Monday, August 4, 2008

Top 10 Tips for Hong Kong Disneyland

1 Do try to arrive right at the opening, and go deep into the park immediately to take a couple of the rides you're really looking forward to. This is standard advice for amusement parks, but it really paid off for us, as a couple of the Fantasyland rides we walked right onto first thing in the morning had hour-long queues just a little later.
2 Don't waste time taking photos with the characters that greet you at the gate as the park opens (see point 1!), unless getting such photos is one of your top priorities. If so, you're not reading the right set of tips. Okay, okay, I aim to please: if you're committed to posing with Mickey, have at it right away, although you'll have lots of company. You might also consider heading straight for the 'Fantasy Gardens' section of 'Fantasyland' when you arrive, where you can pose to your heart's content.

3 Don't bother trying to 'stick to a plan' for working your way through the park. It's so small you can change your mind anytime you want, and walk right across the place in five or ten minutes. This is actually a blessing if you've got small children in tow, and when you're off to get 'fastpasses', which we'll discuss next.

4 Do make use of the 'fastpass' system. A fastpass is a pre-booking you can make on any of five popular attractions. You put your park admission ticket into a machine, and are issued another ticket with a time range on it. During that period, you can turn up at the attraction and get right on it, ahead of the normal queue. You can only hold one fastpass at a time, and it has to have expired before you can get another one.

5 Don't bother tying up a fastpass on the Lion King stage show, though. Although those with fastpasses were indeed cordoned off into a 'special' waiting area when we visited, they were admitted into the show right along with us ordinary-queue proletarians in a single stampede.

6 Do take advantage of the 'Single riders' option at Space Mountain if you are a couple with small kids, or if you and your companions don't mind riding alone. Using this 'queue', Mrs Tall and I rode twice each and waited a total of about three minutes.

7 Do use sunscreen and wear hats if it's sunny. Sounds obvious, but although most waiting areas were at least partially shaded, on the day we visited there were still hundreds of painfully red faces and shoulders around, proving that some of us need little reminders.

8 Do buy orange juice. There are plastic bottles of fresh orange juice on sale all over the place for HKD15. That's not bad, given the general range of prices around the park, and it's delicious.

9 Don't expect to ride all the way around the park on the little train if the park's busy. The train has two stops: at the entrance, and at the opposite side of the park in Fantasyland. We found out that when the park gets crowded, you can only go from one stop to the next one, where you then have to get off.

10 Don't go crazy trying to get a good spot to see the fireworks. We saw people staking out positions to watch them almost an hour and a half in advance. This is surely not worth it. We waited till the last minute, and still were able to squeeze into the main plaza in front of the castle where the show is centered. We had a tree branch obscuring a bit of our view, but it was still fine.

No comments:

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...