Japan 05/26 – Marchen Mura + Huis Ten Bosch
Another day, another park
Day 11 – Marchen Mura
A quaint place with precisely 0 visitors and a catchy, repetitive, park-wide song.
Home to only the finest of coasters, behold #1 Ladybug Coaster.
One neat thing they have here is these little lookout towers next to each ride.
Might be my most photographed of the trip.
Elsewhere in the park they have cute animals.
A hill with a big squirrel slide on top.
This.
Free table tennis.
And free bikes.
All in all, everything Sanrio wasn’t.
Huis Ten Bosch
Down the road was one of the biggest parks of the trip, but you’ve probably never heard of it because it doesn’t contain a rollercoaster. I know I hadn’t.
It’s a fairly hefty resort, with a fairly hefty pricetag, and entirely themed to Dutchland.
First thing through the main entrance is another teddy bear museum.
Making a habit of these.
Back outside towards the action there are a few rides.
First up was Mission Deep Sea, which was timeslotted, and had a seemingly pointless fastrack system for 95% of the year.
It’s a weird one, with approximately 30 minutes of just pre-shows, moving from room to room with a couple of staff actors. They build hype rather well into each transition, but as with most show rides it’s lost entirely amongst the faff and procedure of making people stand in front of the next screen.
Very, very eventually you get to your cinema seats.
Where the main thing that sets it apart from most is that the lead actor sits in a game chair up front by the screen and performs along with the video. It only lasts about 4 minutes and despite their admirable efforts, is a complete and confusing non-event. Oh well.
Next door is a flying theatre. This is an odd one, because it opened just last year with the usual sightseeing faff. Now, less than 12 months later, it’s been overlayed with Evangelion the Ride 8K.
Which doesn’t appear to match the elaborate queue at all.
More pre-shows! You get batched several times and have several instructional videos on joining NERV, military operations, high tech all-terrain (flying) vehicles.
As such they’ve just transitioned from one trope to another. Scary monsters attack your base (which is the park itself) and you tag along for the ride watching the main characters in big robot suits beating them up. You win, at the cost of the park being destroyed, the end.
It was all a dream though, the park is fine, here’s a triple-decker carousel.
Last of their big 3 is Horizon Adventure.
This is a strange one, because water based special effects show to me usually means very exciting. Instead you sit on some wooden benches and listen (via headphone translation if requested) to an old man tell a confusing story about water to his uninterested grandchildren.
They run off and knock a statue over, then the story stops, then you watch the flood, then he comes back and shrugs ambiguously, the end.
Ferris wheel time.
The Dutch illusion falls apart when you can see the landscape beyond.
Construction, get excited?
Observation tower time. For context, it’s a replica of the tallest church in the Netherlands, the Dom Tower of Utrecht.
This used to house a simulator. The park also used to have a much more interesting sounding dark ride which has also been lost to time.
And I feel like it needed that. While it was a very pretty place, all of the ‘rides’ were a bit underwhelming and didn’t live up to the theming quality of the rest of the park.
All in all, glad to have knocked it off the list, even if it’s only worthy of a ‘s’alright.’