Dashu Township, Kaohsiung, Taiwan – Thursday, May 12th, 2011
E-DA Theme Park opened in late 2010 in the southern city of Kaohsiung as Taiwan’s newest theme park, part of a larger retail and development complex by E-United Group called E-DA World. The theme park has an ancient Greek theme, starring a cast of cartoon characters created exclusively for the park, led by a blue rhinoceros named “Da-E.” The result feels a bit like a mix of Japan’s Sanrio Puroland (with its kawaii Hello Kitty characters and mall-style infrastructure) and France’s Parc Astérix (with its interpretation of classical history through a locally-reflected animated IP). Given the thematic potpourri of most Asian theme parks, the consistency of the Greek theme was distinctive.
The bus ride from the train station to the park played several cartoon shorts to introduce these characters, with each with the characters involved in a Trojan Horse gag where the battle doesn’t go as planned. The endless repetition of the same set-up and apparent amnesia of the characters to any of the previous incidents underscored the whole thing with an unspoken surreal quality, as if we were gods watching a cartoon rhino’s metaphysical punishment of eternal recurrence in increasingly unusual forms.
The bus dropped off just outside the theme park, but a crenelated brick wall blocked anywhere there might have been an entrance. Instead I had to navigate a confusing route through the mall, following wayfinding that mostly didn’t have English translations.
I finally found the park entrance in a sort of weird basement space.
Schedules and admission options were equally confusing.
I don’t know what it says, but this sign looks ominous.
Welcome to E-DA Theme Park, where we are desperately in need of a new graphic designer!
The park is divided into three sections, two indoor zones named Acropolis and Trojan Castle, and one outdoor zone connecting the two, named Santorini. Down into the park I go…
For being a brand new theme park barely six months old, there were a lot of contradictions built in. Why did the park have such a convoluted layout when they had the advantage of a completely new-build development?
Why did they spend so much effort developing the characters and theme but then forget to put together a brand guideline for how they would be implemented in the park?
And why was so much money spent on infrastructure and theming when many of the attractions are glorified (or even unglorified) carnival rides?
Part of any world class entertainment program: guppies in a box on a tarp.
I don’t want to sound too critical of E-DA Theme Park before I’ve even properly toured the place. The fact that the place was so oddball was what made it kind of endearing. A lot of effort had been put into some aspects of the park, even if the idea behind that effort was questionable. If I’m going to travel this far and I can’t have something really good, I at least want something really unusual. E-DA Theme Park delivers in spades.
The outdoor Santorini zone even had some unironically nice areas. Certainly better than that other Greek themed park. (Apparently the park has a side business offering these spaces as wedding photo shoot locations.)
E-DA Theme Park also offers coaster hunters the most credits within a single park in Taiwan. The signature attraction is the Big Air, a prototype Vekoma design never built before or since. The gigantic 200+ foot tall U-shaped shuttle ride appears to offer some serious weightlessness.
I say “appear” because I never got to ride it for myself. That ominous untranslated repair sign at the park entry seemed to be for this attraction.
The mechanism appears to work similiarly to the Vekoma Giant Inverted Boomerangs, only with a sit-down car and the cable winch on only one tower.
They were however testing it several times throughout the day. While it unfairly raised my hopes and got me to stick around for longer than I might have otherwise, I did at least get some photos and video of the attraction in action. I’ve heard that the rotating cars have since been disabled.
The cyclops figure with a sickle slicing through the load platform is pretty badass.
The Zamperla tower ride was also down for repairs all day.
The Booster was open for part of the day, but it too went down for repairs. I honestly cannot remember if I rode it or not.
With all the tall vertical outdoor rides in varying states of closure, that pretty much left me with the water rides. I took a hard pass on the Splash Battle, even if it did appear to be one of the more elaborately themed rides in the park. Nothing I couldn’t see from the dry safety of the pathway.
The Flume Ride was another attraction that I initially figured I wouldn’t bother with. Way too wet.
However, later in the afternoon I took a closer look and realized that I might have been missing out on a water coaster credit. It wasn’t listed on RCDb, but from the ground there seemed to be a few small dips on an elevated section of track that appeared to be gravity driven. I couldn’t be certain, but decided to buy a $30NDT (~$1.00USD) rain poncho to find out.
Sure enough, the metal tracked attraction featured two small gravity drops and rises after the first lift. I celebrated the apparent discovery of a new, unlisted coaster credit as we passed through a small tunnel and ascended the second lift hill. It wasn’t much of a coaster, but it still seemed to count. (Shortly after my visit RCDb later did confirm it met their definition of a coaster as well.)
Then it was down the big drop to prove that it was still also very much a water ride.
Heading towards the indoor Trojan Castle section, an ancient not-quite-Greek gladiator battle seemed to be underway. It seemed they could use an audience.
It starts off with the usual fighting as the spectators, uh, disinterestedly look on (or check their phones).
But then this girl comes out to show them how to join hands in a chorus to “We Are the World,” apparently.
And then whatever this finale is. One thing I learned is if you ever see white people performing a theme park show in Taiwan or China, there’s a pretty good chance they’re all Russian.
The indoor spaces feel like they were originally intended to be a mall, and later the design was repurposed for the theme park. All the smaller flat rides that can fit indoors are semi-randomly scattered throughout the many floors in here.
One of the main dining locations was in here as well. Food was pretty bad.
I’m not sure what’s more amusing about this place mat: the Walt Disney script with double exclamation points, or the Greek village and characters rendered as if they’re in the wild west.
A peek inside the bathroom setup. How much of a liability are those electric hair dryers mounted over the sinks?
Two of the park’s best attractions are located in here, if you can find them.
The first is the deceptively named Dark Ride. E-DA Theme Park doesn’t actually have a dark ride, rather this is an enclosed roller coaster with some sort of mining theme.
In a surprise twist to no one, this would be yet another Vekoma Roller Skater, now the fifth I’d come across between the four parks I’d been to so far in Taiwan. This one was probably the second best of the bunch, after Laser Blaster at Window on China Theme Park, as it was another custom layout coaster in the dark with a few special effects and some whip around a few of the turns.
The most unusual thing about this coaster was that it boards at an upper level within the mall park, dropping down into the main layout out of the station with the lift hill saved for last. The lift does briefly penetrate outside the show building for a glimpse of sunlight, but that’s all you get as a finale as it rather anticlimactically turns back into the station at this point. The steampunk style theming around this ride is much better than a coaster like this really deserves.
I took a video of the ride as well; admittedly there’s not a tremendous amount to see for much of it.
The other noteworthy ride in the Trojan Castle was the Taiwan Formosa flying theater; think “Soarin’ Over Taiwan.” The size of the queue definitely suggested the park thought of it as one of their top attractions.
Unlike Disney’s Soarin’ attractions which all board at the same level and then lift up into the flying position, Taiwan Formosa has its rows of seats staked vertically, which then push forward towards the screen. It was a similar travelogue style ride film, although the great irony was that I had already visited more of the Taiwanese locations filmed in Taiwan Formosa (notably Taipei 101, Yehliu Geopark, and Taroko Gorge) than I had for locations in my home country during my first flight on Soarin’ Over California earlier that year.
This was the first flying theater installation by the Taiwanese company Brogent. While it might be easy to assume it’s just another copycat manufacturer, the reality is that today Brogent is one of the leading producers of high-quality flying theater attractions. Several years later I’d get to work with them on the Green Lantern: Galactic Odyssey attraction at Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi, and not only is their flying theater one of the most powerfully dynamic on the market, but they were all around one of the best vendors to work with on that entire theme park. As I recall Formosa Taiwan was still very much a prototype; the movements weren’t particularly fluid or well-synchronized with the screen as later endeavors would be.
Going up onto the roof provided the last coaster for me to get today. The creatively named Roof Junior Coaster is a Fabbri Spinning Mouse. When I first arrived, this ride was also shut down and looked likely to be yet another missed credit.
Yet surprisingly, as the park neared its final operating hour, the coaster actually did briefly open. I had spent nearly the entire day thinking I would only get one coaster, and while Big Air never arrived, between the late discovery of Flume Ride as an unexpected credit and this ride’s last-minute resurrection, I was still able to rack up three coasters to my count, exactly as I originally planned.
The ride is just an off-the-shelf model, although it was a model I personally hadn’t tried elsewhere before. Honestly, the rooftop seemed to be an afterthought where a few aftermarket rides got tossed after the park realized they needed more program cheaply to meet their capacity targets.
There were some nice views, which undoubtedly made the coaster much more interesting than it otherwise should have been. I’m sure by now much more of this land has been developed by the growing city.
After scoring the Roof Junior Coaster, the park was already beginning to literally close up shop for the evening.
Looking back, if I had to rank all of Taiwan’s theme parks I suspect that E-DA Theme Park would probably appear somewhere near the bottom of the list. Missing out on Big Air was obviously the biggest disappointment. Yet I can’t not recommend E-DA Theme Park to anyone else planning a coaster or theme park trip to Taiwan. Depending on how you count water coasters, it has both the highest coaster count of any single Taiwanese park, as well as the second-most elaborate themed environments after Leofoo Village. It’s held back by its many faults related to its eccentricities, but those qualities are also what make it worth the long journey to southern Taiwan to check out. It may look Greek, but E-DA Theme Park is perhaps the most uniquely Taiwanese theme park on the island, for all the good and the bad.
I was next off to Taichung City, which would serve as my home base for the next three days as I focused on completing Taiwan’s collection of theme parks.
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