China 09/23 – Oriental Neverland

Time to end on a low then. With one short day left there was nothing major on the cards, just a trip to a nearby city with something of minor intrigue. A morning train took us out to Shaoxing, rather close to where we had flown into that really nice airport. The neighbouring city was also all about the fact that they had hosted the Asian Games and thus looked rather fresh and clean. Let’s hope the park is too.

Driver dropped us off at this entrance, which turned out to be the wrong one and a right pain in the ass.

Day 15 – Oriental Neverland

Oriental Neverland consists of 3 parks – a water park we don’t care about, the Mountain Kingdom park which is an indoor affair with a cred, and Coldplay Kingdom the more major outdoor park with several creds, including the one(s) I was most interested to try. The entrance we had ended up at was this massive building which contained both the water park and Mountain Kingdom. At the ticket desk it was confirmed that things wouldn’t be simple. They had no information regarding the big outdoor park here, nor could they sell tickets for it, nor could you access it through the indoor park (I had no idea about the geography at the time).
Walk, 10 minutes, that way.

10 minutes later little progress had been made. A painfully long walk around the outside of the building had led to a wrong turn at a hotel and then a monorail station. The station was elevated, with a woman sweeping leaves from it and glaring, but could not be accessed.

We continued on foot for a further 10 minutes, entering this strange assortment of buildings and the ‘second entrance to coolplay kingdom’.

The Oriental Garnd Hotel

There might even be a 4th park, full of this stuff.

Also a dog.

There was a ticket desk out here.
Question 1 – is Twin Dragon open? Yes, but it might rain later, and then it will close.
Question 2 – can we buy a ticket for both parks? Yes.
Simple enough, and exactly what I needed.

Powered in over a rickety bridge and past some swans towards the both ugly but also quite good looking track of Twin Dragon.

It’s a weird mismatch of track styles, and the framing of the synchronised loops is pretty poor with all of the mess around it, but this end sequence looks great in comparison.

I entered the queueline only to be accosted by a man.
It was closed.
But the ticket desk said it was open.
Don’t make me tap the sign. (A maintenance sign outside, of course)
Well someone’s lying then, fine, but do you know when it will open?
A shrug, can’t say.

What else have they got here then?

Some rubbish. #1 Mine Adventure.

This green on green mine train with an elephant on the front was a thing.

A bit like a jet coaster is probably the nicest thing I can say about it. Some interaction too.

And so is #2 Magic Speed Ring Racing the only threaded Sky Loop in the world? I always dread these things, the Chinese ones even more so because the last suspended me upside down for what felt like forever until something in my head exploded. This wasn’t helped by being forced into the front row, but at least on this occasion I could take my row of choice – 5. Near the back for a faster pull through, non-wheel seat. They can ride pretty jank too.

Surprisingly this was tolerable. Smoother than, say, the genuine article in Finland. No more excessively upside down than normal. Grin and bear it, +1.

No signs of life over at the star attraction, jumped on the Ferris Wheel. Dirty, dirty windows but some cool amenities like USB charging on it. That’s new.

There’s the scale of the stupid walk.

Is it a cred? I asked myself, looking down at the closed water ride. If you look closely it definitely has one of those questionable up and down coaster looking pieces of track in there.

On closer inspection, what do you think?

They have a flying theatre here, but it only runs like twice a day and we had missed the slot of course. Very helpful.

And so there was nothing for it but to camp outside the main attraction and see if anything happened. Made them feel as uncomfortable as possible by sitting on a bench directly outside the entrance, munching away on some snacks and staring.

All that transpired in this time was the staff member sneaking off to smoke in the guest toilets, and a Chinese couple coming up to the ride to ask the exact same question we had – when? There was no helpful answer, so they declared themselves: ‘we’ve done everything in this **** park, let’s get the **** out of here’. Even the locals know.

Soon after we said the same. Jumped on the monorail and back over to the other park just as it began to rain, so that was that for the day anyway. The staff at the monorail corroborated that ‘it always seems to be under maintenance’ and I bet the staff on the coaster were rubbing their hands together and going home thinking that’s a job well done.

There’s the entrance we actually wanted.

Mountain Kingdom

Over at Mountain Kingdom it was desperately quiet. They’ve got this massively elaborate entrance hall which bears no resemblance to what’s going on inside.

The face on this tree sums up my feelings about the place.

All the stuff on the left side has this vibe to it.

And here’s the cred. #3 Dragon Valley, Dragon Through the Valley, Through the Dragon Valley, Dragon Going Through Valley etc.

I always wanted to be in Gryffondor.

This was annoyingly hard to find, arrows were pointing up and into the rockwork, where we got lost, and I just wanted to ride the cred and get out of this damn place.

Eventually we found it in a basement, it was running on stupid timeslots but somehow we had managed to luck out.

In the station we weren’t so much greeted as forewarned with a terrible list of ways in which this was an experience not to be trifled with. As with the first coaster of the trip, on the very last we were asked to verify our age by means of a passport. For a family coaster. I still don’t know whether to feel insulted or not by this, but was leaning towards yes in the current mood.

Don’t do this, don’t do that, put your stuff over here, glasses off, hold on tight, very intense, you’re not ready for this, it spins very fast, the full works.

The car did three quarters of one rotation throughout the entire lap and was the most boring Mack Spinner in the world. What a joke.

For a laugh, or I don’t even know why, maybe the stupid time, effort and money it had taken to get to the ride and the fact no one else was around, maybe some goon points? I asked if we could have another lap. Maybe the spin was very luck based.

No. We were not allowed to reride this attraction today. The reason?
One time, one person had a nosebleed.
And you’re saying this to a man in a Kärnan shirt.

This was definitely the most frustrated I’ve ever felt in this hobby, even though I got the damn cred. Just every little thing about these parks was wrong, in the most stupid of ways. I’m not a confrontational person at all but very nearly kicked off, instead reminding myself that there’s just no point.

You could explain that every other park in the world would just clean up should a paying guest ride something and then happen to leak some fluids over your ride. It’s extremely unlikely, but it comes with the territory.

You could tell tales about a man who came halfway around the world to visit parks like this, who had ridden over a thousand different rollercoasters and how a plethora of them were infinitely more intense than this ride, and never had any of them come close to causing a nosebleed.

You could say that the stupid Sky Loop didn’t have this policy, in the same resort, but when did logic ever count for anything?

You could equally go to their guest services centre and say the same. You could say that you were lied to by staff about the opening of their star attraction before having your money stolen and experiencing one of the worst days at a theme park ever.

All you would get is a smile and a nod and them’s the rules. There’s nothing I can do about it.


Anyway, the right hand side of this park is also full of rubbish.

A dome theater with about two time slots a day that we had of course missed.

A 4D cinema with about two time slots a day that we had of course missed.

And then we left. This was an expensive day out by Chinese standards. Everything about the place is perfectly set up to not have you experience everything, to deny completionism, perhaps in an attempt to make you visit multiple times and get more money out of you, or more likely in a desperate attempt to save themselves some running costs. But the customer experience is so awful as a result that why would anyone want to visit, let alone return? And clearly they don’t. Just another poxy place that’s doomed to fail out here.

But, sadly, you know I’ll be back.

Taxi, train, metro, bags, metro, airport. Scooted on out of Ningbo and that was that.

Summary

New creds – 44
New dark rides – 33
New parks – 15
New Jinmas – 8
Best new coaster – Wooden Dragons Roller Coaster
Best coaster – Flying Aces
Best new dark ride – Forest Drifting
Best dark ride – Jinshan Temple Showdown
Best new park – FT Wild Land
Best park – FT Wild Land
Planes – 8
Trains – 14
Automobiles – 36
Spites – 11/55 (20%)

Interesting, more than half of the spites happened in a single day, though that’s a pretty bad percentage and par for the course out there. It felt like it was worse, but likely only on the magnitude of what they were…

Anyway…

God damn Flying Aces set the bar too high, clearly, though there were some cracking rides along the way, both coasters and dark rides. Was particularly gratifying to knock off every woodie in the country, China has such an insane lineup of those, and loved getting back to some Fantawilds, they’ll definitely be turning into the focus/highlights of future visits with the number of ‘big draw’ coasters dwindling.

2 more years of visa, let’s see what happens!