As Christmas Day is round the corner, Ximending (西门町) has put up many decorations in every corner. Below are just some of them.
Our plan for today was to have fun in
Leofoo Village Theme Park, which is located at Guansi Tsinchu (新竹关西). According to its website, we can take MRT to JingAn station (景安站) and from there, take E-Go bus directly to the theme park.
Before I proceed to talk about Leofoo theme park, let me digress a bit. Do you know that if you are travelling to Taiwan as a free and easy traveler, you can actually collect some freebies from Taiwan Visitor Association? All you need to produce is one night of confirmed accommodation in Taiwan and your individual air ticket. The freebies vary from month to month. Last month I understand it is a multi USB cable. For us, we were given four EasyCard stored value Taiwan MRT cards (优游卡). There is value in the card, which I think is about TWD50 per card. Other than the cards, there were also many discount vouchers and information about Taiwan. Below is where you collect the freebies in its Singapore office.
MRT station: Raffles Place MRT station;
Building: Chevron House;
Address: 30 Raffles Place, #10-01, Chevron House, Singapore 048622;
Unit: #10-01;
Telephone: 65-6223-6546/7;
Ok now back to my post. After we arrived at JingAn station, we turned left from the exit and saw a long queue for the E-Go bus. A man then approached us as well as a few others in the queue asking if we wanted to take his private van to the theme park. He explained nicely to us saying that if we continue to wait for the bus, it'll probably be an hour before we can even board the bus. Looking at the long queue and one bus that had just departed, I think he's not exaggerating. His charges are slightly more than the bus fares but I think it's reasonable. He charged TWD200 per person and after negotiation he agreed to TWD700 for my whole family. That's about SGD30 for a 45mins ride.
We strongly believe we had made a right choice because we overtook the bus that left the station before us. And here we were, Leofoo Village Theme Park. We quickly went to the ticket counter to purchase the entrance tickets at a discounted rate as we had discount vouchers at part of the freebies collected from Taiwan Visitor Association in Singapore.
Leofoo Village Theme Park includes four theme areas namely Wild West, South Pacific, African Safari and Arabian Kingdom.
First, we went to Arabian Kingdom because we were all attracted by the beautifully constructed Arabian palace. Our first two rides were the Flying Horse and Flying Carpet. The park was not crowded as it's a weekday. It's good because we did not have to queue for most of the rides. In fact, Jerlene and Javier had been "addicted" to the Flying Carpet ride and kept taking it over and over again.
Next we walked over to African Safari and were greeted by the little pony.
We were a bit disappointed that the steam train ride "Nairobi Express" was under maintenance today. So we went over to the "Monkey Trail" ride where we were riding bicycle above ground.
From the above ground bicycle track, we were able to enjoy the daily lives of over 100 monkeys from the above.
You need to cycle at a consistent speed, otherwise the bicycle behind will catch up with you. As Jerlene and Javier are too short to reach the pedal, poor daddy and mommy got to do the hard work. The entire trail was pretty long and we can feel our leg muscle strain after the ride.
We continued to explore the area before heading to South Pacific via Arabian Kingdom.
On our way, we took the "Ali-Ba Ba & The 40 Thieves" merry-go-round. With the two kids around, we can only take those "not so thrill" rides. Anyway, it's a good excuse for me as I'm not sure if my heart can still "tahan" those thrill rides. :-P
Here we took the Sea Serpent and Bird Flight rides.
We then had a short break and it's Ice Cream time. The ice cream biscuit is in a shape of letter "V" or rather a "tick" sign as in Nike logo. I believe we've seen it in Korea, which is very popular there.
By the time we entered the last theme area, Wild West, it was past 3pm. In other words, we left with about 2 hours in the park. Jerlene had enjoyed the dragon junior roller coaster in Legoland and when she heard about a similar ride here, she got excited and pulled me along with her to the ride.
We spent about slightly more than an hour in this area. By the time, the sky started to turned dark.
We quickly took some photos here before going back to Arabian Kingdom for the Flying Carpet ride. Yes again......and I think we took it for 4-5 times continuously because there was no queue.
This year is the 35th anniversary of Leofoo Village. And our trip here ended with a few "trademark" jumps from Jerlene and Javier. :-)
We decided to take the bus back to JingAn station as we were not in a hurry now, unlike this morning. Anyway, most people had already left earlier and there was no queue at the bus stop.
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