Photo TR: Divv's Dutch Adventure

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WALIBI WORLD (Below)

DUTCH FAIR

EFTELING

 

On Halloween weekend this year I was fortunate enough to be able to go and visit my good friend AJ in Holland. I guess that's just another of the many unexpected perks of doing TPR trips - having friends all over the world you can visit and visit parks with!

 

I was intrigued to visit Walibi World at this time of year because this is when the park runs their "Halloween Fright Nights" event. It's fascinating that Walibi World offers this event seeing as by all accounts Halloween is hardly celebrated in the Netherlands at all.

 

Even for a country that doesn't celebrate Halloween the Dutch really ate up the haunt concept. The park was CRAZY busy. Probably a combination of the Halloween stuff and it being the last operating weekend of the season. Good thing the park offers "RIP passes" which lets you cut the line on the mazes, which of course we did not think twice about purchasing!

 

The park offered three mazes, four scarezones and a bunch of shows for the event. The mazes ran with the US concept of a continuous stream of people walking through rather than the UK way of having small groups of ten go through. The mazes themselves were all good, with the best probably being "Club Roxy" which was basically themed to a night club where lots of evil stuff was going on. The other mazes were "The Villa" which took you through many iconic scenes from horror movies and "Alice in Horrorland" which was a trippy experience which required 3D glasses. Quite appropriate for Holland really!

 

All in all Walibi World put on a great event and I'd love to visit again for Halloween someday.

 

Oh yeah, Goliath was running FANTASTIC. I just love that thing!

Hello Walibi World! Long time no see!

Walibi World have pulled out the pumpkins and blood fountain to make sure you know that it's Halloween!

But first, here’s the main reason to visit Walibi World!

Mmm… Intamin sexiness!

I have to say, Goliath was running absolutely fantastic this visit!

Great to see the ride ops slap hands with riders every single time the train goes out! Not something you'd see in every country.

Goliath was delivering airtime in spades today!

It’s beer o’clock at Walibi World!

I think this Mad House was closed in 2008, or I just somehow missed it on that visit. It was pretty cool, though I am a sucker for pretty much any mad house!

AJ has a four foot long Walibi. True story.

What a fortunate mug combination.

The Willy Lorry is where all the fun goes on.

Robin Hood has gotten a little rougher since my last visit but it’s still pretty good, especially for a Vekoma!

I guess this must be where Batman sleeps during the day.

Don’t worry Scottish Steve, your Stacker crown is safe. AJ failed multiple times.

If you visit Walibi World next year then you might just get to rock out on the Double Decker flavoured Boomerang!

You can’t visit a Walibi park without grabbing one of the amazing waffles!

There’s those weird Vekoma rapids that I’ve only ever seen at Walibi World. It’s a shame you don’t see any more of these!

And it’s a shame you see so many of these! The original and worst.

The line was spilling out onto the midway for El Condor. No thanks! Not even without a line!

Time to check out Walibi’s Halloween Fright Nights stuff! I was very interested to see Walibi’s take on a Halloween event since the Halloween holiday is pretty much non-existent in the Netherlands.

When this show mentioned putting snakes in this box never in a million years did I expect them to be live snakes!

But true enough, this guy sat with live snakes moving around his face for about ten minutes!

The park offers quite a wide range of different mazes, shows and scarezones for the event.

The map gives you an idea of how much the Halloween event really takes over the park!

The hockey dude is probably doing a lot of people a favour right now!

Not wanting to wait in any horrendous lines, AJ and I purchased the RIP passes to skip the lines at the mazes. We also got a special impromptu RIP meet and greet with Beetlejuice!

Just when you think the maze is over and you leave Club Roxy is right when the freaky chainsaw dude attacks!

As this board shows the park was CRAZY BUSY this weekend!

Good thing we get to skip the lines at all the mazes! The Villa was a cool maze that went through lots of scenes from various horror movies.

I dug my own grave and you can too! Just visit digmyowngrave.com right now! You’ll be dying to try it!

Sexy scary dancers should be at all Halloween events in my view!

Beatleben, she says hi.

Not even AJ could tell me what Camazotz means. Turns out it means more slutty vampires and zombies singing Lady Gaga and Britney songs!

See that huge line behind AJ? No way we’re waiting in that!

We just waltzed right past the two hour line thatnks to the RIP pass!

Alice in Horrorland was my first 3D maze. A bit gimmicky but it did look cool and worked quite well for the theme.

AJ prefers his fairy tale hotties dead and evil.

Halloween Fright Nights at Walibi World was a fun event. There were some really crazy crowds so everything had crazy lines at night so the RIP passes made a massive difference.

 

The event felt like a bit of a cross between Halloween Horror Nights and Thorpe’s Fright Nights. Obviosuly it’s not on the same scale as HHN but it felt like that’s where a lot of the inspiration came from. And at least Walibi know how to do a scarezone, unlike Thorpe Park! I’d certainly visit the park at Halloween again!

So Walibi World brought my 2010 Halloween season to a close. It was cool to see all the Dutch people get right into it even though Halloween hardly exists in Holland.

 

Walibi World put on a good event and it felt like they could possibly expand it even more. I’m excited to watch this event evolve. Thanks for reading!

Edited November 7, 2010 by Divv3k

That's cool that they do Halloween events over there! Excuse my ignorance, I thought it was mostly a North American/Irish thing that had been picked up as a novelty in Japan. Is it, by any chance, a leftover tradition from the old Six Flags Holland days?

Halloween events in Europe were practically non-existent a decade ago, but many parks have added Halloween events over the past few years.

Edited November 1, 2010 by larrygator

^^ Halloween is pretty popular in most western countries. Although in europe it's a more "traditional" interpretation. Most places do this kind of thing but that said I wouldn't be surprised if Walibi's event was highly influenced by the Six Flags days.

 

Dave

^You are right, the event was started by Six Flags. But now they are working together with Universal.

It was great posing with my RIP ticket in front of those lines.

People were really nice, and understanding with us cutting the line. (nope)

I was there last saturday and park was indeed packed. It was far worse than last year.

 

But for some reason we hardly had to wait at the first two mazes. Alice 15 minutes and Roxy 20 minutes. We arrived at the Villa at 20:00 and that line was about an hour.

 

So the park was packed but it still was doable without a RIP pass.

 

 

----Hans

Guess i'd better try and plan a visit to this next year..

Looks like you guys had a lot of fun

I went this a year ago and had a lot of fun. Makes me quite tempted to go back and try it again in a couple of years time!

I'm hoping Walibi will also pick up Q-Bots or fasttrack passes or something. I think they could make some money of of that, and it seems like most rides allow for slight modification of the queue.

 

Got an e-mail from Walibi today to fill out a survey about Fright Nights. They were asking what I would pay if they'd only open from 6PM till 10PM instead of the whole day, so maybe they're planning something like that. Either way, I've entered a lot of comments regarding the type of people they allow in the park, the level of aggression I was feeling here and there (cutting the queue with my RIP pass (people actually starting to get angry because of that) instead of being able to just walk to a RIP entrance).

 

Also, I've only seen like 4 or 5 guards that day. And we actually seen someone getting very aggressive towards one of the scare actors, the guy said "don't scare my girlfriend, what are you thinking" (dude you are at Fright Nights, what do you think would happen?) and started to push the chainsaw carrying clown. The Walibi guy that was there (not security) actually did nothing to help the clown out.

 

A video was posted about some fight that happened the same day we were there, you can actually see one of the Walibi employees just walking past, not helping out or calling security:

http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/1183861/89bcae6e/walibi_presenteert_mixed_martial_bitchfights.html

 

I had a great day none the less. I just hope they can do something about the type of crowds they let in (probably not, maybe dresscode? Yeah right..), or perhaps get some more security out there (this should help).

On our way back from Walibi World we took a quick detour via the fair in Dam Square!

After we got back from Walibi World we found this small fair right in the centre of Amsterdam at Dam Square!

This small fair had a portable version of those crazy Star Flyers!

Some Skeeball too! Why don’t we have this in the UK?

OMG, archery with real bows and arrows! Never in the UK! I love Europe!

That’s one pretty cool looking ghost train!

Creepy AJ can’t wait to check out Spunk – Castle of DOOM!!!

This was most definitely up there in “Jeff Johnson Credit” territiory!

There were some real quality effects in here!

In true European fashion we got finished off with the LIVE Chainsaw dude!

This is me totally freaked out by how nice the Dutch carnies were!

 

Efteling is up next!

I rode Spuk at Hyde Park's Winter Wonderland last year, and will hopefully be riding it at the same venue again, next month. Great ride, definitely a couple of cuts above the average ghost train - did they have a roaming zombie/ghost/wraith person outside Spuk in Dam Square? That definitely added to the experience in Hyde Park - and that scary knight-looking barker animatronic is awesome.

 

Great TR, by the way!

EFTELING!

 

On the second day of my Dutch excursion we headed to Efteling. Unfortunately I wasn't lucky enough to partake in the Club TPR fun at Efteling this summer but with a new GCI dueling coaster opening I knew I had to get to the park this year.

 

I really liked Joris en Draak! Granted, I'm quite a big GCI fan but even I've been getting a little bit bored with how samey a lot of them are. The good thing about Joris is that it's quite different from the others, especially the first drop and starting section. Also with it being a dueling coaster there are loads of interaction points with the other train. I can only imagine how much fun this must have been when TPR had ERT on it in the summer! I don't think anyone can argue that this was a great replacement for Pegasus!

 

The rest of Efteling was looking as nice as ever especially with Autumn taking over a lot of the trees. The park was pretty busy but we got rides on everything we wanted to. (All the dark rides and the coasters which don't try to kill you).

 

The new section which is under construction looks very nice from what you can see from the park. Pretty much what you'd expect from Efteling. I know I'll be back when they open Pandora's Box or whatever it is in there!

 

I'll let the photos tell the rest of the story...

Hello Efteling! My my, that’s one big sexy entrance you have!

Speaking of sexy… Check out that hot new GCI goodness!

Any ride which features a hubungous, crazy, water-farting dragon is good with me!

A winning train! (aka fatties)

Joris is just a mess of fun crossovers and little pops of airtime.

Hey Gwazi! This is what a fun duelling GCI looks like!

Overall I thought Joris is a fantastic addition to Efteling! Just great fun from start to finish and with the modified seating a lot of families can enjoy this ride together.

Over to the other big ride at Efteling – it’s beer o’clock at the Flying Dutchman!

Just looking at this photo means I can’t get that song from the queue out my head!

There was a little change to ride in this tower since my last visit. Overall I still really like the ride.

The coaster section isn’t anything special but the water splash doesn’t get you wet which gets the thumbs up from me in October!

I’m still recovering from my last ride on this in 2008 so we passed on Python today.

There's no way I can visit Efteling without checking out La Via Volta!

It’s a nice Mad House but it’s the fantastic soundtrack that makes this ride so amazing!

Keep watching the creepy eyes on these things – they move! (Not in the photo though)

The new area looks pretty interesting. Looks like Efteling is pulling a big trick out their for this addition!

Dream Flight! Some hate it, others think it’s the most amazing thing ever.

I think it’s pretty cool. Though I am a big fan of pixies, fairies and elves.

That’s one pissed off looking bird. I guess I would be too if thousands of people walked between my legs every day.

Wow, that’s quite a line for Vogel Rok. Thankfully the good capapcity means that this lined whizzed by. I got to hear the soundtrack on the ride this time too (for some reason I got a soundless ride in 2008) it definitely improves the ride!

If you’re having wind issues then you should check out Efteling’s rapids.

I’m always a bit tentative about riding rapids in October but Efteling’s seem to be in Thorpe Park’s category of getting you “moist like a jam sponge cake”.

For some reason I had no recollection of riding “Pirates of the Arabian” in 2008 even though I have photographic proof that I did ride it. It’s a pretty cool ride.

Tiger hunt!

How the hell do I not remember this?! It's totally my kind of ride!

Only in Holland would you exit a ride to find these contraptions in the gift shop!

I missed this Efteling icon in 2008. I’m so pleased I can now say that I’ve had my own up close, shitting donkey encounter!

What better way to finish my Dutch adventure than with the glory-bound amazingness that is Panda-FUDGING-Vision?!

Although this is no ordinary Panda Vision…

This is the best damn Panda Vision in the world! Complete with animatronic giant arse pandas!

Before he leaves, AJ just wants to say “Hope you’re having fun in Singapore Erik!”

Upon leaving the park I found the most amazing new piece of theme park merchandise ever – THE PEENA PUU ACTION FIGURE!!!

And that brings my Dutch Adventure to a close. Efteling is a fun park with some real unique attractions. I can’t wait to check out the new area in a couple of years!

 

Thanks to AJ for his hospitality this weekend and if you’ve made it through this TR then thanks for reading!

Another great TR, Divv!

 

I love how these Halloween events are spreading!

Before he leaves, AJ just wants to say “Hope you’re having fun in Singapore Erik!”

 

Fun and Singapore don't mix... I would rather join your halloween trip to Walibi and Efteling... May be there will be another opportunity to catch up with you / the brit crew. Otherwise we see us at Tokyo next June!