ZoneWombat (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
zonewombat) wrote2006-10-02 11:38 pm
zonewombat) wrote2006-10-02 11:38 pm
Entry tags:
Tortway Lagoon
A bit ago I alluded to my friend K– hauling my half-naked and unconscious self up out of a pool while berating some Muslim men.
At this point, we all took stock and decided to leave while we still could. And that is how we came to call Sunway Lagoon “Tortway Lagoon.”
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 199-. The first-ever water park on the Isthmus of Kra has just opened: Sunway Lagoon. It’s part amusement park, part water park, and all deathtrap. Our friend S– wanted to go there for his birthday. So we grab the 3 childless couples under the age of 50 from the embassy and head out. The players are me and R, S the Birthday Boy and his wife C, and K and her husband A.
Even though it’s the weekend, and it’s always summer in Malaysia, the park is not packed by US standards. There is some line waiting, but not a lot. We start on the non-waterpark side. It seems to have a Wild West theme, sort of. There’s a flume ride where the boats look like log canoes with extremely non-PC American Indian gondoliers sculpted on the back of each. There’s a shooting gallery that’s kind of Olde West. There’s a “white water rafting” ride that might have been intended to have a Gold Rush theme. And there’s a roller coaster that goes through a volcano. (Say what? Either the Malaysians figured everybody has volcanoes, or someone really did their research and found that volcanoes were a feature of the Old West. The pre-Cambrian Old West.)
S opts to start with the white water ride. This ride involves groups of 6 to 8 sitting in a circular “raft,” really a hard plastic thing with a molded trunk in the center. On the trunk is a ring that everyone, sitting around the edge of the raft, holds on to. Except, after we’d been loaded on board and the ride started, we noticed that our raft had no ring! We’re looking around for some way to secure ourselves when WHUMP! The raft goes off an 18″ drop! Those on the fore side tilt backwards on their benches, while those of us aft are flung forward, into their laps, or in the case of S the Birthday Boy, face-first into the plastic trunk amidships. Ten minutes in and S has a black eye, swollen jaw, and broken tooth. The rest of the ride was uneventful, both in terms of injury and fun. We slowly bobbled along the undecorated concrete canal, and every so often a metal pipe, jutting a foot or two from the canal wall over our heads, would desultorily debouche some warm water onto our heads.
Escaping the excitement of the white water ride, we went looking for a nurse’s station for S’s face. We finally found a park employee, who informed us that the First Aid Station wasn’t open yet, and there was no medical care. Ultimately, S got some ice from a concession and wrapped it in a bandana. We all suggested leaving, but he was adamant we stay.
Next stop, the roller coaster. This ride marked the boundary between the amusement (ha!) park and the water park. The two parks were otherwise separated by height - an 80′ tall cliff supported the amusement park, with the water park at its base. The roller coaster had been built so that for part of the ride the track was right on the edge of this cliff, or a little over it, and, as mentioned, for part of the ride the track went inside a fake volcano and came back out. Not out the top or anything showy like that, and not, as it turned out, doing anything loopy inside the volcano. Just a thing, I guess. This ride was known to the Malaysians, so it had the biggest lines. We got to watch several iterations of the coaster’s departure, and in each case the ride guy could not get the safety bar on the last car to latch. When it came our turn, he naturally wanted to load me and R into that car. We refused point-blank, so he made us wait another turn of the ride. Not really worth the wait - the coaster went straight, into the papier-mache volcano, did a slow lap so we could all see that the inside was unfinished, just chicken wire with the mache oozing through it. Someone had also left a bucket of rags soaked in paint thinner next to an ashtray. My big worry was fire - even without open flame it was well over 100 degrees inside the volcano - but we had no drama.
However, this story has a coda, and a tragic one: A week later, a mother and her son were killed on this ride, being flung from one of the cars out over the cliff and falling 80′ to the concrete below. I get sick just thinking about it, and I know which car it was.
Anyway, on our Park Day no one died, which is about the best I can say for it. After the coaster, we went into the arcade. This was the most crowded part of the park, video arcades being quite the thing in Asia, and it housed the elevators down to the water park. It also housed an animatronic bellowing T. Rex, which made things painfully loud, but might have been thematically related to the volcano. Or the Indians. Who knows.
The water park advertised a food court, which, not so much. It turned out to be a half-assed KFC and a couple greasy noodle places. Lunch was 6 chicken nuggets from KFC (and a side note here: KFC in Malaysia cooks everything in palm oil, and I am virulently allergic to palm oil, so I knew that within an hour of eating lunch my day would be over. I will spare you the details of squat toilets and blood here), not really enough to go on, given the caloric expenditures to come.
Malaysia is a Muslim country, but they didn’t bind Westerners to Islam. In other words, us three white chicks could put on swimsuits and go to the water park. However, we were the only women. But that’s OK, because the three white guys were the only men - only boys in Malaysia go into the water, it being a frivolous pasttime. The parents were all hanging out on the benches and tables near the rides, the women in brightly-colored and head-scarved knots and the men in smoking groups.
Because the park builders knew that only young Asian boys would be going on the rides, they engineered them accordingly. We found this out the hard way on the first ride. It was the toboggan ride, where you sit on a plastic toboggan and are dropped straight down onto a steep slide that dumps you into a pool. Or at least it dumps you into a pool if you are 4′ tall and 70 pounds. If you are closer to 6′ and 200 lbs, like A, you shoot right across the pool, right across the 5′ of astroturf on the other side, and slam smack into the cinderblock wall. At 5′5″ and 150 lbs, the pool exerts just enough drag to grab the toboggan, sending you sliding across the astroturf on your unprotected ass. So that was fun.
Once we’d all hit the wall on that ride, we headed for the speed slides. These were your basic bobsled-style water slides, with water sluicing down them. No raft or tube or toboggan. The guys decided to race each other while we girls waited at the bottom. The water sluicing down the slide started turning red when they were about halfway down, and each of them came out dripping blood: the segments of the slides hadn’t been properly riveted together, so sliding down them was something like sliding down a cheese grater. The guys all said it looked worse than it was due to the water, but only A wanted to go again.
We went and looked at the wave pool, but it was packed. Teenage boy stew. Or steampot, to be Malaysian about it. We turned around and saw the twisty slides. These are the ones you always see at water parks, enclosed tubes that twist and loop around. Looked promising - big pool at the end, no blood dripping out. R and C went first (S was really suffering and getting a serious black eye by this point, and A was still bleeding from all sides), then me and K. At some point halfway down, I did something like an Immelmann…the last thing I remember is landing on my head, feeling my neck pop sideways. When I came to, K had one of my arms over her shoulders and was dragging me through the water towards R, who had leapt in and was running for us. She turned me over to him. I was really confused and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t stand up, but R was fumbling with my swimsuit top. K, meanwhile, had launched herself at a group of 5 Muslim men who were standing by the edge of the pool, pointing at me, laughing, and taking photos. Everything suddenly snapped into focus, and I realized my top had come off. R got me covered up and we got out of the pool as K was threatening to rip the film out of the camera and throw it in the water. Her diatribe about how they should be ashamed of themselves and this was not good Muslim behaviour was beautiful. I was more appreciative of the fact that she’d saved me from drowning.
Even though it’s the weekend, and it’s always summer in Malaysia, the park is not packed by US standards. There is some line waiting, but not a lot. We start on the non-waterpark side. It seems to have a Wild West theme, sort of. There’s a flume ride where the boats look like log canoes with extremely non-PC American Indian gondoliers sculpted on the back of each. There’s a shooting gallery that’s kind of Olde West. There’s a “white water rafting” ride that might have been intended to have a Gold Rush theme. And there’s a roller coaster that goes through a volcano. (Say what? Either the Malaysians figured everybody has volcanoes, or someone really did their research and found that volcanoes were a feature of the Old West. The pre-Cambrian Old West.)
S opts to start with the white water ride. This ride involves groups of 6 to 8 sitting in a circular “raft,” really a hard plastic thing with a molded trunk in the center. On the trunk is a ring that everyone, sitting around the edge of the raft, holds on to. Except, after we’d been loaded on board and the ride started, we noticed that our raft had no ring! We’re looking around for some way to secure ourselves when WHUMP! The raft goes off an 18″ drop! Those on the fore side tilt backwards on their benches, while those of us aft are flung forward, into their laps, or in the case of S the Birthday Boy, face-first into the plastic trunk amidships. Ten minutes in and S has a black eye, swollen jaw, and broken tooth. The rest of the ride was uneventful, both in terms of injury and fun. We slowly bobbled along the undecorated concrete canal, and every so often a metal pipe, jutting a foot or two from the canal wall over our heads, would desultorily debouche some warm water onto our heads.
Escaping the excitement of the white water ride, we went looking for a nurse’s station for S’s face. We finally found a park employee, who informed us that the First Aid Station wasn’t open yet, and there was no medical care. Ultimately, S got some ice from a concession and wrapped it in a bandana. We all suggested leaving, but he was adamant we stay.
Next stop, the roller coaster. This ride marked the boundary between the amusement (ha!) park and the water park. The two parks were otherwise separated by height - an 80′ tall cliff supported the amusement park, with the water park at its base. The roller coaster had been built so that for part of the ride the track was right on the edge of this cliff, or a little over it, and, as mentioned, for part of the ride the track went inside a fake volcano and came back out. Not out the top or anything showy like that, and not, as it turned out, doing anything loopy inside the volcano. Just a thing, I guess. This ride was known to the Malaysians, so it had the biggest lines. We got to watch several iterations of the coaster’s departure, and in each case the ride guy could not get the safety bar on the last car to latch. When it came our turn, he naturally wanted to load me and R into that car. We refused point-blank, so he made us wait another turn of the ride. Not really worth the wait - the coaster went straight, into the papier-mache volcano, did a slow lap so we could all see that the inside was unfinished, just chicken wire with the mache oozing through it. Someone had also left a bucket of rags soaked in paint thinner next to an ashtray. My big worry was fire - even without open flame it was well over 100 degrees inside the volcano - but we had no drama.
However, this story has a coda, and a tragic one: A week later, a mother and her son were killed on this ride, being flung from one of the cars out over the cliff and falling 80′ to the concrete below. I get sick just thinking about it, and I know which car it was.
Anyway, on our Park Day no one died, which is about the best I can say for it. After the coaster, we went into the arcade. This was the most crowded part of the park, video arcades being quite the thing in Asia, and it housed the elevators down to the water park. It also housed an animatronic bellowing T. Rex, which made things painfully loud, but might have been thematically related to the volcano. Or the Indians. Who knows.
The water park advertised a food court, which, not so much. It turned out to be a half-assed KFC and a couple greasy noodle places. Lunch was 6 chicken nuggets from KFC (and a side note here: KFC in Malaysia cooks everything in palm oil, and I am virulently allergic to palm oil, so I knew that within an hour of eating lunch my day would be over. I will spare you the details of squat toilets and blood here), not really enough to go on, given the caloric expenditures to come.
Malaysia is a Muslim country, but they didn’t bind Westerners to Islam. In other words, us three white chicks could put on swimsuits and go to the water park. However, we were the only women. But that’s OK, because the three white guys were the only men - only boys in Malaysia go into the water, it being a frivolous pasttime. The parents were all hanging out on the benches and tables near the rides, the women in brightly-colored and head-scarved knots and the men in smoking groups.
Because the park builders knew that only young Asian boys would be going on the rides, they engineered them accordingly. We found this out the hard way on the first ride. It was the toboggan ride, where you sit on a plastic toboggan and are dropped straight down onto a steep slide that dumps you into a pool. Or at least it dumps you into a pool if you are 4′ tall and 70 pounds. If you are closer to 6′ and 200 lbs, like A, you shoot right across the pool, right across the 5′ of astroturf on the other side, and slam smack into the cinderblock wall. At 5′5″ and 150 lbs, the pool exerts just enough drag to grab the toboggan, sending you sliding across the astroturf on your unprotected ass. So that was fun.
Once we’d all hit the wall on that ride, we headed for the speed slides. These were your basic bobsled-style water slides, with water sluicing down them. No raft or tube or toboggan. The guys decided to race each other while we girls waited at the bottom. The water sluicing down the slide started turning red when they were about halfway down, and each of them came out dripping blood: the segments of the slides hadn’t been properly riveted together, so sliding down them was something like sliding down a cheese grater. The guys all said it looked worse than it was due to the water, but only A wanted to go again.
We went and looked at the wave pool, but it was packed. Teenage boy stew. Or steampot, to be Malaysian about it. We turned around and saw the twisty slides. These are the ones you always see at water parks, enclosed tubes that twist and loop around. Looked promising - big pool at the end, no blood dripping out. R and C went first (S was really suffering and getting a serious black eye by this point, and A was still bleeding from all sides), then me and K. At some point halfway down, I did something like an Immelmann…the last thing I remember is landing on my head, feeling my neck pop sideways. When I came to, K had one of my arms over her shoulders and was dragging me through the water towards R, who had leapt in and was running for us. She turned me over to him. I was really confused and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t stand up, but R was fumbling with my swimsuit top. K, meanwhile, had launched herself at a group of 5 Muslim men who were standing by the edge of the pool, pointing at me, laughing, and taking photos. Everything suddenly snapped into focus, and I realized my top had come off. R got me covered up and we got out of the pool as K was threatening to rip the film out of the camera and throw it in the water. Her diatribe about how they should be ashamed of themselves and this was not good Muslim behaviour was beautiful. I was more appreciative of the fact that she’d saved me from drowning.
At this point, we all took stock and decided to leave while we still could. And that is how we came to call Sunway Lagoon “Tortway Lagoon.”