Everland

Everland is the largest theme park in Korea and has been around now for about 20 years. It used to be called Farmland, I wonder if back then it just had farm animals. It was this park that gave the incentive to visit Korea on account of it receiving a new wooden record breaking coaster - T-Express. It was also a nice surprise to be told that a contact had arranged for us to have the coaster to ourselves for one hour prior to the public being allowed to board.

We were welcomed to the park by a couple of mascots and a number of nicely dressed women. Again with the government advice there were hardly any other people at the entrance.

This park had also gone pretty overboard on the Halloween theming. The strange thing is I think Asian countries celebrate the day less than we do. It's only the Americans that go overboard on this.

This pic shows just how busy the park was. Bear in mind this is 5 minutes on Main Street, five minutes after the park had opened its gates. The exclusive riding may end up being a joke as we might have been the only people in the park anyway?

With the majority of the group heading straight down to the wooden coaster I decided to head in the opposite direction and see what else I could find.

This is Herkl & Timmy's Racing Coaster, a medium sized kiddy coaster in the Aesop's Fable themed part of the park. Herkl is the Hare and Timmy is the Tortoise, so the story should be obvious. The coaster was OK interacting nicely with the gardening around it. The best part of the ride for me however was the cute ride-op with an evne cuter voice who would say some pre-ride spiel in Korean prior to launching the ride. I have no idea what she was saying but I could quite happily listen to it over and over again.

The rest of the Aesop's park was very well themed. It was just a shame that with no kids visiting the park today, the majority of this part of the park was either not being used or not being utilised.

Two of the coasters were down at the park today. The large white corkscrew was closed for a ride inspection.

The yellow swinging coaster hidden in the trees and rated as the best of its type in the world had recently been closed, which disappointed a lot of the trip attendees as it was expected to be one of the premier rides on the trip.

A rather intersting flat ride that I hadn't come across before. It sort of looks like one of those games where you have to pass a ring around the metal course without touching it or you'll set off a buzzer.

The park has a dragon, seems to be quite a common coaster in this country, I guess because its cheap.

At the bottom of the valley you get an amazing view of the new coaster. T-Express was built a couple of years ago taking the record for the steepest drop and I think it is also the tallest drop on a wooden coaster. The second hill looked particularly good.

The ride resides in the nicely themed Alpine section of the park and is themed around a runaway train. Rather peculiarly however the ride is sponsored by a national telephone company hence the T logo above the entrance.

The ride itself was a ride of two halves with the inital part being very intense and powerful but as soon as the ride hit the mid-course brake the momentum of the ride was drastically killed and the coaster didn't have the same intensity any more. Having said that I did remain on the train for the entire hour, whilst people queued for the front and back seats I stayed put in the middle, which was actually the best seats on the ride.

With the hour up the ride opened to the public and surprisingly there was a decent crowd waiting to ride it. I decided to queue up with them and have one last go. Riding with the club is great but as they've ridden everything and anything the experience is different to riding with people who get scared, scream, and hold on for dear life. In short a more real audience, and I wasn't disappointed with the crowd screaming and cheering, even on the second half.

5 years ago I would be running to have a go on rides like this. Now I don't bother having ridden them way too much. The downside to having too much of a good thing perhaps. For some people spin rides are like crack and having tried them and liking them they have to have more, but I'm not like that.

The park has a small 50s themed area half way down the hillside. As with the rest of the park they'd done a good job with the theming. The adverts for cigarettes with the odd looking Sean Connery were particularly nice.

Even though the park was running at a ridiculous low capacity they still went ahead with their Carnival Fantasy Parade.

The parade was pretty good actually but a little odd in that most of the participants were not Korean but appeared to be Russian. In fact later in the day we found a Russian circus show which contained the same people. So it looks like the park makes the most of this work group by having them do the parade as well as the circus.

Being on a mountainside, getting around the park could be a pain but fortunately for those of us who wouldn't be good at ascending the hill, the park had built a couple of cable car systems that we could take advantage of, and boy did we use this!

A rather peculiar ride where the seats bounce up and down and rotate in time to some random tunage.

The park has a nice big wheel but with the windows covered in a green tint, taking photos from the cabins wasn't really practical.

Some nice views of the T-Express coaster.

Another coaster cartoon. This time for T-Express.

With the youngsters catered for by the amusement park the developers also built some nice gardens for the older people to enjoy (or for those who don't have the nerve to ride).

and for those who are more interested in animals the park also has a small zoo and safari park. Now prior to the trip I had seen a clip from this park where they put a bear cub in with some monkeys and lion cubs. The cub was absolutely petrified but in dubbing canned laugher over the top they made out it was a funny situation.

Anyway the safari park wasn't very good to be honest. Most of the animals looked bored and didn't have much room to move around in. The animals also knew that when the minibuses came around the drivers would offer food so they would congregate around the feeding places and stand on their back legs to get the food. Not very natural at all. I did get to see a Liger and some humping Hyenas though, so it wasn't all bad.

The polar bear enclosure wasn't that big either but they weren't pacing back and forth like most zoos. Whilst I was taking this photo a second one launched itself quite spectacularly off a rock into the water and I completely missed it with the camera. This also happened at Yokohama Sea Paradise on the last trip so I'm 0 for 2 when it comes to photos of diving Polar Bears.

Realising the time we had to make a hasty exit out of the park where we were given a farewell by the park's brass band. Perhaps the best brass band I've ever seen but then I'm a sucker for a cute Korean girl with her mouth around the end of a ..... enough of that. Apologies for the over-exposure in the photo, I think the camera was steaming up, although I'm not sure how.

Everland is a very well themed park with a decent selection of rides. It was a shame that Eagle's Fortress was not running but the good news is that the park is not getting rid of it completely. They're just replacing the current swinging trains with some new ones. Exactly the same process that took place with the Vampire at Chessington back home in England. So I will have a very good reason to go back to Korea.

Following the departure from Everland we made our way further South to the city of Daejeon.