China 05/24 – Shanghai

Back in Shanghai, we’ve reach the end of the line. There’s one more launch coaster here that’s been eluding me for a while now, I’ve never actually been to the park so it’s lower down the spite scale, but it is getting quite annoying.
Landed in the hotel, it was raining, phoned Steel Dolphin, not open of course.

Was only a few months ago that I was in Shanghai, and it was raining, but managed to mop up a couple things on the Eastern side of the stupidly massive city. This time there were a couple of backup options far out to the West that caught my eye. Indoor ones.

Day 15 – Wanda Children’s Park

I’m not exactly sure when this one appeared on the coaster hunter radar, don’t remember spotting it when researching previous visits and didn’t realise Wanda had a foothold in this city, albeit a not very good one.

Inside was a baby spinning coaster that looked rather cute.

But the curse of soft track obstructions strikes again, slightly less decorative this time. Why?

And that’s the park.

Wanda Auto Theme Park

Over a bridge, in an adjacent mall, there’s another one.

And a slightly more interesting one at that.

Mainly because it’s home to this, whatever this is. It’s like a Jinma version of the stupid spike coasters but better capacity and it actually operates. This is what I clocked on the trawl of coast2coaster and immediately thought ‘I want that’.

They had complicated wristband options on the door but you could pay per ride, at the ride, using QR codes which worked. Getting better.
I immediately paid for both sides, to the alarm of the staff.
The advice of ‘you should try one side first to see if you like it’ fails to consider that liking things isn’t a factor in this game any more.

I did kinda like #1 & #2 Speed Racing anyway, it’s by no means offensive, more a bit something and nothing. It goes real slow along the whole first straight and turn, but gives a decent burst of acceleration along this return stretch with a bit of ducking and diving.
The other end is just more slow turns and then it ends though it looks quite cool/weird, there’s a bit of theming like a crashed car in the wall. Biggest gripe is that it doesn’t do anything about the racing aspect. There’s was no indication of victory when we beat a small child on the second side.

They also have this thing, which looked awful.

And a simulator, which looked intriguing, so waited for the appropriate time slot.

Asia-Europe Rally had decent attention to detail, the entrance walls were plastered with newspaper cuttings about all the different characters and vehicles that were going to feature in the film.

Vehicles look quite good and are on carpet. Somehow they rise above the carpet when it’s time for action.

The action was, as proclaimed, a race across the world. Very farfetched, silly and wacky, these old timey cars and caricature characters crossing all sorts of terrain and famous landmarks while constantly trying to foil each other. It started in China and ended in Paris and the main guy won, or was it us.
Decent quality anyway, this would have done well at any actual Wanda park that’s lacking a dark or show ride.

Park complete.

Trip complete.

I’ll leave you with this haunting image.

Summary

New creds – 35
New dark rides – 51
New parks – 14
New Fantawilds – 6
Best new coaster – Beyond the Cloud
Best new dark ride – Legendary Dunhuang
Best new park – Oriental Legend
Planes – 3
Trains – 19
Automobiles – 53
Spites – 8/43 (18.6%)

China 05/24 – Huachang Dragon Valley

Next stop Nanjing. Been here a few times, gradually chipping away at its offerings. I didn’t know what to do with myself this time though, what with the public holiday situation. Had one park in mind, no backup, would just have to suck it up and see I guess.

Day 14 – Huachang Dragon Valley

Bit of a trek into the park from the Didi drop off point. It’s a resort as much as any other theme park is a resort at least, out in the lush green hills beyond the city. Got a water park and stuff.

Main entrance to the amusement park is contained within this building, with a big fancy graphics display, turnstiles, a shop, not much else.

Heading outside again you’re greeted first with this type of view. The big star water ride looks rather awesome offride, but it wasn’t on my radar.

Bypassed all that in an anti-clockwise direction and straight to the star coaster #1 Jungle Dragon. Not to be confused with the Happy Valley GCI that used to be called Jungle Dragon and is now named after an animated plane for kids.

Also known as Abyssus without the multi launch. Also known as a Vekoma Shockwave.

Even though this was the Saturday directly following 3 days of public holiday chaos, miraculously the Chinese theme park scene had returned completely to normal. I walked straight onto a half empty train.

It’s a great ride. I liked Abyssus a fair bit, though it’s hard for it to stand out amongst its lineup. Amongst the lineup on this trip however, Jungle Dragon was a pretty hard hitter. I’m not sure if the faff/start/multi-launch helps Abyssus in any way, all the meat of the layout comes from the main launch onwards before it starts to die a bit at the end. Maybe 3 acts are better than 2, will reconfirm at some point.

What I did know was that it packed a lot more punch than the Hyper Space Warp which didn’t do much for me a few days prior. I actually wanted to reride this, though it was a struggle to ride multiple times on the bounce, 2 weeks into a China trip anyway.

The trimmed top hat is silly, and not in a fun Wrath of Zeus, Toutatis or Batman GCE kinda way, but once you get that out of the way it’s packed with strong positives, solid pops of air time and plenty of twisty. Locals loved it. I did too.

Now that it had been confirmed that timing wasn’t going to be an issue, it was time to mop up the rest. Starting with the duelling family coaster cred(s).

There’s a reasonable chance that visiting one day prior would have bagged both sides of #2 Dragon Race, but under extreme duress. Alas, though it still had maybe a 10-15 minute queue that steadily grew due to a mostly family oriented demographic on park, they were only opting to run a single side because China.

Haven’t come across this layout before anyway, another slight glimmer of hope that Jinma are getting more interesting and creative, but it’s a little short and does nothing. Two more out there apparently, woo.

The park is split into multiple indoor lands aside from the coasters. This was the one with the tree.

It had a 4D cinema about a bee, called 4D Mine Adventure for some reason.

It wasn’t very good.

And a flying theatre by the name of Mystical Tour.

It was a flying theatre.

The indoor area that contains the big boat ride is a lot more impressive, all decked out like this.

Loads of just cavey sections to explore.

Some museum about stuff.

One path lets you see the elevator lift of the boat ride in action. No cred here.

Pretty though.

Haunted walkthrough I assume.

Theme of the next indoor area was space. This meant that they were playing How to Train your Dragon 2 on a big screen…

Dragon Valley I suppose.

Also guns.

Some 4D ball.

But the most interesting attraction was Star Tours the dark ride, not to be confused with Star Tours the simulator.

It’s another 4D motion based car ride from our new friends Playfun. Pretty hefty and extravagant.

Name aside, the other influences are quite clear. We get our spaceship thing repaired by some robots and head out into a huge space battle which looked rather cool. Reminded me of the epic intro to Revenge of the Sith and then had me wishing we had a Star Wars dark ride that did something around that. This is where the fun begins.

We also had Pandora.
And Transformers, lots of Transformers.

It had lots of other different things in it too though, was great fun. Movements don’t kick enough ass again, but it’s to be expected for now.

Sadly there was still one more coaster to obtain, I’d been putting off #3 Through the Ring.

There’s no way I would have queued this.

For this. I absolutely hated this. The new revelation that I don’t even care about the upside down any more. Just the horrible, horrible tracking that rattles your brain and gives you a headache.

And then it rained and then I left.

Success I guess, nice enough place. Got some good visuals and a decent headline coaster and dark ride, rest is meh. The quintessential Chinese theme park lineup.

Day 15

China 05/24 – Silk Road Paradise

We escaped the horrors of Lanzhou the following morning and caught the next train back down to Xi’an. Once here I had one particular park in mind.
In the absence of almost any actually decent rollercoasters to do in China now, my attention has turned to the latest and greatest from good old Jinma. They’ve been trying their hand at a few more ride types and track styles as of late, so let’s go sample their (Aurora) Flying Coaster or FXC-28A.

Day 12 – Silk Road Paradise

I don’t know the brand behind this place. but in terms of scale and presentation it seems fairly top tier for China. It also seems possible they did the Silk Road park down on Hainan, are they doing more? Maybe they can hang with the other big players. We’ll see.

As for today though, the driver dropped me off at the East entrance to the park, as it was geographically convenient to do so. Turned out it wasn’t logistically convenient to do so, as there wasn’t a ticket office on this side, just a confused rabble of guests seemingly unable to get into the park because of various QR code and app faff. I also tried the QR code on the park map here, but it didn’t work. Ugh.

The map indicated however that there was a far more significant entrance on the North side, so I hotfooted it around the perimeter to that point and sure enough there was a big ticket office to one side of the plaza.

If you’ve ever wondered how (some) Chinese parks make any money and can be so quiet for most of the year, I present to you a public holiday visit. The ticket office was set up like a train station, with 12 or so windows and it was packed. They were absolutely raking it in.

I’d been too busy focused on getting in and not quite noticed the sheer scale of the place just yet. Is huge.

Particularly this thing, I was rather fascinated by it. Such a striking centrepiece and seemed to be a good 1000ft tall, looming over the park in every direction.

I battled my way through the crowds and towards the main coaster. A small queue was present outside of the entrance, no biggy, and then I clocked the sign. A temporary sandwich board sign. That’s a 4 hour queue lads.

Well, I’ve come this far.

It seems an injustice to dismiss what turned out to be a four and a half hour wait for a coaster in a single sentence, so some observations:

Time passed relatively quickly for me, all things considered. I think a combination of getting older and having past experience with bad theme park situations helps with this and maybe also that I cared less about the end result.
Two combined stints at Maverick totalling the same amount of time was far more stressful and included breakdowns.
Two hours not moving in the Taron single rider queue for ‘midnight Taron’ at 8pm with a thousand train despatches vibrating your feet while people around you have panic attacks was far less pleasant.

In general, the Chinese didn’t seem to care, it was par for the course to be spending their precious day off in a barely moving queue.

They had roaming staff in the room allowing people to leave for bathroom, food etc. provided they took a photo with their group and then showed it upon return.

One family tried to cut about 15% of the queue by sending their children forward and trying to join them after. Both the surrounding guests and staff gave them a good shouting at and they were removed in shame. Shame that doesn’t happen in other parts of the world.

Some of the community spirit was rather heartwarming, some prospective riders had family members just pop in every hour or so with some food or a power bank for their phone, pat them on the head and check they were ok.

One guy left the queue area to sit down and cry on a box for a bit, though it could have been unrelated.

They also did a Taron and closed the queue 4 hours before park close so that it would be empty by the end of the day. This confused people so many times because of course they had to keep opening it to let returning queuers through, then stop normal guests who would come and ask is it open?

But, through all that, it was running one train when it has two. None of this was necessary.

Made it to the station anyway and ended up back row, outside, woo.

So, how was the ride? I enjoyed it.

#1 Aurora Flying Coaster doesn’t have the refined qualities of an old B&M (let’s not talk about new B&M), but it doesn’t ride poorly by any means.

It feels a bit prototype in that they’ve gone all in with their own pretzel loop element, but then not much else happens layout-wise around that. The same could be said for Superman clones.

And, for now, I’d take it over one of those purely because its different. Once they build 10 of them that will likely change.

For those who don’t like pretzel loops/intense moments on flyers, you’d probably like this more. It manages to make the pretzel a little more pedestrian and less lung-crushing somehow, though it has some strong positives in the later turns.

Best bit about the whole thing for me was the seating position though. Yes, it’s old school Vekoma loading, but those tip you slightly on your head in the horizontal position and it’s deeply uncomfortable waiting in the station and on the brake run which, at Carowinds, takes forever.

This one has you perfectly flat on your back. Comfortable, just chillin, yourself and your thoughts on a rollercoaster, looking straight up at a high wooden ceiling and then some ominous sky as it was threatening to rain. In that sense it was unlike anything else I’d ever experienced, and a good thing for it.

It also retains the more effective anticipation of backwards lift hill, which I always appreciate.
I hope they can take this stuff further in the future now – the technology is definitely getting there, now they need a good creative streak from a designer and to do something much more exciting with it.

With more than half the operating day gone on a single attraction, decisions had to be made of course on what else I wanted (and was willing) to do.

The back of this theatre tells us that the park has six themed lands. I saw two and a half at most.

From the queue I had clocked on a TV that they had a major dark ride, so that became priority number two. This is it, the Mysterious Adventure of Marco Polo. Queued about an hour, all in.

You know that adventure, where Marco Polo is in the desert, meets a wizard lady and helps her stop Godzilla rising from the earth. It’s a well known tale.

Well this was that, on a 3D, motion based dark ride.

See?

Oh and she gets a dragon friend at the end, because merch.

It was alright, not the best of quality, not the worst. Again mostly enjoyed for being something new.

This park actually has quite a selection of branded merch, a shocker for China. I didn’t have the time nor the inclination for any of it given the circumstances though.

From there I learned a few more things. Every time I see Jinma spinner with the inversion listed in a park I assume the clone, which I’ve still not yet managed to do.

This one isn’t a clone. But on a day with 4 hour queues, the 4 seater spinner had, naturally, already closed its queue for the day.

And they’ve got a Flying Theatre, but my willingness to put effort in had been drained for the day. More multiple hour queues for lesser indoor attractions, already closed rollercoasters, and it started to rain, so I left.

Such a tease of a visit. It’s almost worse for me having been to half a park and simply not being able to see or experience most of it, than not knowing at all.
Inevitably I’ll have to return for the rest of the rides (and a Zacspin! they’re building a Zacspin! eww), and probably not queue 4 and a half hours for the flyer.
Which, on an obsessive level, renders this visit moot.

Oh well, rode the new Jinma and liked it. Got some dark rides for the database. Beats doin’ stuff.

Day 13

China 05/24 – Fantawild Adventure Jiayuguan

After escaping Dunhuang again in a far less themed manner it was back to Jiayuguan to tick off the other Fantawild park.

Day 11 – Fantawild Adventure Jiayuguan

Though only branded Adventure, it also has some unique styling, which is nice.

Wouldn’t be one without a castle though.

Next thing I noticed was less expected. The place had queues. Queues? On a Wednesday? At a Fantawild? In the middle of nowhere?

Well today was labour day for China, on which they take a few days off and hit up some theme parks, so good for them.

I’d say that this was all part of some grand scheme on my behalf to ensure I got on Beyond the Clouds at some point this trip, suffer at all costs if necessary, but I remained ignorant to what was really going on this day. Luckily, being the middle of nowhere, it didn’t manage to affect things too much. It soon would.

Anyway, skipped past the SLC because it looked a bit sweaty and joined a 20 minute queue for the Boonie Bears Adventure interactive shooter.

This was from an era where they still had the original ride system, but already had Boonies to play with so went straight in with that, rather than overlaying poor old Fantawild dinosaur.

Speaking of whom, this was the closest I’ve come to acquiring another one, except that it was either £1100, or they wouldn’t sell it. Or both.

He even had his own shop again.

But it was closed.

Woo, service gates.

They also have a Boonie theatre, but I’d seen this film (the original) not too long ago, so had other priorities.

Musi… Skip!

One such priority was The Silk Road, the last of the unique dark rides in the region.
In an Adventure park? How unprecedented.

Poor camel.

Queue had some stuff.

And I was worried about the sheer volume of people in here, but then clocked the ride system.
We’ve got ourselves a people eater.

Once a thousand people are aboard, the curtains close and you get an introductory video on the left. Silk Road is a thing, lets travel along it. Then you move off.

Given the vehicles, the direct comparison is Chinese Opera Express, and this one successfully highlights the problems with that one. Range of scenes.

You’ve got cold bits.

Animals.

Hot bits.

It also had its own Dunhuang/Mogao Cave section.

And in the usual revolving platform spot, this guy. Still had the screens too, more stuff happened, but though I was perhaps unexpectedly expecting to spin around with this guy and some huge sets, it didn’t happen.

Was decent enough.

Main priority out of the way, it was cred time on #1 Mount Tanggula.

It also had a stewing queue, but hold on a minute.
They
added
a
second
train
!

This marks the second park in the whole country at which I’ve borne witness to the phenomenon, outside of Disney (and Universal – do powered Mack inverts really count though?)

Admittedly they were sending them out with multiple empty rows for no other reason than a couple of air gates were broken, but still. Progress.

Yeah, the other cred was teasing me from afar. Decided to leave it a little while longer though.

The other, other cred teased me up close, by being unobtainable.

Space Journey had a queue outside the building, which is never a good sign. But I was still yet to ride one after the magic door bloke stole the last one, so we sucked it up. Wasn’t terrible.

The insides hold some momorabilia, and not much of a queueing area thankfully.

Preshow. It’s the 50th anniversary of space and we’re having a celebration. Then Chinese Joker comes over the comms (you never get a visual, I just pictured it in my head)and says he’s gonna do terrorism. I believe Picard season 3 stole their plot from this ride.

Of course we’ve got to board our high tech, all terrain, space cruiser and help the city stop the terrorist. Provided we’re the appropriate heigmt for such an undertaking.

Simulated excitement.

It was ok. Plot wasn’t all there, we catch up to the guy a number of times and then he drops a cubular time bomb in a building. We catch it and Iron Man it out to space before it explodes. I guess the Avengers stole a bit from here too.

There’s no resolution to that though, we stopped the bomb but as far as I can tell the guy is still out there causing chaos, we didn’t catch him. Oh and we don’t actually go to space.

Space.

Didn’t manage to obtain a vantage point for this parade, though it happened outside the exact same ride building, so that was trippy. I’m confused by the concept of this one, it was just a bunch of Chinese in cosplay, and some clowns, but I’d seen half of them on park already, in ride queues. Do they work for the park? Are they volunteers? Can you rock up and get free entry if you do the parade? Would I? Probably.

Sadly it was SLC time, though #2 Flare Meteor had faded to a mere two train wait because most people had done it once, never again.

It was fiiine. Or was it. No, I think it was pretty bad. Doesn’t matter, it was a thing.

Wizard Academy is also a thing here, another sign that this is the newest Adventure park. No dinos rampaging here.

Endorsed by Duludubi.

And this is where we keep learning new things. Unlike any other iteration I’ve done, this one has a preshow with an animatronic and everything. It weren’t running though. I really needed that back story.

The cars had more effort put into them.

And on board there were a couple more surprises, the same screen sequence was interluded with a number physical effects that aren’t often there either.

Rawr

Wizard chucks some logs at you cos he’s evil.

And arrows.

OG Old mate octopus.

Your bravery saved yourselves. From me. You can visit the Wizard Academy any time.

Satisfied, we headed out and then things started to go wrong. Didi couldn’t find us a driver. Gave it like half an hour of saying it was searching and that we were in a queue. And there were a couple other parties out by the road in the same situation as us, also in that queue.
There weren’t even any dodgy drivers hanging about either, strangely. I guess they get the day off too.

Time ticked on towards the train and things got desperate. A taxi rocked up, but had been prebooked for someone else on park and didn’t want to take the emergency fare. I was ready and willing to pay top dollar to not be stranded in a city with like 2 trains a day, but they were an honest soul and it wasn’t necessary. Instead another of the friendly groups that were waiting, also fair play to them, helped to reason that we just pay for both the outbound and return leg, the taxi can hotfoot it to the station and back and still meet their commitment. So they did.

Yay for China.

– – –

I should learn to trust my instincts when trains sell out unexpectedly. Like that time it snowed. It would have been possible, and was the original plan, to take a train directly back to Xi’an that night, but they all sold out the moment they were released.

Not to worry, I just booked one that went half the distance, a hotel for the night, and then one for the following morning.

UGH, this was such an unecessary added faff. Upon arrival at Lanzhou station, henceforth known as a hellhole, the same Didi failure was happening again. There’s a designated pickup point at most stations set up to cope with online booking shenanigans and not ruin the taxi ranks and or/car parks and, though while standing at this point watching a million cars go by, none of them could be assigned to us apparently. We waited a good half an hour for the ‘virtual queue’, eventually got to the front, a car came up on screen, then instantly cancelled on us. It then says sorry mate, you’re our priority now, but nothing came of that either.

Should have just gone to the normal taxi rank. Went to the taxi rank, where there were millions, got a car instantly… dumb. Problem was it took over an hour to do a couple miles to the hotel, because traffic, during which the driver told us all the delights of the public holiday that was news to me. I swear I looked that up…

Anyway, many wasted hours just to unnecessarily transit through a city. All in a days work.

Day 12

China 04/24 – Dunhuang

Such was my fascination with the Legendary Dunhuang ride, we took a day out from parks to go and visit the actual Dunhuang for some general sightseeing, another few hours further out into nowhere by train.

In a welcome change from the endless high rises and chain hotels that punctuate the average Chinese city, we had no option to stay somewhere such as this quaint inn.

It’s China, but not as we know it.

Day 10 – Dunhuang

The staff were really friendly and arranged a driver for us out to the Mogao Caves the next morning. Catch was, upon arrival at the ticket windows, sightseeing and culture had ‘sold out’. You HAVE to take a coach to get into the compound because it’s all barricaded off because people are stupid, and you HAVE to use a massive tour group ticket for exploring inside the caves to get on the coach. So you can’t even just go outside and take pictures.

Good thing we have Google isn’t it.

Not my photo.

This was ‘offpeak season’ and both the driver and the hotel were shocked and confused that we couldn’t get in. They told us like ten times not to take any lighters into the caves because they’re banned, but not once had it been necessary for them to ask ‘have you got a ticket?’

Therefore the ride was better than the real thing.

Oh well, something there isn’t a ride for is the desert literally on the edge of town.

You have to pay to get this far, but it wasn’t sold out. Because you can’t sell out a desert.

Once inside there’s all sorts of activities you can get up to. The first and most recommended is renting shoe covers, which were like giant luminous socks up to your knees to stop the sand being coarse and rough and irritating and getting everywhere.

As seen here on the right.
Camels are also a thing.

About a km into the desert is the Crescent Moon Spring, which you can take a big golf buggy to, though it only drops you off around halfway and you have to trudge your way the rest of the distance – surprisingly tough going in soft sand.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking for a bit.

Tourism is overrated, but if you have to put up with it, this was my kinda jam.

On the walk back I decided to be brave and scale this dune, to see what was on the other side.

It’s an intense climb, all you have is this tiny rope ladder with wooden slats, disappearing into the sand, to give you any semblance of sure footing. The incline is pretty hefty in the dry, blazing heat and I had a guy keeping pace in front of me who was literally collapsing, breathing heavily and barely crawling his way up for the most part. So that made it easier.

What you don’t see here is that about half way, I looked back and saw a thousand school children in the same hat all clambering up behind us like a scene from a horror film. It was time to circumnavigate the guy, at my own peril.

Also I guess they’re just building a road straight to the oasis, so it looks pretty bad right now.

At the top, of course, was just more sand.

I’m probably now on someone’s mantlepiece because to all the thousand school children up here, the foreigner was far more interesting than the view and they all wanted to say hello and have a picture with me.
I believe this sort of thing was a lot more common just anywhere 10-20 years ago, but you have go somewhere real obscure now to garner the same reaction. Thankfully.

Coming back down was fun, you can just freestyle away from the ladder, almost gliding with huge strides that take you knee deep into the side of the dune. Shoe covers were a life saver.

Then we had a culturally appropriate on-site KFC and called it a day.

Day 11

China 04/24 – Silk Road Dreamland

I’ve been eyeing up a couple of Fantawilds now for what feels like a very long time. The trouble is they’re rather remote. To put it into the perspective of a coaster trip planner, they’re 8 hours away by high speed train from the nearest ‘destination’ coaster, which would be Flash in Xi’an. And there’s nothing in any other direction, they form the final moments of civilisation as you head up the long and narrow path known as the old Silk Road into the North-Western deserts of China, Kazakhstan and beyond.
If I ever need a reminder of how huge this country is, for all that coaster density in the East, half of the land mass doesn’t contain anything at all.

Or it’s an hour by plane.

Stupidly early the next morning we headed over to Xi’an airport and boarded a reasonably pleasant flight with Sichuan Airlines. Landing in Jiayuguan was great, it has a very limited schedule and a single baggage carousel, so the least faff you could possibly imagine. While heading to that area, they had a corridor displaying exactly what you could do in this region.

Some rocks, or Fantawild.

I wonder where we’re headed.

Day 9 – Silk Road Dreamland

Here of course. Of the two parks in the city, this one was the big pull, another uniquely named and branded one in the chain, bringing me up to 10 out of 11 of those at the time of visiting. And the 11th is a kids park that only opened this year.

I knew a little more about this one before heading in, not least that it has a unique dark ride specific to the region. Again the park shares a number of characteristics with that of a middle-aged (2019) Oriental Heritage, along with a good chunk of the lineup, but the twists are far more significant. Are they good?

There’s a number of different ways in which these park handle their quiet days and low crowding (most days) and rather than the hotfooting around an entire park for specific timeslots that was experienced in say, Jingzhou, here they have more structured windows of ‘this half of the park runs for a few hours, then the other half runs for a few hours’, with a bit of overlap in between.

I didn’t know this at first as we headed off into, of course, the closed half of the park. Everything was clearly stated upon arrival at any attraction entrance though so expectations could be managed accordingly.

As such, the first ride of the day couldn’t be what I’d come for. It was a #1 Puppy Coaster instead. Classic.

From there I clocked the old Chinese Opera Express, an attraction I hadn’t experienced since my very first Fantawild over 7 years ago. The one I despised. This ride did no favours to those feelings, but it was a funny story.

With a fresh perspective on just about everything Chinese theme park related I was intrigued to give it another shot, heading through the queue of scattered opera memorabilia to lay eyes upon what is potentially the largest dark ride vehicle known to man. They seat a good hundred people and are dual loading so, naturally, this thing could haul. But it was only due to run three times in the whole day and they only needed one car.

Took a seat front and centre and waited a couple minutes until after the scheduled start time so that they could let a few other guests bumble through the queue and join. Hold that thought.

The ride is, as proclaimed, all about opera. On the surface it looks great, some of the sets and theming are quite striking and the visuals can be interesting in their own way. The main problem is that it’s a 25 minute experience and, without being a Chinese opera expert perhaps, has very little dynamic range in scenes.

Corner after corner is turned and most things look very very similar, while a lot of the things going on sound very very similar. It simply doesn’t need to be this extensive for the casual guest.

After passing all the good looking stuff anyway you end up on a platform in a circular room with a 360 screen. To add insult to injury basically at this point you get several minutes of video either recapping a lot of the performers and things you’ve just seen or something very very similar, while slowly rotating one way or another.
This is the precise moment when all 100 of the unsavoury characters in Ningbo, who had been shouting at each other loudly during the entire ride, decided to pile out of the still moving vehicle and head towards a fire exit, where staff were unable to stop them. Now I’ve got the true measure of the experience I can kinda see why, but it’s still dumb.


Though we were now in ‘the desert region’ the temperature had dropped a fair amount from what we had been used to the past few days and there was a chilling wing running through the air. This apparently meant that the nearby SLC was down, for now. Shame.

So what better opportunity to try another attraction I hadn’t done for 7 years, in my second ever Fantawild, the one that showed me their true potential.

Bridge to Love was also time slotted and, though we passed by the staff member outside the entrance, who then radioed ahead to say you’ve got a couple more coming through, perhaps a minute before the allotted time (which was kinda dumb because we had walked straight from the finish of the last timeslotted attraction), by the time we had bumbled through the queue and reached the preshow doors… they had closed on us.

Walked back through the queue and asked what the hell that was about. Oops. Wait for the preshow to end and you can get straight on the ride.

Good thing I know the setup.

This attraction weaves the tale of the cowherd and the weaver girl, through the medium of a telescopic revolving theatre. There’s screens and a few physical touches around the walls and then also a dome in the ceiling. It turns back and forth periodically, while the seats can also tilt you back for a better upwards persective depending on where you need to look. And the whole platform rises up and down towards the dome when necessary.

To summarise in the usual fashion, a talking cow likes his owner but thinks he needs a girlfriend,

so goes to a nearby pool where some magic ladies are bathing and steals the clothes of one of them from some rocks by the side.

Without their clothes, they cant fly back to heaven/space, so she gets stranded in the pool and the cow is like nudge nudge, wink wink to the guy, go give her her clothes back. This heroic deed is grounds enough for the beginning of a beautiful relationship, for some reason even with her clothes back she’s missed the bus to heaven/space so they spend a lot of time together and hit it off.

Several years later, big mama magic lady up in heaven/space finally realises whats going on and magics the girl back up there. The guy panics and, with the assistance of the cow embarks on the actual heroic deed of going up there himself to get her back.

An extended sequence of upwards travel follows, with various encounters along the way like a big tree who offers money and he says no, a scary dog thing chasing him and, um, jetpacks maybe. They’re reunited for the briefest of moments but big mama puts her foot down again and they get separated across space and time.

But there’s a bridge, to love, in the stars, with birds, so they can see each other once a year or something. Not the happiest of endings, but Fantawild are good at those.

S’alright.

Tune Tour, boat ride, ethnic groups, subtly different

See?

One of the areas had no sound and one had no movement. We told the guy at the end. He didn’t know what to do about it.

I didn’t know what Silk Road Saga was. I was in for a treat.

The guy at the entrance was confusing, saying something like bit of a queue, Dudley Do, but brand new (to me) attraction so I didn’t care. We headed in and reached a chained off batch point and so sat down in front of it, with the expectation that we would be waiting for a bit. Some family came from behind and, this again, immediately just removed the chain themselves and headed further into the depths of the queue. Fine.

A room of screens about stuff on the silk road.

Our first glimpse at the main character. Don’t know her name, but this annoying kid is about to shout Jiejie (‘elder sister’, doesn’t have to be related) a hundred times at her, so henceforth she shall be known.

She’s a magic princess, rides a broom, takes a kid (and us) from a library on a magical tour of the sights of the silk road. Good set up.

We were then presented with the first and only time I’ve encoutered a high tech locker system for a ride at Fantawild. We were given F.L.Y. wristbands, but before F.L.Y., to activate our door and stow stuff away. What the hell is this ride?

Heading down a spiral staircase soon answered that question as we arrived on a small circular platform with 5-seater robocoaster vehicles travelling around it.

a) I didn’t know they had one that wasn’t Devil’s Peak. A scream.
b) I didn’t know they made them different to Devil’s Peak, and any other version of the ride system I’ve seen. Unintelligible noises.

It all led to a rather interesting and different use of the system. It didn’t bounce around physical sets or play with any trickery or illusions as to the linear path you were taking, rather moved somewhat serenely through big open corridors and spaces, from big screen to big screen and spent significant time in front of each one mimicking more of a flying theatre type experience. As such it was less intense than usual, perhaps a little less atmospheric, but still rather gorgeous.

Here’s some promo art.

The aforementioned kid gets to ride on a goose as you go from place to place. Things start off plain sailing but then you meet a nice looking dragon who, probably because the kid is annoying, thwacks him off the goose with his tail after being shouted (*point* dragon) at.

He falls through the sky and some vines while the goose is stunned, shouting for Jiejie far too many times (sometimes I wake up screaming her name myself these days), before she portals us to safety somewhere else.

That somewhere else is a pirate ship in a storm. The goose is still recovering and the kid has lost his glasses or something, so Jiejie, Jiejie! before she portals us to safety somewhere else.

That somewhere else is Rome, did you know the silk road ended in Rome? Specifically the Colosseum. The now flying pirate ship crashes into it and then, of course, the kid ends up surrounded by some lions from the Colosseum that get on board. Jiejie, Jiejie!
Am I the only person that finds this annoying? The overuse of names, to the persons face, like we both know who you’re talking to, don’t wear it out. Chinese media is certainly guilty of it, but it’s probably just cultural politeness.

Anyway, saved again, shut up kid, back to the library for you. You can portal with me any time.

Loved it, big surprise, four and a half thumbs up. Made the extended trip out here worthwhile and we haven’t got to the main event yet.

It was time for the other half of the park to open.

Legendary Dunhuang was the main event and yet I knew nothing but unique dark ride. Usually enough for me anyway.

Dunhuang is a city further up the silk road, famous for being home to the Mogao caves – some ancient grottoes full of buddha statues.

As such, this ride is an exploration of those, with a twist.

A vault sealed for two centuries.

Preshow has this guy talking about what we might find.

My inner fan screamed. 3 months ago it had done the same, when finding Deep Down was a nu-Qin Dynasty Adventure. Well this one is as well, and I believe the original version of that particular layout.

And it’s amazing. Huge. Has such an atmosphere in places, heading through these dark grottoes with creepy statues looking out at you while monks are throat singing. I’m getting the chills now.

The archaeologist guy interferes with some artifact in front of a statue of a mythical deer, known as a Fuzhu. It comes to life and everything is magical for a while as we follow it round some wondrous sights, galloping away happily.
Eventually you end up in this big ancient pretty foyer and then the guy interferes again. Fuzhu is mad now and dark, fire breathing deer starts to chase us through the backwards portion of the ride layout for a while, all sorts of scary effects going off. We come to a halt in what was the most intense dark ride scene of all time over at the dinosaur park, here the walls come in at you from the sides and a big ancient siege type battering ram comes at you from in front.

Time to make the quick escape. Pillars collapsing, fire, cogs, it all happens and we make it out in one piece.
Don’t disturb the peace basically (like a Chinese tourist), get out, Fuzhu can go back to being a statue.

Loved it, big surprise, five and half thumbs up. The trip out here had already been made worthwhile, but this was everything I wanted and more. I was back in the zone with my peak Fantawild experiences.
Should have a POV for you in about 5 years.

Sadly the opening of this side of the park meant it was also Boomerang time.

They asked me if I was sure I wanted to ride this, as a show was about to start. Well not really, but I’ve seen the show before.

#2 Stress Express may be the most aptly named coaster out there. It was ok.

Sadly the SLC had also opened itself by now, so time to complete the creds.

Coaster game in Jiayuguan is poor. Both Fantawilds have one of these as their star attraction, which is kinda dumb. #3 Silk Road Speed is the newer, non-Kumali layout at least, with the janky attempt at airtime. It was ok.

Legend of Nuwa

She’s still got it.

It’s taken me a hundred laps to notice something fun. There’s a glowing light in the front of the ride vehicles that I thought was always there just to look cool, but it only lights up to signify the moments when you, the riders, are in posession of the magic stone or ‘all-spark’ of the story.

And here’s the dragon that was on the front of that coaster the other day.

Here’s a dragon in the park.

God damn, this place was perfect. Well, not perfect, there were operational embuggerances of course, but it wasn’t an issue.

It had its own identity and we got 2 for 1 on unique, high end, Fantawild dark rides and I’ll happily move the earth for that at this point. Sadly I think this marks the point where I’ve run out now though, as you do when you obsess. But we know how quickly these places can fade, so no use in slowing down.

Day 10

China 04/24 – Oriental Legend

The more relaxed half of the trip was over and it was time to go rather hard in order to tick off a few of the more ‘unique’ Fantawilds I still had my eye on.
An early morning few hours on a train took us out of Jinan and over to Handan where, in the middle of nowhere, between two non-descript cities, this one lives.

Day 8 – Oriental Legend

It all looks rather familiar however.

There are a lot of Oriental Heritages out there, 9 to be precise, but for some reason this park got its own separate designation, logo and branding. At heart, it’s pretty much the same as a middle-aged (2019) Heritage park, with a few different flourishes here and there.

Tick though.

A pleasant sight on the right greeted us for what should have been the first ride of the day.
School trip season hit hard here, as we rounded the first corner to be greeted by a member of staff, and the sounds of several hundred school children in switchbacks. They advised we come back later. I do love a Magic Gallery, but I’m not queueing for it.

Pressing on, they had a fairly early showing of Daydreams about to happen.

Actors, magic projections, there’s so many of these now that it’s hard to keep track, but in this generation of park they do tend to be entirely unique to the local scene. I hadn’t come across it before anyway.

It told the story, back in the day, of a guy travelling to the big city to become learned and, by extension, rich and influential. Some bloke tells him to rest on a bench for a while and there he has an extended dream sequence laying out the possible outcomes of what he seeks to achieve. Basically it’s not all it’s cracked up to be – your beautiful wife won’t love you, some military General might get you in trouble, demon spirits could take you away from your child. Such is life.

He decides to keep it simple and goes back home to be happy instead.

Kids were making a bit of a racket, but it was a decent one of these. Thankfully we managed to avoid crossing paths with any school groups again, by means of some good tactics.

I’ve skipped reriding this revolving theatre a good hundred times now, but we’ll get to one again at some point.

This was rather unfortunate. Maybe a bit of learnedness does count for something.

The mid-sized cred here is unlike any other at a Fantawild.

It appears to be the same model as when Beijing Jiuhua made their own Mack Youngstar attractions and called them White Horse Coasters cos, you know, Pegasus.

#1 Sky and Earth has the dragon from Legend of Nuwa on the front though, because Fantawild are better than that.

They ride with rather less gusto.

Obligatory shout out to the painted service gates.

Boat ride, Chengyu, 4 character phrases, life lessons.

See?

We’ve been here before, but each and every installation of River of Tales appears to mix things up a bit with some local, specific or inspired choices.

I had trouble finding the entrance to the main cred.

It’s not through here.

Yes, star of the show here is #2 Flying Dragon, another Vekoma Space Warp, or ‘lift-hill Formula, extended’.

It’s a very respectable ride that would do well at a few places no doubt, but I felt like I was just going through the motions with it on this occasion. Can safely say it lacks the spark that Vekoma found not too long after.

Rounding out the +1s was another Puppy Coaster, although it got upgraded to being called #3 Mountain Voyage here, not sure why.

Interactive shooter Bears Mission caught our eye for having a similar sign up to Taizhou where we earned a badge by beating a target score.

Here you could win a medal by getting 15,000 or more. And, more amusingly, you could win a trophy by getting 50 medals. I’m not that dedicated, yet.
Got the medal though.

Let’s try again with Magic Gallery.

Now a walk on, it’s also the first time I saw the pre-show playing for this particular version of the attraction (Brush Boy, not Belly Buddha), but didn’t get to see much.

Plenty more queue to walk through anyway, I still remember the excitement and confusion of my first one of these, eventually heading into that station to find a trackless dark ride.

Somewhere on a Chinese theme park blog, there may well be a picture of me taking this shot, posted by this guy. I wonder what the caption would be.

My first ride on one of these was amazing, second was a little broken, then this one full on broke, but it was amazing for it.

After you go on a magic turntable and get this gorgeous reveal, the other car headed off into the trees while our one just got stuck in this position. All the media played out for them as they passed and then paused, waiting for our arrival that wasn’t happening.
After a minute at most, an engineer walked out of the shadows with a remote controller, stood just to the side and manually drove us off of the turntable and onto the ‘track’. It was the geekiest experience I’ve ever had with a ride out here and I loved it.

The whole ride was a little bit skewed from here on, but I admire how clever the many systems were in being able to keep it mostly together. Everything still triggered as we headed round, out of sync with the rest of the world, until a moment near the end where you head into the ‘flying theatre’ segment that begins with a physical curtain reveal.
The curtain timing was off and closed in front of the car, which kept ploughing on almost as if it was going to crash or get tangled.
I got nervous, don’t want to break the thing.
Sensors kicked in thankfully and stopped it just short of the calamity, before the curtain opened again and it fixed itself once more. Added jeopardy.

Let us recall the visit to Warner Bros Abu Dhabi last year when I rode their Justice League thing after a long, rough queue, only for the cars to not rotate or have a functioning motion base. We saw absolutely nothing of what the attraction was supposed to be, facing the wrong way at every screen and it was a complete waste of time. The staff just laughed and offered nothing but ‘go queue again’.

Upon our arrival in the station for Magic Gallery, even though we hadn’t queued, the on-board delay was minimal, we still saw everything the attraction had to offer and, from a fan’s perspective, received what I’d consider an ‘enhanced experience’, the staff profusely apologised for the technical mishap and gave us a free souvenir rabbit as compensation.
<3

Bad Warner.

OG red bloke punching blue bloke for Legend of Nuwa. Not that Sun Tribe rubbish.

She’s still got it.

I got confused in the dying moments of the day. Didn’t recognise this name. There was a closed off building at the other end of the park that was illustrated on the map with the magic door guy coming out the roof.

This magic door guy. World Idiom was this simulator attraction again, I didn’t realise it was so prolific. Good though.

For fun we can compare this bespoke build to almost exactly the same shot from the overlay in the Adventure park.

Night and day.

We’ll end here on an obligatory donkey shot. No hat, but he’s got like a waistcoat thing.

Great park overall, a tad disappointing for me to learn that this one doesn’t really have a unique identity beyond the badge, but you can’t knock the source material, except in Ningbo, and it’s another one off the list.

Didi let us down on the way out, far too obscure a location it seems, so we ended up with some sketchy taxi bloke to take us to Anyang, the other non-descript city that this park lies directly in between. He was alright though, negotiated a fair deal with no fuss.

From there it was another few hours train Journey to the West.

Day 9