Qinghuangdo lies east of Beijing on the coast and is the starting location of the Great Wall of China. It's also a very popular Summer resort for the Chinese and as we later discovered the Russians.
The first park was Nandaihe which was one that I found in bizarre circumstances. When the itinerary was initially announced it included this area but for its sand dunes and water slides. At the time there were no coasters known of in this area. I figured that the trip organiser had known something that I didn't so furiously searched for the coasters that may have been there. In doing so I found a single panoramio image that showed an aerial shot of the park. So the itinerary was changed to include the amusement park instead.
The plan today had been to get their early and pre-empt the crowd to get on the 3 coasters that they have there. However the locals must have been tipped off as there was a sizeable crowd trying to squeeze their way through the few entrances that had been opened up. Some of them had bought the hats made from leaves that were being sold by the traders who swarmed around the coaches as they arrived.
The first coaster that we came across was a powered dragon with no queue because it was down. A great start.
A variation on those half-pipe things we'd seen earlier in the trip. This one featured a full-pipe and a spinning car. This could be quite nauseating.
The rollover I know is already nauseating, so I gave it a miss.
The second coaster was a locally made shuttle loop coaster. This had a sizeable queue and very slow throughput which made for a patience-testing wait. As with Happy Valley there were no queue lines on the attraction and the lengthy queue existed only outside the ride.
Local girl says to Yvonne "You look beautiful". Yvonne does not respond with "and you look frightfully ugly"
The heat causes some people to leave the queue ride for shade, and under the coaster seemed to be the best place. It also gave them an opportunity to queue jump on the way back in, something we were prepared to repel.
When we did eventually get on we had way less legroom than normal (I had to enter sideways to get in, but could sit straight). For a country that is stereotypically associated with unsafe practices China has more restraints than we're used to.
The irony here was that given all the safety mechanisms in place the ride still managed to hurt, and served only to prevent me leaving the ride behind quickly. For some reason my head rest was missing the padding just where my head lay and I took a major blow to the back of the head when the car exited the loop on the way out. Memorable but almost wasn't!
Nice theming on the disk-o although I think there's a misinterpretation of "ring" master there.
The third coaster is down at the back of the park and was down when we got to it. Golden Lion is an SLC copy that obviously suffers from some uptime issues. It had been running but broke whilst we were on the shuttle loop, and didn't get to reopen in the time we were there.
Some good news however on the way out was that the dragon was now up and running and with a wait time of 30 minutes we got to ride that. Even this ride was suffering from slow loading, partly due to the addition of some seat belts, but to keep the crowd moving they were running the ride with a single lap rather than the usual 2 or 3.
The skycoaster trapeze was very popular.
Some cute artwork
Nandaihe park, like the region its in is very pretty but during peak season be prepared for some major crowds, all of whom will likely ride the coaster and some of whom will be prepared to jump it.
Nandaihe park, like the region its in is very pretty but during peak season be prepared for some major crowds, all of whom will likely ride the coaster and some of whom will be prepared to jump it.
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