Photo TR: Taiwan

Day 4: Finally, a day without driving! This was our experience at Janfusun Fancyworld. It's a very nice park in a beautiful setting.

Whoops, this is the night park entrance again and it's closed and we have to walk around.

Entrance to Janfusun Fancyworld. Notice the show advertisement. We didn't watch any shows, but were amused by the Wikipedia article about the park, which claims that there is a drag queen show. We didn't investigate this claim.

The gates as seen from the parking area.

It's KiKi!

There's KiKi and KuKu and the whole gang, one of whom seems to be a plate. A plate mascot.

Welcome. Security camera and spokesplate can be seen on the left side.

More entrance plaza.

Drat, non-working escalator.

Spooky stuff happening. We are climbing the hill to get to the rides on the other side.

Horrorwood is the walkthrough.

Lots of nice landscaping for Horrorwood.

Baby Ghostface!

Baby Dracula!

Le Petit Mort!

Lending a hand.

Baby Ju-On!

Great views from here. This is facing east, towards the mountains.

We finally crest the hill and make it over, only to find this piece of bad news.

The B&M Dive Machine is down.

I'm guessing that they'd just repainted this. There was no wheel wear on the paint.

It's closer to Oblivion than to Sheikra or Griffon.

View of the park facing west, towards the plain. Looks like they didn't repaint the railings.

There's the other B&M. Hopefully that one's not down too. That would suck.

Escalator down to the other side of the mountain.

Empty wave pool, ProSlide Tornado, and diving machine.

We've found the floorless coaster!

And it's open for business!

Some lift hill for the pervs.

Basically a walk-on at that hour.

A Chance Inverter and a Huss Frisbee

Huss Fly Away

Cheryl found the rotating sunflower ride to be quite pleasurable, though she did not wait for the cycle to end before getting off. This is how patrons get killed on rides.

But she may have gotten off for good reason: there was an alarming sound during the chair rotation "element".

Worth noting here that photo shops were all over the place, offering green screen photography that could then be customized.

Up, up, and away.

There's G5 and the waterpark. The hotel is on the other side of that hill.

Dirty windows, but there's Insane Speed, the floorless coaster. Kind of a unique layout.

And to the upper left is a part of the park that we're going to explore next. See the big building there? Worth noting that many of the parks we visited had this kind of giant indoor section with lots of flats and games.

Better view of the full layout of Insane Speed.

Full view of G5 Diving Machine.

S&S Turbo Drop and Space Shot, though only Turbo Drop side was open.

Swings...and I think this is the first time I noticed that flat in the right background. What's that?

Nice candy store, but only the bottom shelf looks vaguely familar.

Toy Workshop and refreshments!

Another one of these things that I still don't know the name of. English name was Super Swing.

We love drop towers.

You can call Cheryl "Drop Tower Junkie". This one was pretty high.

Largest ferris wheel in Taiwan.

We're gonna go check out the big building.

Kiddy Land!

The plate welcomes us.

Not quite the Fremont Street Experience, but interesting.

We've got a bunch of kiddy flats.

This was unusual: A *three*-tiered carousel. I've never seen one before. And the levels turned independently. One was going while another loaded. I didn't see them fire up the top level though.

We took a spin on the powered KuKu coaster.

It's a Zamperla.

This was the cuing area for the funhouse, but we were too big. Everyone there was either waiting for their cue or chalking their cues.

Kiddie theater.

I'm a plate!

The Janfusun Kiddy Land Mission Statement. I can just picture management: "We need a plate..."

Don't let the sign fool you.

It's not a Pexan train at all! For a moment I was worried! Train does a loop. We saw one of those toilet bowls in the waterpark and we got close enough to G5 to clearly see that it had recently been repainted.

We ran across a forlorn Top Spin.

Ah, the ride we saw earlier from the Ferris wheel is a Flic Flac.

Closer look at the Flic Flac.

Time to cool off!

This little flume had a dry lift hill, turnaround, and drop. It made me think of a mini-Mack SuperSplash. I want to ask Duane about the classification of such flumes.

Surpisingly high quality Disney wood art props in one store.

I wouldn't mind having one of these.

We're still in the park. It's a tea house.

And we found a refreshing break...where else but...

Of course! The Janfusun Coffee Museum! They build the culture credits right into the park.

Cheryl scored this nifty pizza in the coffee museum. Not bad for park food.

Sorry, we skipped the haunted walkthrough. There was a fairly huge queue inside.

The park started getting crowded as school groups began arriving.

Another bizarre culture credit was the Panda Classroom. Wtf?

We made some friends from the school!

We're tired. Thanks for visiting Janfusun Fancyworld with us! Next up: Formosan Aboriginal Cultural Village and Sun Moon Lake!

I want this for my front yard.

dt

I shouldn't be surprised anymore.

Martin - I think the technical name of the ride you can't think of is Swing Around.

That's sad about G5 Why do all the rides in Taiwan seem to be closed??

The parks are open all year round. As a result, rides have to be shut down for rehab from time to time. Martin was just slightly unfortunate in that a couple of the majors were down for his visit.

Today we visited another really cool park: Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village! It's in a beautiful mountainous area and adjoins the largest body of water in Taiwan, Sun Moon Lake. We found a great restaurant there after the park.

What's Formosa, you ask? In 1544, a Portuguese ship sighted the island and called it "Ilha Formosa", or "Beautiful Island".

We're back in the car, heading to FACV!

Scooters such as these are ubiquitous. In the big cities, there are giant seas of scooters, making it tricky to navigate the city streets.

The first thing you see is this train.

And that's where we are.

And the train's route is a circle around this this giant European garden.

Across the garden, beyond that stand of trees, we think we see the kind of things we're looking for. Actually, the big Intamin gyro drop was down.

It's a nice walk.

Up these steps.

Through this big pavillion and up some more steps.

And boom, you're in the park. This ride, Space Race, was down, so we weren't sure what it was.

Here's the layout. The whole park is on a rising valley between two mountain ridges. You can see the European garden at the very bottom, then you have the amusements area. There's a cable car (not operating when we visited) to the top of the mountain on the left. The face of the hill is full of little villages and displays showing aboriginese life and culture. At the top of the mountain is another cable car that takes you to Sun Moon Lake.

We're off to get the first credit, Mayan Adventure.

Mayan Adventure is a Vekoma Satanic Looping Coaster placed within simulated Chinese Mayan ruins.

The only interesting thing about it is that there are some parts that go into the ruins.

Otherwise, it was a very painful headbanger and I definitely took a shot to the chin. Remember to ride this one defensively.

The Mayan theming fits with the aboriginal museum next door, featuring artifacts of native peoples throughout history and the world.

Next is Caribbean Splash, a Mack SuperSplash.

There's a lot of good theming for this ride.

Excellent theming from the Mack factory! Are their production facilities also in Rust, near Europa Park?

It's a fine looking ride.

The park was empty enough so this was a walk-on.

We got pretty drenched on this one.

And we also took a pretty direct hit from the splash cannon. Sorry for the thumb.

You could walk behind it, which I don't think you can do this at the SeaWorld parks, can you?

This seemed like an unusual angle to me.

As did this.

As is the norm in the Taiwanese parks, we found a large indoor area, and this one had a credit.

Move over Disney! Here comes Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village!

This one is a Vekoma MK-700 Custom. There were flashing lights in the dark!

Another forlorn Top Spin. But I'm not sure if I've ever seen one indoors before.

Waikiki Wave was the name. And I don't think I've ever seen a single row before. Might not be a Huss? No clue.

Remarkably similar to its sister attraction in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee!

Good times.

Here's a good view of Mayan Adventure. You can see the sky ride to the top of the mountain, which was down, so we had to take a shuttle bus.

At the top of the mountain we were able to board the larger sky ride, the Sun Moon Lake Ropeway.

This one will take us over a larger ridge to Sun Moon Lake, the largest body of water within Taiwan.

Great views from here.

And there's the actual lake. The park entrance fee included the trip.

After the cable car round trip, we walked down the hillside through the Aboriginal Culture Village section. There are sections for each of Taiwan's indigenous tribes.

There are displays showing how the various tribes lived.

We watched some ceremonial dancing and singing. There was also a museum.

There were a bunch of life sized open air dioramas, like this nasty one showing a coming-of-age ritual...kill the monkey in the cage. Not cool.

Back down to park level, we found another well-themed flume.

Formosan Gold Mine, as it was called, had a section that ran through a restaurant we visited after riding. Here we see the monkeys taking their revenge.

No need for a queue product on a light day like this one.

Overall, it was a very nice park, but we said our goodbyes and drove...

...to the 921 Earthquake Museum of Taiwan. Unfortunately, it was a bit late and they were closing down.

The 9/21/99 earthquake killed nearly 2,500 people and injured over 10,000, with an epicenter in a place unused to quakes, which are usually on the east coast.

The museum is at the site of a former school. Just look at what the quake did to the track! This is pretty incredible for us east coasters.

Our fault for arriving so late. Then we drove back to Sun Moon Lake.

Chiang Kai-Shek, the father of modern Taiwan, summered here at the lake. Now there's a resort on the grounds. This was his summer home, and many heads of state visited this "summer White House".

And we had an excellent dinner there at the Lalu resort. Thanks for following! Next up: EDA Theme Park!

Pretty cool that they have a fast pass system there. Not a bad looking park.

Martin thanks for this and access to your Flicker album to get some additional photos and I already set-up the next park in the Park Index awaiting your next update.

Pretty nice TR! You didn't miss much. Space Race was a generic Intamin motion simulator running a haunted mine movie last fall.

I did my whole trip to Taiwan last fall without renting a car and except for Farglory and Windows on China, managed to do all the major parks. The only ride down for rehab then was the Gyro Drop at Formosan Arborginal Village and G5 colors did look very faded, but was open with one train running. Mayan Adventure was actually pretty smooth then and didn't have any headbanging. Maybe it had just gotten a rehab? I am looking forward to your TR of E-DA World and if Half Pipe was running!

Thanks for everyone's comments, and thanks johncenas for putting us on to page 7. Next (and probably final) update will hopefully come before or after the weekend. I know readership is lower on the weekends as everyone's going to the parks! Have fun!

Hello!

I'm new here, but I'd like to thank you for this awesome TR. All those parks seem somewhat lost on the edge of the world, very few guests and the most unusual layouts I have ever seen, like that Moon Sea park.

As reported in these very pages of Theme Park Review back in January 2010 and thereafter, Taiwan's newest theme park just came online in the past year. E-DA Theme Park is in Kaohsiung, which is a large port city in South Taiwan. Cheryl and I headed there for the last day of our Taiwan theme park adventure. Thanks again to everyone who followed our trip report.

It was about a 2 hr 15 minute drive from the Janfusun Fancyworld hotel.

It's a massive complex with a theme park, mall, and hotels. It was also our first not-great weather day, unfortunately, so we were anxious to get the credits before any rain. We arrived very close to opening.

It took us a little while to find the actual theme park entrance. The complex is huge.

We finally found the ticketing area. But then we had to get lost again finding the actual park entrance.

We figure it out eventually and we make a bee-line for this baby.

Big Air turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. I was secretly worried because I'd seen a recent story in the press about guests getting stuck on the thing.

But people were starting to line up and there was a crew there.

It's impressive to look at. The towers are just under 200 feet, according to Vekoma's website. And we enjoyed the ride. A catch car lifts the train forward up the far tower, then drops you, you coast backwards up to the top of the other tower, then forwards back down, and the catch car captures the train mid-way up the hill and lifts it up to the top again while it's heading back up. I give Vekoma credit for challenging themselves because the catch car system looks like an engineer's nightmare. And after being on so many coasters, it's not often that I actually get scared on a ride, and I was. The car catches the train while the train is moving at speed!

The Cyclops theming was cool too. The whole park has an ancient Greece theme, sort of.

This was right before they opened. We got on the second train. Alas, I was too much of a meathead to take any action photos.

Another theme park in Taiwan means another set of adorable looking characters. Notice the togas. The leader is the rhino, named Da-E. In the queues, they show cartoons of the characters, and many rides are incorporated into the cartoons. The cartoons are scatalogical, but cute.

In the cartoons, the characters all lived inside that Trojan Horse. You can see the rest of the park from here, sort of. Straight ahead is a large indoor section on many floors. To the left was a flume, to the right a splash battle, and on top of the indoor section was another credit.

Nice theming on the flume. Also a monorail but we didn't see it run.

Here's a shot of the splash battle.

Junior Roof Coaster is on the roof. It's a Fabbri Spinning Madness, which are unusual for the two-part lift hill. This one's spinning didn't lock and release like most spinning mouses, so we were not locked going up the lifts and the car turns on the lift, depending on the passenger weights.

I took a lot of pics waiting for this ride because it's not a people eater and the park had become more crowded.

For some reason they put the ferris wheel outside of the theme park area on the other side of the complex by the hotels. We never got over to that side.

These two other flats, Samba Tower and a swinger were also on the roof.

We had a decent lunch at Tokyo Prince, also on the rooftop level, but indoors.

Indoor were a ton of kiddy flats.

They have to be kiddy flats because the ceilings aren't really very high.

Taiwan Formosa is a major attraction, being a Soarin'/Over California ripoff. Vekoma built it. They were uptight about me taking pictures, but I think the seats are at the end of arms that extend into open space closer to the screen. The arm can then rotate right and left as you "fly". I mostly remember how derivative it was of Disney's rides (including fireworks at the end) and also how poor the movie screen image quality was.

Of course the host is Da-E, not Patrick Warburton.

Here's Taroko Gorge again, I think.

You get the idea. Did you know Disney actually scents the Soarin' rides?

Dark Ride was the final credit for us. You'll never guess what model.

Another Vekoma Junior!!!

This lift hill is the only part of the track that's visible.

We did not visit this walkthrough Haunted House, the line just looked insane and it wasn't moving. We had to return the car and catch a train.

And it had started to rain, which closed the outdoor rides (even the flume!). I did stop to photograph this Fabbri skyscraper. Isn't this the same model as the Tibidabo accident? Just wondering.

This appeared to be a driving range.

We also scored some nice merch. Thanks E-DA Theme Park!

Miraculously we made it here, to the Zuoying High Speed Rail terminal, once I figured out that the addresses of the terminal's car rental counter and the actual drop-off garage were not the same. The task of driving on city streets was not made any easier by the, literally, hundreds of scooters sharing the road with me.

We caught one of these babies back to Taipei. It goes the length of the island in about 96 minutes at 186 miles per hour.

First class was very civilized and not that much more expensive.

Cheryl's flight back to NYC was in the morning so after I saw her off at the airport, I headed into the city to visit Taipei 101.

In case you don't know, Taipei 101 was the tallest building in the world from 2004 until last year. It took the world's tallest title from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) and lost the title to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Unfortunately the day was cloudy, but it's still an impressive experience. It also has the 2nd fastest elevators in the world, built by Toshiba, fully pressurized, costing $2.4million each.

This is the massive tuned mass damper at the top. It counteracts vibrations and swaying. Taipei 101 is designed to withstand both earthquakes and hurricanes.

Yes, there's a Subway in Taipei 101. The mall is humongous, and I spent nearly an hour just walking the food court!

Well, that's it for the Taiwan trip report. I encourage everyone to check it out, it's a cool place. Thanks for following!

Great report, thank you for sharing !!

I really loved the vekoma BigAir pics, also found a video on youtube !

The tibidabo flat was a different kind of ride,..(poorly I can't name it (The Pendulum)) it's a "Fabbri Booster Maxx" in your picture !

This really makes me want to go to Taiwan! Thanks for sharing!

Big Air looks somewhat boring, like a DéjaVu without the rollercoaster parts. But the lifting system should be the same... and as DéjaVus this one surely has to be down often.

Big Air looks somewhat boring, like a DéjaVu without the rollercoaster parts. But the lifting system should be the same... and as DéjaVus this one surely has to be down often.

I understand the sentiment, but I've ridden a few Giant Boomerangs, and given that the Vekoma cobra roll always makes me want to barf, I found the Big Air to be far more enjoyable and fun. I guess time will tell whether the catch car system has been made any more reliable than in the past.

I'll tell you what I think of it when I get back from Madrid and their DejaVu "Stuntfall". It will be the first time I ride one of these. Hope it won't be down for maintenance...

I'll tell you what I think of it when I get back from Madrid and their DejaVu "Stuntfall". It will be the first time I ride one of these. Hope it won't be down for maintenance...

It was down when I visited Madrid...one of those credits I don't really mind missing.

^I rode it, and it was waaaay more enjoyable than the SFMM Deja Vu !!

Deep Sea Adventure at Window on China seems to be a Zamperla Air Race. They debuted the ride last year at Coney's new Luna Park. It was a lot of fun, and had the longest lines in the park when I was there in June. It also didn't have great throughput, which led to the long lines.

On another note, I read this thread with great interest. Thanks for all the info and pics. I've been considering doing a side trip to Taiwan and/or South Korea before or after the TPR China trip, depending on the overall schedule and cost of that trip, and my ability to get reasonable flights (or award flights with miles.)

I'd probably focus more on the 3-4 biggest parks, and do a day of general sightseeing, too.

I'd bet that this TR will get some others interested in doing a similar trip. Unless, of course, Robb and Elissa are already planning something else too.

Also, to Absimilliard, how easy was it to get to the parks without a rental car?

It's probably a bit early to ask this, but are others here theoretically at least interested in a Taiwan side trip?

^I rode it, and it was waaaay more enjoyable than the SFMM Deja Vu !!

You're saying that Stunt Fall at Parque Warner Madrid was waaaay more enjoyable than the identical Deja Vu at Magic Mountain?

I'm happy there were no boomerangs, giant, interveted or otherwise, in Taiwan.

Let's see... I stayed in Taichung for the first part and from there, reached 3 parks: Janfusun, Yamay Resort (Discovery World is part of it) and Formosa Arboriginal Village. Janfusun required a shuttle that left from near the train station and once there, I stayed one night at the onsite hotel, the very nice Prince hotel. Formosa was a shuttle bus that actually left next door from my hotel. Yamay Resort was a short train ride away and from there, a fixed fare cab take you to the park.

I booked the amazing Crowne Plaza E-Da World and there are buses from the high speed train station "Zuoying" near Kaohsiung and it take you to E-Da World.

Windows on China and Leofoo were actually on the same bus line and I took a bus from a subway station to the park. I didn't do Farglory.

^^^No doubt public transit and shuttles would have been a cheaper way to go. We paid NT$12,500 for the rental car for 5 days, which worked out to about US$80 per day, not including fuel. Not cheap of course, but not exorbitant either. The only trick was figuring out the Taiwanese GPS, which was doable. The rental car firm gave me a GPS, but I bought one on my own to start mapping out in advance. I'm guessing that if and when we go back (to get the @#$%^ credits we missed), assuming that our financial circumstances have not changed for the worse, we'd do the car rental thing again. But it's a good point to make that Taiwan is still doable even if you're on a budget. The round trip flight to Hualien was only US$100 each and it was just about another US$100 for the "limo service" in Hualien, taking us to the park and then to tour Taroko Gorge, which should not be missed. The biggest chunks of expense are, as usual, airfare and hotel.

Thanks for reading.

Deep Sea Adventure at Window on China seems to be a Zamperla Air Race.

I looked at both again and they are similar in some respects, but not the same ride. On Air Race, seats are all forward looking in the direction of the main wheel's rotation and the secondary rotation is clockwise or counter-clockwise around the main wheel's orbit of transit.

On Deep Sea Adventure, half of the seats look inward at the center of the main wheel or outward. The secondary rotation is then in the direction of the main wheel's rotation or in the opposite direction of the main wheel. By contract, Air Race's secondary rotation is "perpendicular" to the main wheel's plane.

I'm not really a technical writer. Did that make any sense?