CHAPTER 9- DISNEYLAND PART 2
Other than this, we went for some other memorable rides as well. The Splash Mountain was a really cool roller-coaster ride through an "artificial" mountain. I put artificial in quotes because it felt so realistic. There was this rather innovative concept of installing cameras at a couple of the most exciting points of the ride, which would photograph your expression as you went past it without inhibitions. The pictures would be displayed on monitors as you exit the ride and you can go up to the counter and buy the photograph for 10 $. Being the unembarrassed uninhibited innovative Indians that we were, we went up to the monitors with our digicams and clicked a photo of the photo. That earned us a few looks, some of amusement and some of disgust, but hey we didn’t give a damn as long as it saved us many a buck. We did this at every ride. :D .
Then, we went to the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride, which was a boat ride, though some pirate villages with realistic characters like Jack Sparrow appearing every now and then.
We then went through the horror house, which was a lot of dark passages of "scary" ghosts and creatures, which was pretty lame. We found it quite kiddish and tried to scare a couple of the ghosts away. :D . The people around us, both young and old, surprisingly seemed pretty scared and excited though.
We then went for the jungle adventure ride, which was a boat ride through a jungle which had animals on the shores. JB met his match on that ride- a girl called Ashley who was the instructor of the ride whose PJs exasperated even JB, the Master of Mokkai (MoM). Then we went to a castle, which was built such that it was shaped like all the wonders of the world. It was a brilliant sight.
But the most majestic sight was the Disney castle, which was draped with decorations of hanging blue and red lights. It was quite a sight to take in.
We then had dinner there and went to the banks of the artificial lake, where a spectacle was awaiting us. That was "FANTASIMIC". Literally. The show is held on the nights of every weekend and that day being a Saturday, we got to witness the spectacle. It is a show where Mickey, as the protagonist, uses his imagination to conjure up objects that he desires. Laser light is beamed on shape changing fountains in the water to give is a feel of the objects. It was so realistic and so majestic. The show lasted a whole twenty minutes. It seems they spend close to 30k $ for that 20 minutes of entertainment each evening. Sheesh…. that’s more than what we would spend in an entire year of graduate study in the US. The wonderful calming music added to the brilliance of the show. To think it was just lights and water being adapted to form such realistic images was mind-blowing. We were so awed by it that it took us a minute to realize we had to tape this on our cams and start clicking. At the end of the show, we swore to come back again for it the next night and witness the spectacle again.
Disneyland is in a way like drug addiction (or how people say it is at least. I’ve no first-hand experience ppl). You want to come back to it every day. Ok bad comparison but hey it is addictive and never leaves you satisfied for sure. It was about 10 pm by the time the show ended.
We had walked at least 5 miles inside the place in those 4 hours and it was only then that we noted the tiredness felt by our legs. We trudged back reluctantly to board the train which would take us back to the car as the exhibits were closing behind us. But we were satisfied by how it had gone till then and couldn’t wait for the next day when we would be coming back to the place.
We drove back to the hotel and went back to our rooms, which is when we noticed that the suite we booked was the kids suite (That was the cheapest deal that we got). Everything, from the beds to the furniture was kid-sized. We felt like a giant dwelling in Liliputian land but then we had been transformed into kids after that night at Disneyland, so we were happy to be treated as kids by the hotel room too. We dived into our beds and didn’t know anything until 8 am the next morning when we woke up, looking ahead to the day.
We woke up and got dressed and stepped out of the house within an hour, which is an amazing achievement by five generally-nocturnal 20 year olds. Such was our enthusiasm to go back to Disneyland. We parked our car there and went into the California adventure park as per our plan. This is an annexure to Disneyland, but meant more for adults as it contained some amazing rides. We went inside and were greeted by the sight of big roller-coasters. We went for a couple of water rides initially, which felt nice in the warm southern Californian sun.
Then went into the Hollywood part of the adventure park, where there was a replica of the intersection of Sunset Blvd and Hollywood Blvd.
Then we went into Monsters 3D, which was a ride which took us through some caves, where Monsters Inc characters kept popping up. The hall of moving doors in that ride was pretty amazing.
Then we went into Muppetvision 4D, which was a show where we were given 3D glasses and we could view Sesame street characters a screen on stage in 3D, thanks to our glasses and say, whenever the characters sprayed water, real water would spray on us too from somewhere, thereby adding the 4th dimension to the show, making it totally realistic. It was the first such 4D show I had gone to in my life, and so I found it really exciting.
Then we went to Hollywood hotel. It was a massively tall building, which gave everyone the creeps. We were taken to an elevator and strapped to chairs there and we could guess what was coming up, but that didn’t prepare us for what lay ahead. The elevator climbed all the way to the top of the 100 odd metre tall building and suddenly stopped there. The door opened for us to see how high up we were. Suddenly, it plummeted down in freefall with every one of us screaming on top of our voice. Then the elevator was caught as it came down and it went up again all the way to the top and plummeted down again. This went on for the next couple of minutes in irregular patterns, which made it an exciting ride.
We climbed out of that gingerly and had some lunch. We noticed a restaurant "Ariel's grotto", which was supposed to be an underwater restaurant, where tables were in the middle of glass-enclosed water chambers from all directions where mermaids keep floating. We didn’t go there as it looked too expensive a place.
After food and some cotton candy (LOL...we were quite a sight with our hands and face all pink in its aftermath), we went to the most adrenaline-pumping rollercoaster ride.
It was a 3 minute rollercoaster, which contained a lot of freefalling, vertical climbing, extreme twists and curves, a couple of 360s and that too back to back. In all it was a really exciting ride as it was a very high speed one too. We were screaming on top of our voices the whole time. We were quite exhausted when we came out. But then, we didn’t feel queasy at all like we would after a ride at Kishkinta or MGM theme parks in India. And it was less of a thrill, because we had faith in its makers that they would’ve done everything possible to ensure it’s a safe ride. Unlike a ride in MGM where you may be wondering if you’re going to fly off the cart due to a loose seat belt or if the track itself would break making the cart crash headlong into the ground. Only after this ride, I realized what a rollercoaster ride was. Exciting, adrenaline-pumping but at the same time does not cause you unease physically and mentally.
We then went out of the California adventure park back into Disneyland. We first went into bug-land, where everything was made to make us feel we were as small as bugs. We looked up to see massive trees and on closer inspection, we found they were actually small plants, with the difference that it looked as huge to us as it would to a bug. It was a really nice concept.
Then we went into the Toy story ride, where while waiting in the queue JB gave up his claim of being the best mokkai (loosely translated in English as PJ cracker) in the world after watching Mr. Potato Head (an artificial character standing outside the ride entertaining people standing in the queue with his PJs) crack a few "jokes". Believe me, they were just of another level. An example- "Say D.... (pause) Say D...(pause) Say D... (pause) Now what do we have here? (pause) 3D. ". This was one of the many PJs he cracked which had people frantically hit their heads with their hands and pray that the queue moved on quicker so that they don’t have to stand this weirdo anymore. It was too much for poor JB to learn that there were two people we encountered in the last couple of days, who were better than him in cracking such jokes, Ashley and Potato head, and he was truly dejected after that :( .
Finally it was dark by the time we were done with all this. We learned that a special Pixar parade was going to take place in sometime where all Pixar characters, would parade on the corridors. We were really excited by this as it contained many of our favorite movie cartoon characters. We sat on the corridor, and witnessed an exciting parade, where characters from Finding Nemo, Toy story, Monsters inc and many more evergreen Pixar films came by and waved at us.
We also witnessed the Disney parade, where Disney characters like Mickey, Goofy, Donald etc walked the ramps.
Then we went to witness the "Fantasmic" show again, as we had planned the previous day. We were again awed by it. I guess one would be awed by it even if one watches it every day, such was the atmosphere. Then we went again to the "Indiana Jones" show, as we thought it was worth another visit.
With our hearts filled with contentment, we went back to the car park and went back to the hotel. On the way back, we stopped at an Indian restaurant that we saw and had food there. Though it was a touch expensive, we felt we deserved it and had good Indian food after months. We hit the hay as soon as we went back to our rooms, as we had another big day ahead of us the next day.
TO BE CONTINUED...
