There will be lots of pictures for a park that only has one small, family coaster.
Chimelong Forest Kingdom was announced years ago, with some amazing looking concept art. They started importing animals soon after, but the park/resort only opened fairly recently. It’s potentially doable as a day trip from here (it’s not too far north of the north end of Guangzhou), but we decided to make a weekend of it since they had package deals including hotel and dinner.
The Giraffe Castle Hotel was huge, and very “Chimelong” in its overall (;ack of) taste level. We got there at around 10:30, and since it was quite busy it took us around half an hour to check in, get park tickets (actually just connected to my ID card which is scanned at the gate) and leave our bags.
The hotel has a giraffe enclosure running along the back side of it, with a walkway to the park. This place is definitely more of a zoo/safari place, but with a handful of kids’ rides shoved in. As with the other Chimelong animal parks, the animals are generally well-kept, with decent sized enclosures. I’ve seen them criticised in zoo groups for their “birds on sticks” model, and this was also evident here, including parrots in one of the gift shops.
The rides area is fairly central. The coaster was closed because of the rain, so that wasn’t great. The weather was due to clear up later in the afternoon though, and the package allowed for a second day in the park if it came down to that.
There were a few different shows across various places. This one wasn’t particularly good, but the finale included live spider monkeys swinging above the audience, so that was something different at least.
The main attraction here is the “Steam Train”, which is a decently long safari ride that ends by going through the huge giraffe enclosure, which is the centrepiece of the park. Apparently, they imported around 40 giraffes, and now have around a hundred of them across both this and the hotel enclosures. The safari also had a large number of African elephants, white rhinos and hippos.
After that, we went up to the ferris wheel, then back down along some other walkways to the rides area since the cred was now open. There was also another show on the giraffe paddock, which was called something like “the great migration”. They basically drive a couple of trucks of food up and down, making the giraffes run around then open a gate towards the back to let a bunch of zebra and wildebeest in while also releasing a bunch of birds to fly back and forth. I took some videos of it, but don’t have them to hand now.
The coaster was fine. Apparently it’s a Mack. It didn’t do much. I honestly don’t know why they’d go the expense of a Mack product for something so minor when Jinma could provide something very similar.
There were still some other animals exhibits to check out, and there was a parade, which included a very cool float with an actual coaster on it.
The park was closing after that, so we headed back across to the hotel. Considering there didn’t seem like that much to do here, we’d managed to fill most of the day, arriving about an hour and a half after the park opened and leaving at closing time. As I mentioned earlier, we could’ve come back the next day as well, but we’d seen and done everything apart from a couple of shows, so we just had a lazy morning in the hotel before heading back to the train station around lunch time.
I liked this place, but after seeing the concept art years ago, along with hearing some news about some big new coaster (at least I think I’m not misremembering that), the actual product came across as a bit half-arsed and lacked a lot of what was originally planned (the world’s largest walkthrough aviary for example), which is quite strange for Chimelong. Their Guangzhou property (Chimelong Paradise, safari park, bird park, water park, circus) is definitely a multi-day resort, as is, more arguably, Zhuhai (Ocean Kingdom, Spaceship, theatre/circus), but this place, despite its massive hotel, just isn’t yet.
Hopefully, there are plans for expansion and we’ll see some of what was planned finally appear. As it stands, it’s a great day out, but offers nowhere near as much as the other two properties, which aren’t even that far away from this one.
Chimelong Forest Kingdom was announced years ago, with some amazing looking concept art. They started importing animals soon after, but the park/resort only opened fairly recently. It’s potentially doable as a day trip from here (it’s not too far north of the north end of Guangzhou), but we decided to make a weekend of it since they had package deals including hotel and dinner.
The Giraffe Castle Hotel was huge, and very “Chimelong” in its overall (;ack of) taste level. We got there at around 10:30, and since it was quite busy it took us around half an hour to check in, get park tickets (actually just connected to my ID card which is scanned at the gate) and leave our bags.
The hotel has a giraffe enclosure running along the back side of it, with a walkway to the park. This place is definitely more of a zoo/safari place, but with a handful of kids’ rides shoved in. As with the other Chimelong animal parks, the animals are generally well-kept, with decent sized enclosures. I’ve seen them criticised in zoo groups for their “birds on sticks” model, and this was also evident here, including parrots in one of the gift shops.
The rides area is fairly central. The coaster was closed because of the rain, so that wasn’t great. The weather was due to clear up later in the afternoon though, and the package allowed for a second day in the park if it came down to that.
There were a few different shows across various places. This one wasn’t particularly good, but the finale included live spider monkeys swinging above the audience, so that was something different at least.
The main attraction here is the “Steam Train”, which is a decently long safari ride that ends by going through the huge giraffe enclosure, which is the centrepiece of the park. Apparently, they imported around 40 giraffes, and now have around a hundred of them across both this and the hotel enclosures. The safari also had a large number of African elephants, white rhinos and hippos.
After that, we went up to the ferris wheel, then back down along some other walkways to the rides area since the cred was now open. There was also another show on the giraffe paddock, which was called something like “the great migration”. They basically drive a couple of trucks of food up and down, making the giraffes run around then open a gate towards the back to let a bunch of zebra and wildebeest in while also releasing a bunch of birds to fly back and forth. I took some videos of it, but don’t have them to hand now.
The coaster was fine. Apparently it’s a Mack. It didn’t do much. I honestly don’t know why they’d go the expense of a Mack product for something so minor when Jinma could provide something very similar.
There were still some other animals exhibits to check out, and there was a parade, which included a very cool float with an actual coaster on it.
The park was closing after that, so we headed back across to the hotel. Considering there didn’t seem like that much to do here, we’d managed to fill most of the day, arriving about an hour and a half after the park opened and leaving at closing time. As I mentioned earlier, we could’ve come back the next day as well, but we’d seen and done everything apart from a couple of shows, so we just had a lazy morning in the hotel before heading back to the train station around lunch time.
I liked this place, but after seeing the concept art years ago, along with hearing some news about some big new coaster (at least I think I’m not misremembering that), the actual product came across as a bit half-arsed and lacked a lot of what was originally planned (the world’s largest walkthrough aviary for example), which is quite strange for Chimelong. Their Guangzhou property (Chimelong Paradise, safari park, bird park, water park, circus) is definitely a multi-day resort, as is, more arguably, Zhuhai (Ocean Kingdom, Spaceship, theatre/circus), but this place, despite its massive hotel, just isn’t yet.
Hopefully, there are plans for expansion and we’ll see some of what was planned finally appear. As it stands, it’s a great day out, but offers nowhere near as much as the other two properties, which aren’t even that far away from this one.
