In case anyone missed it, which is highly likely, some rumours popped up a few weeks ago that All Speeds, the Taron clone (ok, near clone before anyone wants to do a “well ackshully”) which has only been open for less that four years, would soon be closing. Ordinarily, I don’t pay much attention to enthusiast rumours, but these were coming from usually well-informed sources, so I decided on a just-in-case visit to Chengdu.
I’d been to Chengdu twice before, but the last visit had been before Chengdu Sunac Land had opened, so the place has been on my “at some point” list but without any real sense of urgency. Last weekend fell in the middle of Chinese Golden Week, a peak holiday period, and the rumours were that the coaster would be open during that holiday and would then be closed.
So yeah, cue a Friday evening flight to Chengdu after work. Annoyingly, they’ve built a new airport since my last visit – one of those new ultra-massive affairs – which is much further away from the city centre than the older one, so it was close to midnight by the time I got to the hotel.
Anyway, I got a Didi to the park the next morning, which took close to an hour and a half. Yeah, this isn’t really a “Chengdu” park in that respect. There’s a high-speed train station not too far away, but that would’ve involved a metro ride to the station in Chengdu, transferring to the high-speed train, then a taxi at the other end anyway. Not difficult, but layers of faff that I couldn’t be bothered with when a taxi for that large distance only cost about 12 quid anyway. There was also some light rain, which wasn’t ideal. I got to the park around half an hour after opening.
As with many other Sunac and former Wanda properties, the park is part of a bigger complex, this one including a shopping mall, indoor water park and huge indoor ski slope. First impressions were pretty good; there’s a nice entrance plaza and well themed shops/restaurants just inside.
And here’s literally the only reason for taking this trip, which is quite ridiculous really. It was due to open at 11am – it was about a quarter to at this point – but there was also a bonus sign out front as well.
Very worrying, but it was early in the day and it was, in fact, slightly raining, so at least it wasn’t a 100% cop out sign at that point. Onto a nearby ride then, a flying theatre. I must’ve just missed a batch going through since I was very near the front of the queue and ended up waiting quite a while. Operations on this, as they always are on these things in China, were slow as all s**t – it was more than half an hour later by the time I got out of it despite being at the front of the queue – but luckily this wasn’t too indicative of the rest of the park. It was fine. The screen quality was mostly really good at least.
And it was back to check on All Speeds. The rain had stopped, but it was still very wet, so I wasn’t hopeful. It had opened though. Thank f**k for that. There was a one-train wait, and not too much faff with loading/unloading (way better than Happy Valley or Fantawild parks), so the single train was going out every 4 minutes or so.
I got back row, went for an immediate reride and got the back row again, and I enjoyed it, but it didn’t hit the same as Taron for me. I’d loved Taron, and back then I think I’d called it one of the best coasters in Europe, so I’m not sure what it was with this version. Later in the day it was MUCH better, but still not quite up to the same level. I’ve seen it referred to as “Temu Taron”, which really isn’t fair at all. Sure, the theming on Taron is better, but All Speeds is still very well-themed and is much better than anything in the vast majority of European and, especially, American parks. There are some annoying fencing choices that ruin some otherwise decent photo ops though. Photo dump:
There’s other stuff here though, so after a few rides on All Speeds, it was time to take a look around. The glass water slide thing was an upcharge, so no. The kiddy coaster was “closed for weather”. Liars. There was a 3D cinema in the “tree” building, and the other huge building was also a theatre, but was closed, seemingly permanently based on a complete lack of information on the timings board out front.
There was another coaster to be had, but I did the Ferris wheel first on the way there. It was huge - a sign out front had it as just over 100m - and there was no queue at all. There were excellent views over the park, but with All Speeds being at the other end not really much chance of decent photos of that.
The mine train coaster had a two-train wait and was on one train, but there was no faff, other than staff generally being in no rush, when it came to loading/unloading. A lot of Chinese parks hold people away from the air gates (or even completely outside the station) while the train is out, but here they let people in. I assumed it was a Jinma coaster, but RCDB has no manufacturer listed, which I only realised after that fact otherwise I’d have tried to find out. Anyway, it was THE smoothest of these I’ve ever done.
Directly opposite is Nirvana Pilgrimage, which from noticing the huge show building from the Ferris wheel I figured must be a pretty major dark ride. The closest comparison would be something like that King Kong ride at Islands of Adventure. Large vehicles move though sets and screens and there’s an immersive tunnel type section. It was decent enough.
I’d been pretty sure the kiddy coaster was closed for the day, but the fairly long trek back over there proved to be worth it. At least it was a bit more substantial than other coasters in China labelled as “Fruit Worm”.
A show was about to start in their large outdoor theatre. This was quite prominently featured in and around the park, so is clearly supposed to be a highlight. It was full as well, which is great, but that’s because 99% of the park guests had headed into it.
I can’t tell you if it was any good or not since I decided I couldn’t be arsed. It was the usual fannying around getting audience members up to the front to do stupid dances for a good 10 minutes, so I decided to just head back to All Speeds, which was literally directly opposite and had no people. I heard lots of loud explosions later though, and some of these large shows in China are pretty epic, so who knows. By this stage, they were waiting to fill the train on All Speeds between dispatches, so it was actually quicker when there had been a bit of a queue. It meant a couple of front row rides at least (back row is always easy to get since people in China tend to fill up from the front, but that means front row isn’t so easy).
I ended up leaving by around 3pm, and people were still trickling into the park (it was open until 9pm). I’ve seen pictures of All Speeds looking really impressive at night, but I really didn’t need/want to hang around any longer. I’ve got so used to hitting these quiet parks at opening, even though a lot of them stay open late these days, that I just never see them at night.
The park then. It’s all a bit sad really. It’s a decent product with an excellent headline coaster, but it was pretty dead. As I said earlier, this was the weekend of a public holiday week, what should be a peak period, and there just weren’t many people around at all. Despite it being quite far outside Chengdu itself, it’s close to another city, Dujiangyan, which is itself a bit of a tourist hub due to its proximity to historical and nature stuff, so by building here, they were clearly banking on getting some of that, but I guess people just aren’t coming to that area for a theme park.
Since the holiday week, the park has been closed. Trip.com, the app I used to book the ticket, has “contact the venue for operating hours” under their opening hours, and they are always very accurate and up to date with stuff like that. That’s not to say that the park itself is permanently closed, but it seems that they’re only going to open it at busier times; it had been closed immediately prior to the holiday as well, I think. So where does that leave All Speeds? RCDB now has it listed as SBNO, and the rumours were that, after this holiday, it would be closed permanently even though the park would not be. Unless they remove it, they’re going to be left with a pretty obvious white elephant since it’s right in the middle of the park.
There was a +1 park around a ten-minute taxi ride away, so I headed there. Even though there was only one coaster, looking at Google Maps showed it to be a decent-sized park.
Fruit Man Theme World
Despite (or maybe because of) its location close to Sunac, as well as having a tram stop right outside it, I arrived to find this:
Whomp whomp. I think it’s safe to say it’s closed for good seeing that this was a Saturday in the middle of one of the biggest holiday periods of the year.
It was a going to be another long taxi ride back into the city centre, and it was still early, so I decided on another couple of crappy +1s which were roughly on the way back.
Le Shui Park
This looked to be a small park with an old crappy coaster, but has very recently been redone as a small water park.
I thought I might be in the wrong place, so had a wander around the area. This was worth doing since it was all quite nice, but as I got further away I became 99% sure I’d been at the right spot in the first place and, getting as much of a look into the park as I could without paying to get in, that the coaster had gone.
There was a kiddy cred listed in a shopping plaza next to Happy Valley. These are becoming increasingly common now - a few kiddy rides set up outside shopping malls – but whatever had been there was gone.
I think listing these on RCDB is probably the right thing to do, but they’re very much small, transportable coasters – often a fruit worm or, more recently, a “chicken coop” coaster – so I think they’re going to be tricky to really keep track of. I’d guess that the one that was here is currently sitting outside another Chengdu mall.
I took the metro from there back to the hotel, passing the Happy Valley entrance on the way. I was almost tempted to pop in for a Mega-Lite and Dive Machine fix but figured if any park was going to be busy on a holiday weekend, it would be that one.
My flight the next day was at around 3pm, and I’d originally planned to just have a lazy morning and a late check-out from the hotel, but decided on a park revisit to pick up a couple of +1s since it was pretty much on the way to the airport anyway.
Nanhu Dreamland
I’d been here before on my first visit to Chengdu, which I think was in 2014. There had been four coasters back then, but three of those have been removed since and two others added. I’m almost certain that last time it had been a pay-one-price thing, but now it’s free to enter and pay-per-ride, which was great for what I wanted. Individually, the rides were a bit more expensive than a lot of these places, but they were also selling packages with craploads of ride tokens, so I’m guessing they wanted to push people towards buying those. Anyway…
This was the only existing coaster from my first visit. I couldn’t remember it at all, so I rode it just in case it later turned out to be a replacement. Looking now at photos from my first visit, I think it’s safe to see it’s the same one with a repaint.
One of the older coasters used to sit here. It was one of those rather questionable creds that was more of a splash boat ride but had a downhill/uphill section before the drop. Anyway, it’s been replaced with a generic Chinese flume ride.
Not a huge amount was looking too familiar – they seem to have filled in a lot of green space with tat since last time – but I remembered this tilting drop tower thing. The cars are now being used as benches.
There was a jungle mouse here before, and I think it was in the same spot. It’s not really a like-for-like replacement since these newer ones have a different track design, layout etc. +1.
Their old suspended coaster has been repurposed which was quite cool since assumed it would’ve just been removed. Jinma only ever sold a handful of these that we know of and only one is still listed as operational, but that’s in Iran, so who really knows.
And then the other cred that I needed here:
And that’s that. Mission accomplished in terms of riding All Speeds right before it was (possibly/probably) closed for good, but it was quite an excessive/expensive thing to do considering a two-and-a-half-hour flight and a hotel for two nights. Stupid hobby.
I’d been to Chengdu twice before, but the last visit had been before Chengdu Sunac Land had opened, so the place has been on my “at some point” list but without any real sense of urgency. Last weekend fell in the middle of Chinese Golden Week, a peak holiday period, and the rumours were that the coaster would be open during that holiday and would then be closed.
So yeah, cue a Friday evening flight to Chengdu after work. Annoyingly, they’ve built a new airport since my last visit – one of those new ultra-massive affairs – which is much further away from the city centre than the older one, so it was close to midnight by the time I got to the hotel.
Anyway, I got a Didi to the park the next morning, which took close to an hour and a half. Yeah, this isn’t really a “Chengdu” park in that respect. There’s a high-speed train station not too far away, but that would’ve involved a metro ride to the station in Chengdu, transferring to the high-speed train, then a taxi at the other end anyway. Not difficult, but layers of faff that I couldn’t be bothered with when a taxi for that large distance only cost about 12 quid anyway. There was also some light rain, which wasn’t ideal. I got to the park around half an hour after opening.
As with many other Sunac and former Wanda properties, the park is part of a bigger complex, this one including a shopping mall, indoor water park and huge indoor ski slope. First impressions were pretty good; there’s a nice entrance plaza and well themed shops/restaurants just inside.
And here’s literally the only reason for taking this trip, which is quite ridiculous really. It was due to open at 11am – it was about a quarter to at this point – but there was also a bonus sign out front as well.
Very worrying, but it was early in the day and it was, in fact, slightly raining, so at least it wasn’t a 100% cop out sign at that point. Onto a nearby ride then, a flying theatre. I must’ve just missed a batch going through since I was very near the front of the queue and ended up waiting quite a while. Operations on this, as they always are on these things in China, were slow as all s**t – it was more than half an hour later by the time I got out of it despite being at the front of the queue – but luckily this wasn’t too indicative of the rest of the park. It was fine. The screen quality was mostly really good at least.
And it was back to check on All Speeds. The rain had stopped, but it was still very wet, so I wasn’t hopeful. It had opened though. Thank f**k for that. There was a one-train wait, and not too much faff with loading/unloading (way better than Happy Valley or Fantawild parks), so the single train was going out every 4 minutes or so.
I got back row, went for an immediate reride and got the back row again, and I enjoyed it, but it didn’t hit the same as Taron for me. I’d loved Taron, and back then I think I’d called it one of the best coasters in Europe, so I’m not sure what it was with this version. Later in the day it was MUCH better, but still not quite up to the same level. I’ve seen it referred to as “Temu Taron”, which really isn’t fair at all. Sure, the theming on Taron is better, but All Speeds is still very well-themed and is much better than anything in the vast majority of European and, especially, American parks. There are some annoying fencing choices that ruin some otherwise decent photo ops though. Photo dump:
There’s other stuff here though, so after a few rides on All Speeds, it was time to take a look around. The glass water slide thing was an upcharge, so no. The kiddy coaster was “closed for weather”. Liars. There was a 3D cinema in the “tree” building, and the other huge building was also a theatre, but was closed, seemingly permanently based on a complete lack of information on the timings board out front.
There was another coaster to be had, but I did the Ferris wheel first on the way there. It was huge - a sign out front had it as just over 100m - and there was no queue at all. There were excellent views over the park, but with All Speeds being at the other end not really much chance of decent photos of that.
The mine train coaster had a two-train wait and was on one train, but there was no faff, other than staff generally being in no rush, when it came to loading/unloading. A lot of Chinese parks hold people away from the air gates (or even completely outside the station) while the train is out, but here they let people in. I assumed it was a Jinma coaster, but RCDB has no manufacturer listed, which I only realised after that fact otherwise I’d have tried to find out. Anyway, it was THE smoothest of these I’ve ever done.
Directly opposite is Nirvana Pilgrimage, which from noticing the huge show building from the Ferris wheel I figured must be a pretty major dark ride. The closest comparison would be something like that King Kong ride at Islands of Adventure. Large vehicles move though sets and screens and there’s an immersive tunnel type section. It was decent enough.
I’d been pretty sure the kiddy coaster was closed for the day, but the fairly long trek back over there proved to be worth it. At least it was a bit more substantial than other coasters in China labelled as “Fruit Worm”.
A show was about to start in their large outdoor theatre. This was quite prominently featured in and around the park, so is clearly supposed to be a highlight. It was full as well, which is great, but that’s because 99% of the park guests had headed into it.
I can’t tell you if it was any good or not since I decided I couldn’t be arsed. It was the usual fannying around getting audience members up to the front to do stupid dances for a good 10 minutes, so I decided to just head back to All Speeds, which was literally directly opposite and had no people. I heard lots of loud explosions later though, and some of these large shows in China are pretty epic, so who knows. By this stage, they were waiting to fill the train on All Speeds between dispatches, so it was actually quicker when there had been a bit of a queue. It meant a couple of front row rides at least (back row is always easy to get since people in China tend to fill up from the front, but that means front row isn’t so easy).
I ended up leaving by around 3pm, and people were still trickling into the park (it was open until 9pm). I’ve seen pictures of All Speeds looking really impressive at night, but I really didn’t need/want to hang around any longer. I’ve got so used to hitting these quiet parks at opening, even though a lot of them stay open late these days, that I just never see them at night.
The park then. It’s all a bit sad really. It’s a decent product with an excellent headline coaster, but it was pretty dead. As I said earlier, this was the weekend of a public holiday week, what should be a peak period, and there just weren’t many people around at all. Despite it being quite far outside Chengdu itself, it’s close to another city, Dujiangyan, which is itself a bit of a tourist hub due to its proximity to historical and nature stuff, so by building here, they were clearly banking on getting some of that, but I guess people just aren’t coming to that area for a theme park.
Since the holiday week, the park has been closed. Trip.com, the app I used to book the ticket, has “contact the venue for operating hours” under their opening hours, and they are always very accurate and up to date with stuff like that. That’s not to say that the park itself is permanently closed, but it seems that they’re only going to open it at busier times; it had been closed immediately prior to the holiday as well, I think. So where does that leave All Speeds? RCDB now has it listed as SBNO, and the rumours were that, after this holiday, it would be closed permanently even though the park would not be. Unless they remove it, they’re going to be left with a pretty obvious white elephant since it’s right in the middle of the park.
There was a +1 park around a ten-minute taxi ride away, so I headed there. Even though there was only one coaster, looking at Google Maps showed it to be a decent-sized park.
Fruit Man Theme World
Despite (or maybe because of) its location close to Sunac, as well as having a tram stop right outside it, I arrived to find this:
Whomp whomp. I think it’s safe to say it’s closed for good seeing that this was a Saturday in the middle of one of the biggest holiday periods of the year.
It was a going to be another long taxi ride back into the city centre, and it was still early, so I decided on another couple of crappy +1s which were roughly on the way back.
Le Shui Park
This looked to be a small park with an old crappy coaster, but has very recently been redone as a small water park.
I thought I might be in the wrong place, so had a wander around the area. This was worth doing since it was all quite nice, but as I got further away I became 99% sure I’d been at the right spot in the first place and, getting as much of a look into the park as I could without paying to get in, that the coaster had gone.
There was a kiddy cred listed in a shopping plaza next to Happy Valley. These are becoming increasingly common now - a few kiddy rides set up outside shopping malls – but whatever had been there was gone.
I think listing these on RCDB is probably the right thing to do, but they’re very much small, transportable coasters – often a fruit worm or, more recently, a “chicken coop” coaster – so I think they’re going to be tricky to really keep track of. I’d guess that the one that was here is currently sitting outside another Chengdu mall.
I took the metro from there back to the hotel, passing the Happy Valley entrance on the way. I was almost tempted to pop in for a Mega-Lite and Dive Machine fix but figured if any park was going to be busy on a holiday weekend, it would be that one.
My flight the next day was at around 3pm, and I’d originally planned to just have a lazy morning and a late check-out from the hotel, but decided on a park revisit to pick up a couple of +1s since it was pretty much on the way to the airport anyway.
Nanhu Dreamland
I’d been here before on my first visit to Chengdu, which I think was in 2014. There had been four coasters back then, but three of those have been removed since and two others added. I’m almost certain that last time it had been a pay-one-price thing, but now it’s free to enter and pay-per-ride, which was great for what I wanted. Individually, the rides were a bit more expensive than a lot of these places, but they were also selling packages with craploads of ride tokens, so I’m guessing they wanted to push people towards buying those. Anyway…
This was the only existing coaster from my first visit. I couldn’t remember it at all, so I rode it just in case it later turned out to be a replacement. Looking now at photos from my first visit, I think it’s safe to see it’s the same one with a repaint.
One of the older coasters used to sit here. It was one of those rather questionable creds that was more of a splash boat ride but had a downhill/uphill section before the drop. Anyway, it’s been replaced with a generic Chinese flume ride.
Not a huge amount was looking too familiar – they seem to have filled in a lot of green space with tat since last time – but I remembered this tilting drop tower thing. The cars are now being used as benches.
There was a jungle mouse here before, and I think it was in the same spot. It’s not really a like-for-like replacement since these newer ones have a different track design, layout etc. +1.
Their old suspended coaster has been repurposed which was quite cool since assumed it would’ve just been removed. Jinma only ever sold a handful of these that we know of and only one is still listed as operational, but that’s in Iran, so who really knows.
And then the other cred that I needed here:
And that’s that. Mission accomplished in terms of riding All Speeds right before it was (possibly/probably) closed for good, but it was quite an excessive/expensive thing to do considering a two-and-a-half-hour flight and a hotel for two nights. Stupid hobby.
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