After a good night sleep in our teeny tiny hostel, we got on the very convenient Subway, switched trains twice and pretty easily got to Hong Kong Disneyland. It seems isolated all by itself on Lantau Island. By some stroke of dumb luck, we happened to be visiting on the exact day of Hong Kong Disneyland’s 5th Anniversary. When we went through the entrance turnstiles they gave us a button that said “Happy 5th Birthday,” so that was pretty cool. We made our way under the railroad station to Main Street USA and noticed that we were back in the land of small castles. This park had the Disneyland Sleeping Beauty Castle. What was striking more than the castle was the beautiful backdrop to the park. The skyline behind the castle was a beautiful rolling mountain backdrop. It really set this park apart in setting. There is so much natural green and a diversity of trees and plants that are cool because they are actually native to the place and not transplanted.
The next thing you notice is there is not a whole lot at this park. Three lands, Tomorrow, Fantasy and Adventure. You know there is a dearth of attractions when they list the Leaky Tikis in Adventureland, the kids’ water feature in Tomorrowland and just walking the 30 feet from one side of Sleeping Beauty’s castle to the other as “attractions.” We went on Space Mountain, Ghost Galaxy, Special for Halloween and that was nice because it was different. Buzz Lightyear was a copy from Disneyland and Winnie the Pooh a copy from Disney World. They really played up Small World since a Disney was built in Hong Kong, it really was a Small World after all. The Jungle River Cruise was strange. It took the place of the River’s of America from all the other parks and ended with a fire bursting, water flooding grand finale. There was also a different version of Festival of the Lion King from Florida and The Golden Mickey’s from the Cruise Line. The very distinct thing about the park is they try to work three languages into everything they do, Cantonese, Mandarin and English. This makes things very interesting when they are trying to spit out main plotlines in three languages. The woman at Golden Mickey’s was amazing, singing and speaking seamlessly between them. We also noticed we weren’t in Tokyo anymore. The rude, pushy annoying people were back. We had a very enjoyable day overall and it was very nice relaxing and slowly making our way from one place to the next because you could easily see everything at a slow pace. The Halloween decorations would never fly in any other Disney park, a little too hardcore. It started to rain in the early afternoon and we were again soaking by 7:30 watching the fireworks, which, by the way, were very impressive. This park was built for lots of close range fireworks around the castle. This was the most impressive thing of the day.
Anyway, I’m tired and creating lots of run on ideas. That’s about it for today. We had an uneventful ride back on the Subway and started relaxing early.
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