![]() Shawn from the amazing travel website Miles to Memories took a trip to India a few months ago. If you were following along with Shawn's Facebook or Twitter page you'll know that it was quite an epic trip. Since Theme Parks aren't really something that he does on his site he sent us the following report from Wonder La, which is a pretty awesome looking park in Kerala. We are going to split this into two updates as there is a lot to get to. Earlier this year I traveled to Kerala, India as a guest of their tourism department along with 25 other bloggers. After the official two week tour of the state, I had a free day and was able to visit the Wonder La amusement park in Kochi. Since I was visiting as a guest of the state, the park gave me the VIP treatment with front of the line access and my own personal tour guide! It was fantastic. Wonder La was built in 2000 and has 55 rides and attractions equally split between a ride park and a water park. According to the General Manager, they rarely see any tourists and locals make up 99.9% of their clientele. The rides park has five coasters, a number of typical flat rides, two 4-D theaters and a couple of other unique attractions. On the water side, there are several slide towers, two wave pools and even a water disco! I really enjoyed the park since it had a unique style of theming and the staff was excellent. The ride selection is mostly off the shelf, however that didn't bother me at all. My favorite part of my visit was interacting with the locals. Everyone was incredibly friendly to me. Most of the other guests were teenagers who were having a great time. Every time a ride or show would start they would start making weird noises. It sounds unappealing, but it made the experience so much fun! Enjoy the tour! Shawn took some great POV of the Wacky Worm, nothing better than a Wacky Worm POV. Another great video from Shawn, this time of the Hang Glider. That's going to wrap it up for part one of Shawn's Wonder La update. What do you think so far? Pretty impressed with this out of the way park in India? Do you think think a "Women and Children" only Dark Ride would work anywhere else? We'll have part two of Shawn's update later on this week.
3 Comments
Zac
10/7/2014 04:15:29 pm
I imagine the "women and children only" dark ride exists because public groping and sexual harassment is a serious problem in India. In an effort to combat the issue, there are also subway cars for women and children only, for example. It appears to be something of a walk-through dark ride and I can see why women would not feel comfortable partaking in such an attraction with men in a place where "eve teasing" (a colloquial term for the act) is such a prevalent occurrence. Even a seated dark ride could present an uncomfortable and potentially traumatic situation should a woman be seated next to a handsy man she doesn't know.
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Zac
10/7/2014 04:19:26 pm
I should have also noted that it would seem the above is a correct guess with a security guard standing there. Men often try to board female-only metro trains either due to crowding or for the explicit purpose of harassing a woman traveling alone (or at least without men) and my guess is that the park experiences a similar problem with that ride. The guard is almost certainly there to keep the [male] riff-raff out, and not without good reason.
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I agree there are serious issues regarding the safety of women. It is also not culturally appropriate for women and men to be in enclosed dark spaces together, hence the requirement.
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