Day 6/7 of North Vietnam Trip, SunWorld Parks on January 13/14, 2018

Having left Hoi An for the nearby city of Da Nang, I visited SunWorld Da Nang Asia Park on the afternoon of Jan 13, and the next day SunWorld Ba Na Hills. Since they are both amusement parks under the same company, I would combine them in one post.

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It was noon when we arrived in our hotel in Da Nang just next to My Khe Beach, where lots of sea food restaurants were located. For the previous days our meals were pretty much consisted of beef and chicken pho's, so despite none of us were sea food fans, we decided to try something different this time.
And despite some of the restaurants being not much more than covered tents, the food did taste great though.

After that, we originally planned to visit SunWorld Da Nang this afternoon, and spend one of the two remaining days in Da Nang on Ba Na Hills, and another one touring Linh Ứng Temple and Hải Vân Quan. However, my mom's not a big fan of amusement parks, so she preferred resting on the beach (or maybe in hotel room) reading, leaving me alone for the two parks.

SunWorld Da Nang Asia Park

A pretty standard amusement park, to put it in simple terms.
An amusement park with seemingly more staff than visitors, if I describe it better.

It just seemed weird that not enough of Vietnam's 9 million population would go on thrill seeking and fill a handful of decent amusement parks. Or, maybe the 300k VNM ticket is just too much for average Vietnamese households even for an evening of fun?

But back to the park itself, SunWorld Da Nang was a park with few visitors but still lines, because they had a regulation that rides require a minimum of four people to launch, so most of the time people were waiting in line for more people to join.

So while (waiting for) riding this roller coaster "Queen Cobra", which was Vietnam's largest and expectedly my first stop into the park, I met a Japanese couple who were true roller coaster fans and found heaven here. They vividly told me how agonizing the wait was while they were at Osaka's Universal Studios when it first opened, and here with virtually no lines, they had an ambitious goal of riding this roller coaster ten times for the night. And their eyes glowed when I joined the queue, they were halfway to the 4-person minimum.
Well, I didn't know how their night ended. After riding this roller coaster for three (or maybe four?) times, I found that excitement from thrilling rides actually decays, and it decays pretty fast. So I went on searching for more thrilling rides.
Which there weren't many, this pendulum ride called "Singapore Swing" was one of those.

Apart from these two, the only remaining ride that's not too boring was probably the Ferris wheel, which was claimed to be Vietnam’s biggest and probably the best place to overlook the city of Da Nang. I rode it twice, before and after sunset.

It was a cloudy day with occasional drizzles. I tried my best post-processing this photo to recover mountains of Thọ Quang Pennisula, and the end result wasn't too bad..

A quick conclusion about SunWorld's Asia Park in Da Nang here. It built a monorail line around the park like Disney, and judging by its size, SunWorld owned huge chunks of land by the park with naked ambition for future expansions. And even in the current state, it's a full-fledged park with everything that an amusement park should have. But the current state of the park revealed how little enthusiasm an average Vietnamese had towards digging deep into his own pocket and have hours of fun on a Saturday evening. SunWorld is playing the long game by literally creating Vietnam's amusement park industry and hoping to become the default park brand some day in the future. At the same time, I could definitely tell signs of age on some of the rides in this three-year-old park. I'm not sure whether that day would come before its rides in Da Nang's Asia Park rust and crumble.

SunWorld Ba Na Hills

Fast forward to Jan 14, I planned to spend the entire day on SunWorld's Ba Na Hill park, which used to be a mountain retreat created by the French back in the colonial days. Of course recently SunWorld renovated the park in the model of a small French town, with gondolas and gardens, and of course restaurants and hotels.
The default way of getting to Ba Na Hills from Da Nang should be tour bus or tour minivan. But to me, what better way than joining the Vietnamese way of life and renting a motorcycle while enjoying the thrilling sense of being an outlaw cause I didn't have licenses?A year after that, one of my coworkers from Vietnam told me that one didn't need a license to operate a motorcycle, which did take some of the excitement away from me.

To begin with, traffic in downtown Da Nang was pretty tense but flowing. And once I left downtown Da Nang, I was pretty much enjoying three empty lanes among beautiful paddy fields and lakes on my own, with occasional tour buses passing.

By the way, Ba Na Hills offered free dedicated covered CCTV-monitored parking lots for motorcycles, mainly used by its employees though.

Unfortunately, the park was built on more than 1400-meter elevation, where the nearby mountain terrain was very good at trapping moisture. The end result was that, while I occasionally enjoyed sunshine on the motorbike ride there, the park was covered in dense fog throughout the day. So things on the mountain looked like this:

On a clear and sunny day, Ba Na Hills should offer delicate gardens, some of which come with spectacular views of surrounding mountains and even distant coastline. However, I went on a misty day with occasional downpour (I knew it from weather forecasting, but I chose not to admit it until I went up the mountains), so I spent most of my day inside one of its castles, or "Fantasy Park" as it's called.

At first sight, the "Fantasy Park" had all the fantastic components. It had a miniature drop tower that's not under maintenance, it had a stage where people would perform from time to time, and the rest of its three floors were filled with FREE arcade games, the majority of which were operating. However, at a closer look, things were not quite what I expected them to be.

First about this drop tower, which was catered to the average visitor to the park that's aiming for little more than a few instagramable photos after sitting in office chairs (or retirement rocking chairs, which is more likely) for the rest of the year. So to riders, it provided only the slightest thrill to make a smiling face in front of a selfie stick, which was itself amazingly allowed onto the ride.
So to me, I was pretty sure I was the only person that day yelling "yeah" instead of "awwww" while riding that unexciting drop tower.

Then, there's this stage, which occasionally feature performance of Western-looking people on roller skaters. I didn't feel their performance was any remarkable, probably because it just wasn't, probably because it was accompanied by loud music, so loud that the deaf would hear again. It's like, the park paid hefty price (made heftier to perform in loud noise I guess) to hire a few performers from the West to add to the park's "Frenchness" so they wanted everyone to know, but they chose to do it in an ignorant way of blasting music throughout the building and annoying most of the people. By most I mean except somehow there was a crowd holding up cell phones enjoying the moment, probably because they were too deaf.

And finally about arcade games. There were a lot of these and they were all free and I admit I really had a great time with these, except this one that's running windows 2000 and crashed of course.
But a closer look and one would find most of the arcade games were obsolete models imported from Japan and China, but as long as they were free, the average visitor to the park obviously didn't care. To me, I had this nostalgia towards arcade games that when I was young and still goodexcited about games, my parents viciously deprived my childhood of these under their skewed understandings about video games and parenthood, and here I was playing the exact same games that a decade ago I could only stand watching.

So I had a great time reconnecting myself with Time Crisis and introducing myself to many more games, including some horror games like Silent Hill. I was the type of person that dare not watch even the slightest thriller movies without flowing terror alerts the Niconico way, but among festive crowds I was finding Silent Hill enjoyable. It must be the crowd effect, because out in the mist it was exactly Silent Hill.

Well wait till I Photoshopped this a little bit.

So I spent quality time with the games until about 5pm, when I decided it's time to head back before darkness fell.

Another quick conclusion about SunWorld’s Ba Na Hills here. Despite its remoteness, it seemed to be a better investment by SunWorld compared with its Asia Park downtown, sheer visitor volume would do the talking. On a sunny day, its outdoor gardens, albeit artificial, would make great attractions. Even when it’s misty, I mean, Silent Hill misty like the day I visited, its three floors of arcade games wouldn't disappoint. Besides, it had rides both indoor and outdoor that even a high-blood-pressure person would have just the right amount of fun to post for instagram selfies. And from the fact that the park's map and its number of gondolas were growing by the year we knew SunWorld's serious about running and expanding Ba Na Hills.
But at the same time, with overwhelmingly positive online reviews before I went, I felt sort of obligated to say something opposite. It felt to me that the park was designed for people interested in an exotic French town but couldn't visit France themselves. I mean, the town and gardens were nice but they were sort of created to be taken pictures at, not to be experienced or appreciated because they looked too deliberate. It could advertise free indoor arcade games but many of those were decade-old second-hand models that's not very well maintained. Many of its other facilities were not the best in industry. But hey, this was Vietnam, where there's pretty much zero theme park industry.
So as a park, it offered something for everybody. It's not the best, but I was pretty sure I won't find another place where arcade games were offered at no marginal cost.
END