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First of 3 theme parks for the trip.
Nagashima Spa Land is a popular theme park on a peninsula of land in the Nagoya bay area, approximately half an hour by train from the centre of Nagoya. This peninsula appears to have been turned into a bit of a tourist/entertainment district, as this is the same stretch of land that Nabana No Sato gardens sits on (last night's illumination), as well as a couple of kids museums, a range of shopping malls and outlets, and an extensive hot springs resort next door to the theme park (which gave the park it's "Spa Land") name. The theme park itself has nothing to do with spa’s.
Again we make the familiar train journey to Nagashima, this time going one stop past the isolated Nagashima station to Kuwana station across the river, then hopping on a bus to travel back across the river to the theme park. Even though it’s across the river, Kuwana station is closer to the park than Nagashima station is so this is how it's done apparently.
Entry to the park was a matter of paying and walking in. No queueing, which was welcome, and amazingly became a trend throughout the day.
As you’d expect from a theme park in Japan, Nagashima Spa Land can apparently get very, very crowded. We’ve seen it happen on past trips at Disney and Universal Studios, so we were expecting the worst. The weather however, wasn’t perfect, and being a weekday it would seem that everyone decided to just skip the theme park today. It was as close to empty as I think it is possible to be.
At around 10:30am it rained very lightly for around 20 minutes. While this wasn't cold, and didn't worry us in the slightest since all of the rides continued to function, what it did do was scare away what little crowds there was. While the park was initially fairly empty, after the rain had passed by around 11am, the park was a ghost town.
I notice that the Japanese in general don't like 2 things:
- Cold temperatures, in which case they try to compensate by superheating their trains/shops/busses/etc; and
- Rain, which curiously makes the Japanese people vanish. I still don't know where they all go when it rains. Possibly to some underground network of tunnels that foreigners don't know about? Little things like this make me curious.
Nagashima Spa Land is, as with most things Japanese, immaculately clean and well kept. Every branch on every hedge is meticulously manicured, and cleaning crews constantly and silently patrol the park to pick up rubbish, vacuum leaves and mop up rainwater (even while it is raining). No I’m not kidding. Every worker in this country seemingly has a dedication to doing their job and unwavering doing it to the best of their abilities, and I've got a lot of respect for that.
Cherry blossom trees are in abundance in the park, and every one of them were in full bloom today. Some had even started dropping their petals, so it was surreal sitting under a Sakura tree, while petals fell to the ground around you like snowflakes, while you watched a roller coaster barrel past you at 90 miles per hour.
To take advantage of the low attendance numbers, not knowing if the park would fill up later in the day, we headed for one of the headline rides, Steel Dragon 2000. This ride holds the record for the longest rollercoaster in the world, and briefly held the world records for a few other stats such as roller coaster speed and height. Needless to say, it is big and fast.
The area set aside for queuing for these rides is insane. Metal barriers were set up to snake crowds for hundreds and hundreds of meters for each ride. When full, and I don’t doubt that they get full on busy days, the wait times could easily get to 2 to 3 hours.
For us though, wait time for the first ride was about 15 minutes, which turned out to be the longest wait of the day. Reaching the front of the queue, we just missed the previous ride, which meant only one thing…front carriage!
The Charlotte and Angela sat in the very front row, while I sat in the seat behind.
The ride was exactly as tall and as fast as you’d expect. The initial hill climb gives you a magnificent view of the park, with each pathway lined with Cherry Blossom trees. Reminiscent of the view from the UFO on the previous day.
Upon reaching the top however, that serenity changes. Being in the front carriage, the train leans over to face down the hill, but doesn’t instantly begin to accelerate, since the carriages at the back of the train are still climbing the hill. Instead you’re left to hang there, with the track below you so steep it isn’t visible, inching forward for what seems like an eternity….until you're dropped, and the carriage accelerates down the hill in what feels like a freefall, and pins you to your seat. The process is repeated again on a slightly smaller hill, after which the train loops around a twisty but remarkably smooth track, before coming to an abrupt end. You then realise that you haven’t taken a breath since the initial hill around a minute ago.
The rest of the day was spent, predictably, running from one ride to the next. If a ride was good, we went on it 2 or 3 times. If it didn’t wow us, once was sufficient.
This theme park is a little different to ones we’ve been to in the past, since the entry to the park wasn’t expensive, but rides are charged separately, or patrons have the option of purchasing a “ride passport” to get onto all the rides they want. On a busy day, I cannot imagine that a ride passport pays off, since you simply wouldn’t have enough time to go on enough rides to justify the cost. For us though, today, based on the face value of each ride, each of us were about $150 in front, per person, by buying the ride passport, in comparison to purchasing individual ride entries. Yep, we got our money’s worth.
While other people stopped for lunch, and stopped for photos, and stopped to browse through the shops, we rode the rides. Non-stop from when the park opened, to when it closed. Veronica and Isabelle did not ride many rides, so they paid for individual ride tickets, and probably saved a few dollars by doing so. While there were a few kids rides in the park, they were relatively lame, even by kiddy standards. The park is definitely geared towards the “thrill seeker” market. Families with young children will not enjoy the park as much if the kids are too young/small to go on the thrill rides, which make up the majority of the attractions.
We didn’t intend to stay the full day…honestly we didn’t…but we found ourselves running from ride to ride 5 minutes before closing to get the last rides in for the day, only to be the last ones out the gate after closing time.
So my assessment of Nagashima Spa Land?
Based purely on the rides, and the lack of crowd numbers that were there today, which allowed us to sample everything the park had to offer: 10 out of 10.
Surprisingly however, I would describe the park itself as "soulless". It's the best description I can come up with. Nagashima Spa Land was a fantastically maintained and well ordered space which allowed its patrons to ride some world class rides. But it was absolutely nothing more than that. Other parks such as Disney and Universal Studios have a theme...everywhere you look they have something going on which captures your attention.
Nagashima Spa Land doesn't have any of those things. Nagashima Spa Land doesn't have a "soul". The park itself exists simply to group a bunch of thrill rides in the same place. If you visit with this expectation, you'll have a fantastic time. If however you go there expecting the immersive atmosphere of Disney, or the glamour and spectacle of Universal Studios, you're going to be disappointed. Especially if the lines for the rides are long.
Walk, bus and train to get back to Nagoya, and with all of us too tired to apply any additional resources to cognitive reasoning, the Coco Curry around the corner from our guesthouse was chosen as the default dinner establishment. I think out of all of the food in Japan, the two things I’ll miss most is Coco Curry and Convenience store foods (especially their fried chicken, which is quite simply amazing, and is like a KFC boneless fillet, but 5x as good, for 1/5 of the price).
I know I’ve said this before, but on tomorrow’s agenda, we literally have nothing planned. We need a rest, and quite frankly there is not much else in Nagoya, other than shopping, that we really want to do. There is Nagoya castle which is probably scenic, and a river and touristy shopping area to the east which may be worth checking out, but aside from that, nothing else piques my interest enough to invest energy into visiting it today.
Personally, I think I’d enjoy the Toyota factory and museum, but I think dragging my family through a car museum for a full day when they’re this exhausted would probably see me murdered in my sleep, which I’d prefer to avoid, so I may have to give that a miss.
Nagashima Spa Land is a popular theme park on a peninsula of land in the Nagoya bay area, approximately half an hour by train from the centre of Nagoya. This peninsula appears to have been turned into a bit of a tourist/entertainment district, as this is the same stretch of land that Nabana No Sato gardens sits on (last night's illumination), as well as a couple of kids museums, a range of shopping malls and outlets, and an extensive hot springs resort next door to the theme park (which gave the park it's "Spa Land") name. The theme park itself has nothing to do with spa’s.
Again we make the familiar train journey to Nagashima, this time going one stop past the isolated Nagashima station to Kuwana station across the river, then hopping on a bus to travel back across the river to the theme park. Even though it’s across the river, Kuwana station is closer to the park than Nagashima station is so this is how it's done apparently.
Entry to the park was a matter of paying and walking in. No queueing, which was welcome, and amazingly became a trend throughout the day.
As you’d expect from a theme park in Japan, Nagashima Spa Land can apparently get very, very crowded. We’ve seen it happen on past trips at Disney and Universal Studios, so we were expecting the worst. The weather however, wasn’t perfect, and being a weekday it would seem that everyone decided to just skip the theme park today. It was as close to empty as I think it is possible to be.
At around 10:30am it rained very lightly for around 20 minutes. While this wasn't cold, and didn't worry us in the slightest since all of the rides continued to function, what it did do was scare away what little crowds there was. While the park was initially fairly empty, after the rain had passed by around 11am, the park was a ghost town.
I notice that the Japanese in general don't like 2 things:
- Cold temperatures, in which case they try to compensate by superheating their trains/shops/busses/etc; and
- Rain, which curiously makes the Japanese people vanish. I still don't know where they all go when it rains. Possibly to some underground network of tunnels that foreigners don't know about? Little things like this make me curious.
Nagashima Spa Land is, as with most things Japanese, immaculately clean and well kept. Every branch on every hedge is meticulously manicured, and cleaning crews constantly and silently patrol the park to pick up rubbish, vacuum leaves and mop up rainwater (even while it is raining). No I’m not kidding. Every worker in this country seemingly has a dedication to doing their job and unwavering doing it to the best of their abilities, and I've got a lot of respect for that.
Cherry blossom trees are in abundance in the park, and every one of them were in full bloom today. Some had even started dropping their petals, so it was surreal sitting under a Sakura tree, while petals fell to the ground around you like snowflakes, while you watched a roller coaster barrel past you at 90 miles per hour.
To take advantage of the low attendance numbers, not knowing if the park would fill up later in the day, we headed for one of the headline rides, Steel Dragon 2000. This ride holds the record for the longest rollercoaster in the world, and briefly held the world records for a few other stats such as roller coaster speed and height. Needless to say, it is big and fast.
The area set aside for queuing for these rides is insane. Metal barriers were set up to snake crowds for hundreds and hundreds of meters for each ride. When full, and I don’t doubt that they get full on busy days, the wait times could easily get to 2 to 3 hours.
For us though, wait time for the first ride was about 15 minutes, which turned out to be the longest wait of the day. Reaching the front of the queue, we just missed the previous ride, which meant only one thing…front carriage!
The Charlotte and Angela sat in the very front row, while I sat in the seat behind.
The ride was exactly as tall and as fast as you’d expect. The initial hill climb gives you a magnificent view of the park, with each pathway lined with Cherry Blossom trees. Reminiscent of the view from the UFO on the previous day.
Upon reaching the top however, that serenity changes. Being in the front carriage, the train leans over to face down the hill, but doesn’t instantly begin to accelerate, since the carriages at the back of the train are still climbing the hill. Instead you’re left to hang there, with the track below you so steep it isn’t visible, inching forward for what seems like an eternity….until you're dropped, and the carriage accelerates down the hill in what feels like a freefall, and pins you to your seat. The process is repeated again on a slightly smaller hill, after which the train loops around a twisty but remarkably smooth track, before coming to an abrupt end. You then realise that you haven’t taken a breath since the initial hill around a minute ago.
The rest of the day was spent, predictably, running from one ride to the next. If a ride was good, we went on it 2 or 3 times. If it didn’t wow us, once was sufficient.
This theme park is a little different to ones we’ve been to in the past, since the entry to the park wasn’t expensive, but rides are charged separately, or patrons have the option of purchasing a “ride passport” to get onto all the rides they want. On a busy day, I cannot imagine that a ride passport pays off, since you simply wouldn’t have enough time to go on enough rides to justify the cost. For us though, today, based on the face value of each ride, each of us were about $150 in front, per person, by buying the ride passport, in comparison to purchasing individual ride entries. Yep, we got our money’s worth.
While other people stopped for lunch, and stopped for photos, and stopped to browse through the shops, we rode the rides. Non-stop from when the park opened, to when it closed. Veronica and Isabelle did not ride many rides, so they paid for individual ride tickets, and probably saved a few dollars by doing so. While there were a few kids rides in the park, they were relatively lame, even by kiddy standards. The park is definitely geared towards the “thrill seeker” market. Families with young children will not enjoy the park as much if the kids are too young/small to go on the thrill rides, which make up the majority of the attractions.
We didn’t intend to stay the full day…honestly we didn’t…but we found ourselves running from ride to ride 5 minutes before closing to get the last rides in for the day, only to be the last ones out the gate after closing time.
So my assessment of Nagashima Spa Land?
Based purely on the rides, and the lack of crowd numbers that were there today, which allowed us to sample everything the park had to offer: 10 out of 10.
Surprisingly however, I would describe the park itself as "soulless". It's the best description I can come up with. Nagashima Spa Land was a fantastically maintained and well ordered space which allowed its patrons to ride some world class rides. But it was absolutely nothing more than that. Other parks such as Disney and Universal Studios have a theme...everywhere you look they have something going on which captures your attention.
Nagashima Spa Land doesn't have any of those things. Nagashima Spa Land doesn't have a "soul". The park itself exists simply to group a bunch of thrill rides in the same place. If you visit with this expectation, you'll have a fantastic time. If however you go there expecting the immersive atmosphere of Disney, or the glamour and spectacle of Universal Studios, you're going to be disappointed. Especially if the lines for the rides are long.
Walk, bus and train to get back to Nagoya, and with all of us too tired to apply any additional resources to cognitive reasoning, the Coco Curry around the corner from our guesthouse was chosen as the default dinner establishment. I think out of all of the food in Japan, the two things I’ll miss most is Coco Curry and Convenience store foods (especially their fried chicken, which is quite simply amazing, and is like a KFC boneless fillet, but 5x as good, for 1/5 of the price).
I know I’ve said this before, but on tomorrow’s agenda, we literally have nothing planned. We need a rest, and quite frankly there is not much else in Nagoya, other than shopping, that we really want to do. There is Nagoya castle which is probably scenic, and a river and touristy shopping area to the east which may be worth checking out, but aside from that, nothing else piques my interest enough to invest energy into visiting it today.
Personally, I think I’d enjoy the Toyota factory and museum, but I think dragging my family through a car museum for a full day when they’re this exhausted would probably see me murdered in my sleep, which I’d prefer to avoid, so I may have to give that a miss.
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