The Eastern Discovery Tour
Day 7

Day 7 saw me visiting Happy Valley, Beijing. The Happy Valley brand is a major player in China, with several parks in  major cities, all of which have some major rides, and some World Class theming.

The Hi-light of Happy Valley, Beijing is Crystal Wings, a flying coaster. It also has a looping inverted coaster and a mine train. I wouldn't quite rate it as a world class park yet, but it's well on the way. It needs another signature ride, and a few more good family rides to support the major rides. It does suffer from not having any dark rides. It has quite a few shows, but it's a large park meaning you have to go out of your way if you want to see most of the shows.

Judging by the fact that the theming is already World Class, and they're planning to add more rides this is definitely I park worth keeping an eye on. One day it could be up their with the Worlds top parks.

This is the entrance plaza outside the park, you can probably guess what time of year I was visiting.
There isn't a Metro to Happy Valley yet, one is due to be added in the future when the Metro system expands. Currently the closest stop is Jinsong (Line 10) from where you can get a taxi, or a Tuc Tuc down the road (or pavement if the Tuc Tuc driver thinks it quicker) to the park. The park is on a busy main road, so I didn't have to wait that long to flag down a taxi back when I left. There's a footbridge to cross the road to where the traffic is going back North.

This is basically a giant car boot sale, without the cars. It's full of various merchants who have set up shop selling various items. Despite the name a lot of items here won't be many genuine antiques, but it's a great place to look for some unusual gifts and souvenirs. It's a good idea to bring along a calculator or a notepad and pen to use while haggling for an item.

A large part of the park was cordoned off where there add a whole new land for Summer 2010. I've heard unconfirmed rumours that it will have a Pirate theme.

Some of the best examples of the parks theming can be found around the parks signature roller coaster, Crystal Wings.

Crystal Wings wasn't due to open until lunchtime, so I headed further in to the park.

The first roller coaster of the day I did was the mine train called Jungle Racing. The people who own Happy Valley must be big fans of this ride, as 2 of their other parks have the same coaster with the same layout.

Of course if you don't want to go all the way to China to try this there's another copy of this ride (the first one built) that I rode last year at Walibi Belgium.

This is a good fun family coaster, with some brilliant theming to accompany it.

Another train flying past.

They've really made an effort theming the exterior of this restaurant. It's a shame the interior was on the drab side.
I also had a problem here with the toilets. All they had to use was the squat down hole in the floor ones. Happy Valley wasn't the only place to do this, but a lot of places had a choice of Chinese Squat and Western Sit toilets. Given that Happy Valley gets quite a few Western tourists (we saw several when visiting) and it's a modern park with a lot of money spent on it I would have thought they would have had a choice of toilet facilities.