Oct 9 2016
In late 2016, I was having a bit of a rough patch when I decided to enter a competition through Crust Pizza in Australia. You had to describe how you would live life out of the box if you won $10,000. I wrote about my desire to ride every roller coaster in the world, and was blown away when I was one of the winners! It felt like the universe was giving me a break, and encouraging me to go and jump on some crazy rides. I swear I have been loyal, and Crust pizza remains my favourite pizza to this day!
Having just got back from the UK and the Middle East, I didn’t have much leave from work left, nor the desire to go through another long flight in cattle class. The best option seemed to be Japan, which was known for a massive amount of parks. Many of these seemed to spring up after the Second World War. I am unsure if this is because the population needed something to boost morale, or if the Western influence during the Occupation played a role. Either way, I had some hard work ahead trying to narrow down which parks to visit. In the end I decided on seven parks which were all relatively central and easy to get to. I roped my sister Justine in, who had always wanted to visit Japan, yet she was not a fun park enthusiast…this would be interesting!
As we arrived in Tokyo late at night, it really was like stepping in to a different world. Dancing robots, huge amounts of fluorescent lights, massive screens churning out local pop songs, busy trains, and Godzilla staring at us from our hotel window. Most of our hotels were like tiny shoe boxes, but we had such a busy schedule that all we were doing was using them for a short sleep every now and then.
On our first day, Justine and I had an oddly unstructured day of sightseeing. We explored downtown Tokyo, Harajuku, the world’s busiest pedestrian crossing in Shibuya, and a cat café. We were unimpressed by the poor owls being kept awake by lighting whilst chained up to the perches in a little space under the cat café. We agreed to be more selective with our experiences at that point. We loved shopping for ‘Engrish’ clothing however, with hilariously incorrect phrases printed on a range of shirts and bags. Around lunch time the skies opened up and it bucketed down. Thankfully, this was the only day of the whole trip in which we experienced rain.
Late afternoon, I had convinced my sister to take a short trip to the nearby Tokyo Dome City, home of the Thunder Dolphin roller coaster. This was a ‘pay as you go’ park which suited us perfectly, as I was only interested in one ride! The park was quite carnival-esque except for the massive hyper coaster in the middle. With no build up, we went straight to the fast pass machine, paid a little extra to skip the queue, and locked ourselves in to Thunder Dolphin. Poor Justine didn’t even have time to get nervous, yet this was her first ever ‘proper grown up coaster.’ Two sweaty palms and a lot of screaming later, we were both laughing and went to line up again. Good job sis! I hoped that I hadn’t pushed her too hard to soon with such an impressive first ride, having made that same mistake with buddies before. Thunder Dolphin was a pretty cool set up in the middle of a high density city – very different to the massive parks which are normally in the middle of nowhere so as not to piss off their noise-sensitive neighbours!
Tokyo Dome City was a fun little area made even better thanks to Halloween, which was a much bigger event in Japan compared to Australia. There were some brilliant costumes around, and I was really looking forward to some haunted house experiences at the parks along the way. With a teeny tiny little taster, I couldn’t wait to get my sister on some truly epic rides! I thought she did a pretty great job for her first ride photo. It was just a shame that in Japan, despite being surrounded by incredible technology, there were no digital ride photos available so the print out quality was really poor.
Roller Coaster Ramble 