Day 8 – Fantawild Dreamland & Oriental Heritage
Today was a day trip to Wuhu for a couple of Fantawild parks.
Train station in Nanjing was one of the more impressive of the ones I visited this week. It was massive, seemed reasonably new and wasn’t too busy. Train was equally easy as all the others have been, happy days.
Taxi from the station to the park was easy (it was the Oriental Heritage graphic and name that the driver got right away). I’d decided to do Fantawild Dreamland (FD) and Oriental Heritage (OH), which sit next door to each other, and the taxi dropped me off in between the two parks.
My plan was to hit FD first, then head over to OH later in the day. They sell a 2-park-1-day ticket for both parks, so I picked up one of those and headed in to FD. Bit of ticket faff here, as the staff member initially wanted to sell me two of these tickets (I think in part due to my poorly explained “2-parks today”), but managed to explain and was sorted soon enough. The entrance area was under refurbishment, so wasn’t the best park entrance (and main street) that I’ve seen.
Entrance.
Wonder what this park is imitating?
I went for a full lap of the park first, picking up the various timed and non-timed attractions as I went round. I’m going to try and be objective about the rides in this park, but it’ll be hard with some of them.
First up was Lair of the Spirens, a 4D cinema. Don’t remember a great deal about this, other than the fairly painful seat spikes (don’t really know what else to call them – they pressed up the seat with a broomstick sized rod). Nothing special, frankly.
Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of the next ride – Qin Dynasty Adventure. This was actually pretty impressive – a huge (I mean, seriously, massive) jeep ride through various scenes. I think there was a story of some description, but I couldn’t really follow it, however it was perfectly enjoyable just looking at all the set pieces. Some of the rooms were truly massive, with very large pieces of theming. Shame I didn’t at least snap a picture of the outside of the building!
Next up was the looper. A bit of queue and bag faff, in part due to repeatedly trying to fill the train, but eventually the train was dispatched. Ride itself was reasonably awful, with some pretty violent jolts throughout the corkscrews. Seemed unlikely that I’d go back for a second ride.
Next up was X-Cops (or X-Co s, or -Cops, if you went off the signage). This was an odd attraction. We boarded a huge ride vehicle, with some sort of pre-show in one room, before the ride vehicle moved in to an adjacent room. From there it was some sort ‘AI robot gone wrong’ show, with a combination of live actors, screen, animatronics and stuff. In theory, a nice idea, but it was pretty crap really. Felt very rushed, not very well rehearsed, the people were too small in the sets to really see what they were doing. Not a fan.
Opposite X-Cops was Space Warrior. Simialr to Maus Au Chocolat at Phantasialand in terms of the ride vehicles and control (although that’s where it ended), this ride had potential. That said, the accuracy of the shooters was miles off and the movement of the cars was jerky. Another fairly sub-standard attraction.
Finally, I rode Wizard Academy. This dark ride stood well above the standard of everything else in FD. A ‘spiderman-type’ (what are these things actually called?!) with some great theming, quality of motion simulator and 3D screens. The story was pretty good, too!
There was only a short walk from Wizard Academy round to the park entrance. I’d actually managed to ride everything around the park that I wanted to, only missing a handful of shows that fell at highly inconvenient times. Only thing left was the kiddie cred.
Spite! They wouldn’t let me ride as an adult! Tried to negotiate with the usual tricks (“I’m not that heavy!”, “I’ve come from England”, etc), but he wasn’t having it. Boooooo.
It was just after lunchtime, and I was starting to succumb to Jungle Trailblazer cred anxiety. Decided I was content enough with leaving FD at this point. Especially to do to OH!
One last shot of the castle.
Now, on to Oriental Heritage.
A short walk across the car park and seamlessly in to OH. First impressions were good – level of theming was significantly better than FD. I’d seen the woodie running, so headed straight that way.
The coaster had no queue, and therefore I was expecting an awful wait while the train was filled, but they ushered us all to the station platform and were more than happy to get us riding with only a handful of guests in the train. I managed to bag a front row ride.
As you can see, it wasn’t that busy!
The coaster was great! The airtime on the first drop was good, and the rest of the layout provided plenty of sharp pops of airtime. It was a bit rough in a few places, but on the whole it was in pretty good shape. The inversion was also particularly impressive thanks to the amount of structure required to hold it up!
On the way to the next cred, I walked past the Small World knock-off. I don’t know why I did it really! Haha.
Walked on to the indoor coaster – Land of Lost Souls. The theming of the park was good, probably the best park-wide since Dinsey. Each of the buildings has lots of good detailing, and the greenery around the pathways compliments them nicely.
Entrance to the coaster.
Coaster was alright – similar to the other Golden Horse mine trains. This one had a combination of colourful theming elements and pitch-black section. Not bad, but didn’t expect to the be coming back for a second ride.
Next coaster in the park was Stress Express – a Vekoma Boomerang. Was expecting this to be stressful as I don’t really like Boomerangs, but in the end it was the spite! Sign out front said the coaster was closed for the month of March (as far as I could gather). Wandered up to the platform for the sake of a check to find the train in pieces.
Only half disappointed, really.
Okay, time to crack out the rest of the park.
Tale of Newa was next. Another ‘spiderman-type’ ride, this time even more impressive than Wizard Academy from earlier in the day. The physical sets were a larger and more elaborate (maybe also just a bit more brightly lit, meaning the details were clearer), and the story was a little easier to follow. The coordination of the motion and the 3D screens was also very well done. Very impressive!
Also keeps up the impressive theming externally.
Took a quick ride on Leifeng Tower, which was an enclosed drop tower. Not particularly forceful, and they weren’t using the automatically opening windows at the top (I assume they’re meant to provide a Tower of Terror style view before the drop), but not a bad one-and-done.
Devil’s Peak was closed, unfortunately, which was a bit of a shame as I was hoping I’d get to try it. Exterior was impressive though.
As I continued round the park, I got lucky with three timed attractions back to back.
First up – Marvels of Chinese Culture. This is a huge cinema, with a great quality screen, and shows a Chinese history/scenery movie. Actually reasonably enjoyable.
Second – Eternal Love. This is a proper performance show with a projection screen in front of the actors allowing them to do some nifty interactions and transitions. Again, fairly enjoyable.
Finally – Chinese Opera Express. This is another one of those massive ride vehicles attractions. The park wasn’t very busy though, so rather than ~100 people per car, it was just me and another guy. The vehicles are pretty cool really, and move through a long traditional Chinese street showing off various aspects of Chinese Opera. In the finale, the car enters a large circular room for an operatic show. The cars rotate and a 3D movie plays around the space. A little slow (boring?), but on the whole, it was pretty impressive.
The loading area had four of these huge ride vehicles.
In fairness to them, the rest of the ride was in very good condition, but one of the screens wasn’t working – and therefore had a Windows error dialogue.
Okay, that was pretty much everything in the park, so I headed back to the woodie for a few more laps.
They seemingly had no problem running the coaster barely empty.
Impressive.
I rode a couple of times in the back row (they let me just stay in my seat), then moved to the front row for another lap, then the back again, and a final one in the middle. The busiest train only had about six rows full, which is really not what I was expecting. They were really keen to dispatch the train with barely any riders, let me have multiple back-to-back rides and were fairly lax about not stapling.
Felt pretty content at this point, and the day was drawing to a close, so I grabbed a taxi back to Wuhu station and took the short train ride back to Nanjing. Happy days.
Fantawild Dreamland: Didn’t love this place, to be honest. Wizard Academy and Qin Dynasty Adventure were the only ‘good’ rides there, with the rest of the stuff ether feeling run down, poorly executed or both. Certainly the significantly worse of the two parks on this site.
Oriental Heritage: This park was much better. The level of theming and quality of rides/attractions was much better, and it felt much better looked after. The park was absolutely dead, which was a bit of a shame, but at least they were running all the rides even though often there was only a handful of people.
Next up, final park of the trip!
Keep it up. 
