A trip to Ocean Park

Even after living here for over a year and a half, there are countless interesting places I still haven't seen. In an effort to help us prioritize them, I keep a kind of "Top 10 As-Yet-Unvisited Locations" list and, yesterday, we traveled to the south side of Hong Kong island to scratch off a biggie: Ocean Park.





It is Hong Kong's original theme park, opening in 1977, and aquatic adventures are the focus (as the name implies)...

From an entertainment perspective, Ocean Park is one part zoo (live animal exhibits), one part amusement park (roller coasters and scheduled performances), and one part carnival (test-of-skill kiosks with stuffed animal prizes). Its closest contemporary is probably the SeaWorld chain, though Ocean Park seems to place much more emphasis on marine life conservation, education, and research.

Its only real competitor in Hong Kong is the relatively new Hong Kong Disneyland (which opened in 2005 and is also on my to-do list). HK Disney is actually less than half the size of Ocean Park, though, and Ocean Park firmly remains the more popular of the two.

Ocean Park might be ~7000 miles from all the other theme parks I've been to, but anyone who has visited a theme park knows that they all have one thing in common...

...long lines! It took us about a half hour to buy our tickets and get inside, and this was on a day where the "real feel" temperature was 115༠F, so these customers were dedicated. (I had hoped that the high heat would keep folks away, but this is peak season, so I was delusional. ;>)

Once we were in, though, the lines really weren't all that bad. Most were 10 minutes or less, which is nothing compared to the hour+ waits I seem to remember us enduring at Universal Studios Orlando. The only attractions that seemed to take longer were those that hoisted you high in the air (the cable car, the giant hot air balloon, the sky needle, etc). Of those, we only chose to experience the cable car...

All aboard!

Heading up the mountain (note the iconic seahorse landscaped into its side)

(Don't worry that we voluntarily missed something - we actually bought a come-as-many-times-as-you-want year-long pass for the price of 2.5 adult tickets. We'll make sure to come back multiple times, focusing on different sections of the park that eluded us this time.)

The cable car, I must say, is awesome. It connects the upper and lower portions of the park and skirts along the eastern side of the peninsula that Ocean Park is built upon, affording a fantastic sea view...

Gazing across Deep Water Bay, beyond Middle Island, out to the Pacific Ocean

It also gives you a great look at the lower portion of the park...

The park is undergoing a large expansion and you can see some of that construction

We had a car all to ourselves...

...which was fortunate, because had we been separated, we would have been tempted to break a cardinal rule...

Something must have happened to cause them to post this!

There's one area where the park oddly veers from the watery theme: its giant panda exhibits. We passed through them while the big boys were snoozing, but found one of them to be quite interesting...

Pandas are native to the mountains of Sichuan, which are pretty much the opposite of Hong Kong in terms of climate. The air in the panda environments was kept quite cool, but not cool enough for these fellas - they still needed ice-encrusted boulders to get a good night's rest.

As you can probably imagine, the park held a lot of interesting marine life (especially in the giant aquarium), but I'll share just one friendly face spied in the goldfish exhibit...

Aww! So cute!

Neither of us are very interested in thrill rides, so I'm afraid I don't have any pictures of those to show you. The only one we went on involved large trampolines with bungee harnesses (allowing you to use your own momentum to jump at least 20 feet into the air). Very cool, but since we both did it at the same time, I don't actually have pictures of it. Perhaps I'll get one next time.

A note about the food: there were a number of overpriced restaurants (as one would expect) which mostly seemed to serve standard Chinese dishes. The pathways, however, were lined with snack stands of all sorts. I'd say ice cream and snowcones were the most popular foods, we saw people toting around, but they also served subs, pizza, burgers, and even...

Fried chicken!

I'm not exactly sure why, but the fried chicken really surprised me. I suppose (1) I don't think of it as theme park food and (2) I definitely don't think of it as Chinese theme park food. Still, KFC is very popular in Hong Kong, so it's not like the concept is alien here.

We had a wonderful time at Ocean Park and it will most certainly move off my to-do list and on to my Hong-Kong-favorites list!