Tokyo Disney Seas...

On the second to last day of our holiday, we were in no mood, or condition, to fight the angry mobs of people on the streets of Japan. Instead, we decided we were in a perfect condition to fight the mobs of people at Disneyland. Our second Disney theme park of the holiday. This time around, we decided to visit the second gate of the park, Tokyo Disney Seas.

The Tokyo Disney parks are a weird beast. They are not actually controlled by the Disney Company. They are run by a mob calling themselves the Oriental Land Company. That is not to say I am describing them as an analog of "the mob", but rather "a mob". Get a dictionary, look it up.

Anyway, what this basically means is that they do not have to answer to the Disney shareholders who value profit over everything else, and are therefore able to spend gobs of money on making their parks look the best they possibly can. Impeccably themed, down to the last detail. Perhaps second only to the main Paris gate in terms of sheer otherworldliness.

The first thing you notice about this oceanically themed park is the giant Volcano at it's centre. Much more imposing than the pansy Sleeping Beauty Castles that infect the traditional Disneyland parks, this centrepiece is obviously meant to appeal to the boys. It belches smoke and flame at regular intervals, and both are accompanied by an earth shaking rumble in the surrounding areas. Contained within the caldera of this volcano is one of the rides I was most looking forward to. But it was closed, so I didn't get to see it anyway. The other ride in this area was the roller coaster through the volcano, but regular readers would know my abject fear of roller coasters, and not expect me to have gone on it anyway.

I know, it's almost impossible to be a regular reader of this journal given the nature of the updates.

The ride that I was most looking forward to in the entire park, however, was the Indiana Jones ride. I was excited about there being an Indiana ride in Paris, and horrified to find it was a coaster. This ride, however, was based on the ride in LA, and was, to put it mildly, excellent. It's a standard dark ride, like Haunted Mansion, but accelerated, and much faster. It's also basically randomly generated, in that the path changes at certain points each time you ride. Theoretically, you should only get the same ride once every thousand or so rides. Neat, no? Unfortunately, time was against us, and I only had time to ride this once, so the Oriental Land Company might be having the last laugh, with only one path through.

Against the better judgement of both of us, we decided that the ride queues were too long, and the walking around aimlessly was getting us nowhere, and we decided to take in one of the stage shows. We were not expecting much. After all, we did not speak the language, and through past history had determined that that definitely makes the shows somewhat less entertaining. We lucked out however, as the show we chose was their Jungle Adventures show (themed to match the Indiana Jones Aztec Jungle area the theatre was in), and was a very Cirque du Soleil type show, with lots of excellent music, and acrobatics... and very little speaking at all.

One of the nicest looking areas of the park was the underground children's ride areas. It was lit with UV lighting, so every colour glowed vividly, and it was decorated like the King from the Little Mermaid. Was he meant to be Neptune, I don't know. I never watched it. There's not much for an adult sans kids to do in this area, other than be impressed by the shiny colours.

At this point, we were fast running out of steam and daylight, so we decided that the best thing to do would be just head on home and sleep. I know, it seems like a waste of very limited amounts of time in a new country, but the flight over had really wrecked us. So we took the 90 minute train journey back to Narita. Then we slept. The last day of our trip has been chronicled previously. It involves beef cordial, it's well worth a read.