Woobang Towerland

Woobang Towerland was a park that I was quite looking forward to and not for the coasters either. The park has a vertical zipline attraction and a small group of us were going to leave the rides to go and do that. However because a contact had managed to arrange for us to jump for free the interest level in it increased, which meant that most of the half day would be spent there instead.

The park's mascots had very creative names, names that could be misinterpreted if used in the west perhaps.

There's the tower and you can just make out the walkway protruding out to the front.

But before doing the jump we still had to do the rides.

The first was a small kiddie coaster with a spiral lift hill, which made it a little unique.

The boomerang coaster was down due to a ride inspection. This would have been the only Boomerang coaster on the trip, some may have considered it a blessing that it wasn't running.

It was closed due to a ride inspection and would open later in the week.

The third coaster was open and not too bad really. One of those large coasters with mostly gentle drops rather than steep ones.

The final coaster, which was the large looping one was also closed. It would have been open the next day :D But unlike the coaster at Childrens Grand Park there would be no opportunity to head back and ride it. After Woobang we were heading out for the next city a few hours away.

The park was pretty desolate really with no people and a small number of rides spread out over a large area. The tower wasn't due to open until 11 so some of the group chose to kill some time on the spin rides.

This attraction was closed so I can't tell you if it was any good or not.

Is there no escape from the American Fast Food chains? This chicken can't be healthy, look how pale its made the Colonel?

A view of the Boomerang taken from the cable cat that was taking us up to the tower. Another Thunderbird 1 ride can be seen in the bottom-right.

Strangely placed Western mural. I wouldn't have thought the Koreans would be into Westerns, but then earlier in the year I saw a crazy Korean film called "The Good, The Bad and The Weird" which was set in the West. Good film if you're interested!

The park has a small zoo area. Here's Even tormenting a cockatoo that could say hello. Not that amazing you might think until you remember its saying it in Korean and that "An nyoung ha seh yo" is a little more complex than our two-syllable greeting.

Not the best name for a great-tasting pancake chain perhaps...

Atop the tower now and people getting into their jumpsuits. Some members of the group decided to put themselves first and jump the queue for the suits, of which there were only so many. This left a few of us with no choice but to wait til the end to get our jumps in. One individual also decided to come back up after his jump and tell us how disappointed he was by it before we'd done it ourselves. Some people just don't think beyond themselves, and they wonder why they're not liked...

Andy preparing to jump. He made his way down with a Superman pose.

Another group pose before jumping.

The jump itself was great. Being 123 metres up (around 400ft) certainly made leaving the platform a challenge, and some people couldn't jump out first time. I was bricking it on the walkway and tried to take the edge off the jump by agreeing to jump out backwards for the sake of a good photo (most people dove out forwards). The drop itself was scary but controlled, and once you knew the cables had caught you the fear quickly subsided and I was able to enjoy the fall down.

Team member David Ellis kindly posted up some youtube footage of some of us jumping and landing (some better than others I might add).

The best "exit" sign of the trip.

So getting out of Woobang it was time for the long drive East to Gyeongju resort.

Woobang, nice park but a dead one. This H1N1 rule must have been killing the theme parks revenue streams, but it was nice of them to stay open.