Shanghai Wild Animal Park 4th May 2019 Shanghai Wild Animal Park has an eponymous metro station on line sixteen of the city metro, but for whatever reason it is located almost two kilometres away from the park it was built to serve. My initial thought was that a pre-existing stop must have been renamed, but online research has revealed this hypothesis to be incorrect; the park dates from 1995, while line sixteen was constructed in 2013. The positioning of the station makes even less sense when you realise that the elevated route that the line follows comes within twenty-five metres of the park's southern boundary. This curiosity is how the place came to the attention of coaster enthusiasts in the first place; a group travelling to Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park a few weeks before our trip spotted a previously unknown family coaster from their train window and passed the details on. I'd intended to get to the park for its advertised 8:00am opening, but I badly underestimated how long it would take me to get from my overnight hotel beside the airport. As such I was almost an hour behind my planned schedule by the time I arrived at the ticket office. Self-service machines were available, but as per usual they were limited to local payment providers, so I headed instead to a cashier who sold me the required piece of paper and a park map for 130 RMB (~€16.79). I stepped through the gate and immediately found myself in the middle of a large crowd that was watching a member of staff leading an elephant along a midway. After about ten seconds I decided that I'd seen enough wildlife for one day and made my way towards the ride area. A small army of staff members were working on the Family Roller Coaster (#2666) as I approached, but it turned out that they were just wrapping up their early morning safety checks. Moments later I'd bought a 30 RMB (~€3.87) ticket that entitled me to a single lap of what turned out to be a perfectly respectable coaster, albeit one obviously knocked off from a well known European design. The train was the same slightly terrifying model seen on Creep Caterpillar at Nanchang Sunac Land, making for a nice upgrade over the more generic equivalents seen at Century Park Shanghai and Gucun Park. The comfort level was excellent, and I'd probably have ridden more than once if the ticket price had been a little lower. The park has a handful of generic flat rides with equally generic names, such as Controllable Plane and Rotating Chair; those wishing to partake of them are asked to "keep good order, refrain from smoking or eating snack, and keep public hygiene". There is also a substantial Ferris Wheel, and I'd have ridden it today had it not been closed for maintenance. I took a few photographs for my collection and wandered around for perhaps half an hour before heading to the exit.

Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park 4th May 2019 One curiosity of the rapid expansion of metro systems across China is the way that the authorities plan ahead by constructing stations in places where there is no obvious need for them. The most famous example is Caojiawan Station in Chongqing, but there are plenty of others around the country, including in Shanghai. When it was first built Lingang Avenue Station had just one building within a two kilometre radius, and though others have been constructed since the area remains largely vacant. A brand new road stretches across fields close by with four junctions, all of which have yet to be connected to anything. The biggest addition to the area since the station opened is Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park, a spectacular theme park and aquarium that premiered in 2018. The developers invested serious money to create a top quality facility, and the ticket prices reflect that; single day admission costs 360 RMB (~€46.49), just ten percent less than the price of an off-peak ticket at nearby Shanghai Disneyland, and almost double what it costs to spend the day at Happy Valley Shanghai. The park was not crowded despite my visit being on the last day of a national holiday, and I suspect the admission cost to be a large part of the reason why. The larger of the two coasters was testing with empty trains on my arrival, and a member of staff at the queue entrance told me through translation software that I should come back in thirty minutes. I decided to use the time to tick off the Family Coaster (#2667), my third encounter this year with a Zamperla 80STD following earlier hits in Alabama and Indonesia. The train on this installation was themed to look like an aeroplane, but aside from that the ride looked much the same as the other thirty-two versions of the type I've ridden since my first encounter with the genre at Holiday World back in 2003. Operations were exceptionally efficient by local standards; I waited just twenty minutes despite an almost full cattle grid. With that done I made my way across to Steel Dolphin (#2668), a custom layout "Blitz" coaster from Intamin and the first ride of its type in China. The layout begins with a gentle descent out of the station onto a launch track, which accelerates the train up to its top speed of 85 kilometres per hour. A steep climb and top hat prefix a blend of airtime hills and turns, including a sideways tilt mounted directly above the park entrance gate. A descent through a shark mouth leads onto a second launch track which gives the train a slight additional kick into a few more turns, a fake water splash effect, and an airtime hill that concludes on the brake run. The design is significantly less intense than other recent Intamin efforts (such as Red Fire) and arguably better as a result; rather than being extreme the layout is pure fun. I could have happily ridden all day. My first lap was in the back seat, which was absolutely great. I went back for a second in the front that was going very well until the second launch, where the train came to an abrupt halt. Moments later I spotted the operators running from the station towards our impromptu parking place. They were in much more of a hurry than I was, given that I had the perfect vantage point high above a lagoon to watch an ongoing Jet Ski show. They brought a set of chocks for the wheels as well as restraint release tools, and they were evidently well practiced at their task as the entire process was handled in less than five minutes. Climbing out of the train was a little interesting given that there was nothing between my left hand side and water perhaps twenty feet below, but in due course I was walking down the stairs and back to the station to retrieve my glasses and camera. Ten minutes later a distinctive paaaaaaarp noise indicated that the empty train was on its way back to the station. I found myself wondering why we'd been evacuated at all given how fast resolution had been, and concluded that the second launch track must not have enough power to move a fully loaded train from a standing start. The ride didn't reopen immediately, so rather than hang around I went to explore the rest of the park, starting with the Whale Shark Hall, an enormous aquarium. Many of the exhibits were decorated with artificial coral, while others had more elaborate theming, notably a submerged propeller aircraft. My next hit became Adventures in the Sea, a tracked dark ride that was heavily influenced by (though not copied from) the Ariel's Undersea Adventure at the American Disney parks. The lead protagonist was a mermaid officially named Amy, though anyone not reading the subtitles could be forgiven for confusing her with her better known animated cousin. A pre-show talked about the bad guys at SeaWorld, though I suspect this to have been accident of language rather than a deliberate attempt to slight the American chain, especially since the majority of local visitors are unlikely to have heard of it anyway. The ride itself was very good, mixing scenery and footage with an underwater tunnel, though it lost a few points for having some scenes reset before they were completely out of sight. I made my way over to Snow Train, a journey through artificial mountains past elaborate scenery and animal exhibits, only to find that it was closed for completely invisible maintenance work. I also went to look at Lava Drifting, a brand new spinning rapids ride from Canadian manufacturer WhiteWater, but decided that it wasn't quite warm enough to risk spending the rest of the day in wet clothes. This decision, made for the best of reasons, was a mistake; I've since learned that the ride is the longest of its type in the world, stretching almost a kilometre from start to end, and that record isn't likely to fall in the near future. Perhaps I'll get back to it some day. After a few more minutes of wandering I decided to wrap up my visit with a few more laps on Steel Dolphin. I completed a back seat and had just joined the line for a second round when the ride shut down temporarily due to a protein spillage. I decided against waiting, but instead took the problem as my cue to head for the exit, counting my blessings that I had at least had the opportunity to experience two and a half laps. (Friends visiting the park a few hours after me were unfortunately not as lucky; the ride apparently had another failure after I left, as it was closed to guests for the entire afternoon despite regular test launches).