Mitsui Greenland

Mitsui was one of the biggest parks on the trip so you get a lot of photos today. Having made our way into the park we decided upon the classic clockwise way of navigating the park. Partly because we're wired that wire but a bonus was that we could get the SLC out of the way first.

As expected it was a bit of a headbanger but quickly forgotten and not a ride we went back for.

Close by was a small kiddy ride, positioned in such a place to quickly re-convince park visitors that the rides were worth doing.

Grampus Jet, the parks swinging coaster was great, despite its lack of theming and "just stuck in a field" look to it. The cars swung out a decent amount, which has to be the measure for rides of this type. With Eagles Fortress out of the running this was my favourite swing coaster of the trip (actually it was the only one I did so it wins by default). For those that don't know a Grampus is an old name for a killer whale, so now you understand the paint job on the trains too!

Grampus left the group upbeat, the Milky Way coaster even more so. The ride is a racing pairing with one side a conventional sit down coaster and the other was like Bill Hicks, a great stand up. It was comfortable and offered plenty of airtime and not the sort that would drop you on the seat too hard as happened the last time we visited Japan and endured that killer ride Fuji Raijin II.

This is the main entrance, not the one we entered. This is on the south side close to the Killer Whale Swing Machine.

The 4d cinema had a very Japanese movie about a girl looking for her sister after she gets abducted in a haunted house. The tale was quite beautifully told and the effects were nicely synchronised with the movie, enough to scare a woman a few rows in front. The ending was quite poignant too. "Beautiful", "Poignant" not words usually described these sort of attractions.

Continuing our circular tour of the park we came across the shuttle loop, well make that part of it. It had been rumoured that this coaster would no longer be running, so it wasn't a surprise to see it down. It was, however, a surprise to see it reduced to just the loop. Whether its on its way out or being rebuilt isn't known, but we didn't get to ride it.

Snow White looks like she's been out in the snow too long!

Up next was the Egyptian themed terrain coaster. It was just alright.

I hadn't realised that the park, along with its 10 coasters also had a toboggan run, but it wasn't open :(

The park is vast but not steep so very easy and comfortable to get around, but for those who wanted to save their steps a land train can be ridden to get you about.

and for those even lazier people a people carrier can take you over the centre of the park back to the side entrance that we entered.

The newest attraction to the park looked to be this chair-o-plane ride. So new was it that it wasn't open and so we couldn't get to ride it.

Mouse coaster was a mouse coaster that moved like a mouth coaster, rode like a mouth coathter and was comparable to every other mouth coathter out there.

This was a quite bizarre simulator on rails ride where you could pick 1 of 3 films to watch as you went round. I can't remember which one we chose, it might have been a space flight. It certainly wasn't the cute manga animal one. IOA's Spiderman on a budget perhaps.

Having nailed half the rides and park we decided to ride the cable car up to the hill that overlooks the west end of the park. Note the lack of safety restraint of any kind whatsoever.


A view overlooking the park

Atop the hill is this haunted walkthrough tower. I'll save you wasting the energy in ascending the stairs. It's not worth seeing, unless you like seeing a teacher splatted against the classroom blackboard.

The good news was that the toboggan was open, and it looked quite fast in places. At least we had an easy way to get back down.(and yes there were a small number of locals in the park today, which made a change)

This dark ride was one of those shooting ones, I should have realised from the guns on the wall but I wasn't paying attention.

and this dark ride was a bit different in that you had to wear headphones whilst on it. Mostly kids screaming etc..

This was the mostly indoor coaster, which wasn't bad. A sort of Vogel Rok on the cheap.

The park has an Ultra-Twister coaster. I'd ridden one before in Nagashima Spaland on the last trip here and quite liked the ride although there was a bit of a bang when it stops on the outwards leg. This one was much the same. A quite nice feature the park has done is that if you ride this 10 times you get to sign a piece of wood forever immortalised in the station for others to see. I didn't like the ride that much!

This was not the most intense ride in the park.

The final coaster in the park is Gao, a massive coaster with a very amazing looking second hill structure that has you going over the back of a dinosaur. The ride looks better than it rides, although having said that once you knew you were going to get smashed on a couple of turns you got used to it. I'll be putting this in the same category as the Usual Suspects film. You enjoy it more on a second go.

Here's a view of the hotel from the very large wheel. Our room was there, that's right, just there.

Lee regrets ordering the large slushy.

Having nailed the park I decided to escape and check another little park close by, just behind the hotel in fact. These random animals have nothing to do with it.

Ultraman land is a small indoor park for the little kiddies who are too short to ride the rides in the main park and I had a hunch that a small kiddy coaster would be found in it.

This silver spandex guy has been around entertaining kids since the 60s and the park is completely themed to him. Even the drinks in the vending machine are Ultraman branded. Alas I wasn't allowed into the indoor section due to it being booked for a kids party (lucky kid) but I was allowed a quick peek inside and there's no coaster.

The gentlemen and ladies look very young. Must be all the soy sauce in the diet.

Andy hanging with his mummy and uncle Frank.

The first, and I think ended up being the only, ice box walk through on the trip. It's exactly as it sounds, just a big freezer that you walk through (you're not allowed to run). Very bizarre and very cold, especially in the final room which seemed to be 10 degrees colder than the rooms prior.

More shots of Gao the big gay dinosaur.

Having nailed the park pretty much, quite an achievement given its size the last hour was spent on the archery range. Yep! They have a full on range to play on, and boy did we make good use of the free goes on this. Our targets ended up looking like a porcupine as we stubbornly tried to see who could get the bull first. None of us could, our excuses all being that the arrows weren't very straight. We ended up with a nearest to bull and I won!


My celebratory lap of honour.

Mitsui Greenland is an immense yet enjoyable park. Again we were fortunate that it was fairly quiet. It's also strange that given it has nine working coasters by far the best one is the stand-up. There aren't many parks you can say that about.