘you must know someone in China to be able to declare whether you’ve got a cough or not’ question. All this bureaucracy was circumvented by the staff themselves just putting Mr. Wang and a phone number of 1234567890, so the system works, I guess.
We flew back into the city of Hangzhou the following week, a beautifully run airport that was leagues ahead of the previous two experiences in every way. The region hosted a major sporting event in the form of the Asian Games last year and as such had been streamlined to suit the wayward traveller a little more.
Something that seems to happen far too often is stumbling on an amazing hotel room, when in fact you only have a ridiculously short amount of time to get in, sleep, and get out again. This was the case here once more, as the airport hotel must have silently upgraded us as I don’t recall booking an entire floor. You know you’ve hit luxury when there’s multiple bathrooms in your hotel room.
I didn’t really want to be in Hangzhou, I wanted to be in Suzhou, so we whisked away early the next morning and began a convoluted journey to get there. A Didi to the train station, followed by another first class high speed train (no chicken this time) to Shanghai, followed by a Didi to the first park of the day.
Day 10 – HB World
HB stands for Huayi Brothers, they make films, thus it’s a movie studio theme park with a Chinese twist and one I was rather excited for all things considered.
Bit of a Universal vibe once inside I must say, though they were here first, right?
Things started strong on the #1 Big Fish Roller Coaster, I enjoyed the face on it.
They had misters in the station and were doing an alright job of it really, a reasonable start. Looks the same as that imposter Jungle Trailblazer to me.
The real excitement came not from creds, but from potential dark ride discoveries as not a lot was known about this place. Kiln Dynamic Shooter certainly sounded like something I’d be interested in.
Certainly wasn’t what I expected. An early queue of stained glass windows turned to dug out tunnels and a single screen looping some first person shooter footage. An excruciatingly long wait ensued while potentially no one in the room was sure exactly what they were waiting for.
With still no idea what the hardware was, our turn finally came and we were handed military helmets to wear. But don’t worry, you needn’t tighten them.
Ok.
The mystery was revealed as this bizarre setup, a 4-armed tower type thing with guns mounted to the restraints, with which you shoot at stuff on the screens that surround the room.
It was very realism based, yet unresponsive in the gameplay. The guns had a fixed swivel and you couldn’t exactly aim anywhere you wanted, not that much sense could be made of what you were achieving anyway. Instead it just played out like a very long feeling 10 minutes of first person war footage.
This looked like it could contain something I’d be interested in. It did not.
Enough faffing around for now then, the major coaster here is #2 Heaven’s Wing / Wings of Glory, depending on which sign you believe, a B&M wing of course.
Not an original layout, but the original version never opened, up next to that first park of the trip, so this one remains unique for now.
It’s quite an intense one as these things go, gets straight to business with all 5 inversions pretty much on the bounce and some hefty positives in between the contrasting floatier moments. Kinda what these things are made to do I guess.
I really liked the flow of it, everything just felt well pieced together as it roared from element to element. B&M quality is back.
From there, things got a little huge.
Let us keep approaching this monumental statue.
Yup, it’s big.
How tasteful, and this, inside a theme park.
Oh… cred though.
#3 Inflaming Beatles is a cultured Beijing Jiuhua spinner with immelman and everything, seeing lots of new layouts from them at least, and them having inwards facing seats like a Gerst were a first for me too.
Back to excitement, what I believed to be a dark boat ride themed to Amazing Detective Di Renjie, whoever he may be.
Queue starts nice and then gets very indoor and cave-like. Is this going to be Chinese Valhalla?
Well no, it had none of the spectacle. Bit of a weird one, huge sections of darkness and nothing much going on. The odd scene I couldn’t understand, though it was quite horror oriented. Other guests just spend the entire ride chatting about other things. Some screens on a lift hill with people fighting. Lots of time to get nervous for the drop at some point.
It was manageable.
A hugely unshaded walk took us back away from all that, where I had another go on the B&M, spending about 15 minutes for a single train to be dispatched, during which I had to fight a man for the back row, as he couldn’t comprehend that the air gates he had been positioned in for a significant portion of his lifetime were intended to line him up with the empty seats he had been staring at for a significant portion of his lifetime.
Round the corner from there was this interactive martial arts thing in front of a big theater screen. Seats in the room were divided into four coloured teams and you had to either mash buttons or spam spinning the giant track ball in front of you to perform some animated kung fu. It was certainly different and I was pleased to at least take a victory from it.
And then this Flying Theatre that was closed. Would it have been good? Who knows.
I had just one more dark ride on my mind, which was in theory located within this other particularly well themed section of the park.
Something war related, huge and extravagent looking. Popular too, with over an hour of queue. I had expected things in this park to be a little more high budget than they had turned out to be so far, assuming the Brothers made money off of this film stuff. Would this one save the day?
Such disappointment (but not the biggest of the day). A highly elaborately themed queueline with holographic preshows led to the Indiana Jones dark ride vehicles but.
It’s VR.
An empty warehouse, with VR headsets. On these vehicles.
Bad VR.
The sound didn’t work properly, the graphics were poor, the movements were weak and didn’t match very well. I had more fun whipping the screen off my face every so often and looking around the dark warehouse at how it all was done.
The cleverest part really was things like heat lamps or fans placed at certain track points to give you that extra ‘dimension’, but all in all a bit naff.
Unlike rival Warner Bros. they were deeply apologetic about the sound not working properly and offered to let us ride again immediately.
We declined.
Oh well, they supposedly had film sets and stuff to nose around too, let’s try that.
Rock Dog, everyone knows Rock Dog.
That one with the tanks from the bad dark ride.
The film with the barrels.
Young Detective Dee, Rise of the Sea Dragon. Looks better than anything about the boat ride.
That one in space.
Meh, best thing about the place was the wing coaster, and that’s not usually a massive accolade. Was fun trying though. Onwards.
The next driver took us to Suzhou itself, where we dumped the bags and found Suzhou cat.
I was getting mixed messages on the internet about the park here and whether it was open or not, eventually having it confirmed as open until suitably late for a mid afternoon arrival.
No time like the present then.
Suzhou Amusement Land
That’s one hell of an entrance, and one hell of a spite.
I had hoped that visiting on a summer weekend would give me the best chance of finding the major attractions open here but alas, no, China being China, less than half of their ride lineup was available. No Mack.
They had a sign up outside displaying the attractions that were open, rather than the ones that were closed, in fact. On a very pleasantly weathered Saturday, with operating hours from 9am to 9pm, with a special promotional event and festival going on, neither of their two major coasters were operating.
Well, whatever, it was cheap to get in and we’d come this far, let’s salvage the rest.
Feel the scale of my disappointment, again.
Then multiply it by 325, because I really, really wanted to ride this thing.
Whose idea was it to take vertical photos? Anyway, this isn’t some Chinese knock off stealing things from Europa Park, they have a big Mack Media 4D theatre here playing the admittedly very good Chaos in Wonderland film.
Though they do a very good job of trying to convince you otherwise. Who commissioned this?
These do look cool, but a better day out for guests would have included both this, and rollercoasters.
Oh, they had A coaster open.
Some trash spinner called #4 Twist Coaster with a horrible kink in it, this time Jinma attempting the Eos Rides model or something – they’ve done them all!
This contained an OCT-made dark ride drop tower thing called Summit of Mount Everest, the first time I’ve managed to catch one open. I love the concept, with a ridiculous floor to ceiling screen across the height of a drop ride, with what should be the ability to bounce up and down like a Tower of Terror. It just doesn’t have the guts to go for it, a very muted set of motions all round. Film was the usual big fantasy blokes beating up other big fantasy blokes in a pagoda type affair.
One more surprise up the park’s sleeve, I had Crazy Journey down as a flying theatre.
This ain’t no flying theatre.
Things in the queue get more biohazard as you go, until
Bonus robocoaster.
Entirely unique as far as I can tell, you’re flying around with a scientist bloke while getting attacked by plants, worms and eventually dragons. Again it had good moments of pause to build some tension, though some of the physical scenes were a little lacking. They made up for this with a couple of jump scares from giant animatronic worms that were pretty cool.
And that rounded off the park for now. Crushing, but had more to offer than stupid Sun Tzu at the very least.