We spent spring break in Asia, which means it’s time for a trip report! Join us on part 4 of this adventure, when we spend a full day at Hong Kong Disneyland!
About This Post
A version of post originally appeared in the newsletter. Subscribe to see the latest ASAP. This is part 4 in our report on this trip:
Spring Break in Hong Kong, Beijing, and China Part 1 - Planning and Booking
Spring Break in Hong Kong, Beijing, and China Part 2 - Heading to Hong Kong
Spring Break in Hong Kong, Beijing, and China Part 3 - Afternoon at Hong Kong Disneyland
Spring Break in Hong Kong, Beijing, and China Part 4 - Day at Hong Kong Disneyland (you are here)
Outside the trip report format, we also have:
Over the next…many weeks, I'll be sharing my trip report for our recent trip to Hong Kong (w/ Disneyland), Beijing, and Shanghai (w/ Disneyland). These won't be just two entries, one about each of the parks we visited. Rather, they'll be extensive and cover from booking the trip to getting home, including plenty of non-Disney content (for more recent non-Disney stuff, visit Emjoyable Explores).
This post covers our full day at Hong Kong Disneyland. It is not, however, a one-day strategy post. That’s covered in the above-linked one-day itinerary post.
Our Day at Hong Kong Disneyland
We all managed to get a decent night of sleep, though the jet lag had us all up for a bit in the middle of the night. I have my alarm set for 5:30AM in any case, so I sort of like when jet lag has me naturally up a bit before that.
With the park not opening until 10AM this Friday morning, Emily and I both had time to run in the hotel’s fitness center before breakfast. The treadmills offered a nice view of the indoor pool:
I took a quick walk around the outside of the hotel to grab some pictures. The hotel had baskets of insect repellant, but I didn’t note any mosquitoes while I was walking around. (Spoiler Alert: Repellant probably wasn't for mosquitoes...)
Zoe did some reading and watching TV (old Mickey Mouse cartoons) while I showered and Emily ran and showered. Then we headed down to Enchanted Garden Restaurant. There was a pretty long line at the restaurant at 8:30AM, and we didn’t have a reservation. We also didn’t really have a backup plan (there is another, fancier restaurant, Walt’s Café, though), but we figured/hoped that this would be a pretty standard family resort buffet where they’d be churning guests and find us a table no problem.
Turns out we were right, and we were seated at 8:44AM. To our surprise and delight this was even a character meal, with Chef Mickey visiting tables.
I have some travel quirks, and one is that hotel breakfasts are my love language. If I had to guess, it’s an outgrowth of the fact that as vegetarian international travelers with a child, the only time we can be sure our child will get a good meal is at a hotel breakfast.
But it’s definitely a vibe for me individually now, too. I love cheese plates in Europe, ful in the Middle East, and, most of all, plastic-wrapped sugar-coated waffles in the Holiday Inn nearest every U.S. National Park.
The buffet breakfasts we had on this trip, including this one, all had similar lineups—a mix of western and various Asian cuisines. We grab a bit of everything—Mickey waffle from the American area, noodles from the Japanese area, curried vegetables from the Indian area, and plenty of fruits, cheese, juice, and coffee.
Mickey came to our table twice, once when Emily was away getting food and then again after she returned, which I appreciated. The Cast Members were very proactive in taking our devices to take photos, and also gave us the Photopass code in case we wanted to purchase a photo.
We paid around US$135 total for breakfast. You can book the hotel with breakfast included, but we were staying two nights and only expected to have breakfast one of those mornings, so we opted just to pay for the individual meal.
Leaving breakfast at 9:24AM, we arrived at the park gates at 9:39AM. There’s a dedicated entrance for hotel guests, which cut maybe a minute off our wait to get inside. Guests without Early Park Entry are held on Main Street, and since Disney hotel guests don't get complimentary Early Park Entry we didn't have it today.
Having checked off the biggest items on our to-do list yesterday, we didn’t feel the need to navigate to the front of the pack this morning. We browsed the stores on Main Street a bit, and at 9:57AM guests without Early Entry were allowed to head into the rest of the park.
We had this full day, plus two partial days on either side—we had no need for perfect strategy today, but we have a one-day Hong Kong Disneyland itinerary post ICYMI.
First on our list was Frozen Ever After. Even with the modern animatronics now at three parks—EPCOT, Disney Adventure World, and Hong Kong Disneyland—this was my first opportunity to see them.
Frozen Ever After is available during Early Park Entry, so it will have a decent wait when the park opens to regular guests. But we had few priorities left, and I like to test sub-optimal strategies sometimes. And, honestly, I like to make Zoe wait in the occasional reasonable line because it’s good for a kid raised on Lightning Lanes to practice patience once in a while.
When we got to Frozen Ever After at 10:03AM, the posted wait was 30 minutes. We boarded just before 10:35AM. The modern animatronics are an improvement on the old technology (which was pretty cool too, TBH).
Exiting Frozen Ever After at 10:45AM, we headed over to Toy Story Land. Three lands—Grizzly Gulch, Mystic Point, and Toy Story Land—typically open 30 minutes later than the rest of the park. This gives you an opportunity for “second rope drop”, but we missed that because of the long wait for Frozen Ever After.
With Zoe not quite tall enough for RC Racer, our big to-do in Toy Story Land was Toy Soldier Parachute Drop. This is an outdoor drop ride that’s a little more intense than Jumpin’ Jellyfish (Disney California Adventure) but well short of, say, Tower of Terror. It’s a fun ride, but my strategy-brain mostly knows it for having low capacity and long waits.
Arriving to a 20-minute wait at 10:50AM, we boarded at 11:11AM. Typically on outdoor drop rides we try and grab a good view. That didn't work out this time, but we all still had fun.
Nearby Slinky Dog Spin was posting a wait of 10 minutes. This was near the bottom of my list (I just don’t think it’s very good), but there’s no need to pass on a 10-minute wait. It wound up being closer to 17, but we were overall still happy to have checked that box.
Wrapping up Toy Story Land, we made our way over to Fantasyland to find some rides with short waits. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was posting 10 minutes and took just about that long, and we had short waits for both Mad Hatter Tea Cups and the carousel.
One of our Disney park traditions is getting a photo of Zoe on the carousel with the castle in the background, and I’ve managed pretty good ones at every castle park we’ve been to.
After the carousel we had about 30 minutes until the parade, time we decided to spend just wandering around Fantasyland and Tomorrowland, popping into some stores. We were happy to see more park-themed merchandise than our last visit years ago, but we noted that guests didn't seem to wear too much park or character merchandise. Instead, bounding and themed accessories were more popular, and many guests were just in non-Disney casual wear. The only matching t-shirts we saw were on westerners. (And twinning, I believe, is still mostly a Tokyo thing.)
The parade for the 20th Anniversary is the Friendtastic! parade. It was a good parade, but ran a bit long for our taste. It’s actually only about 12 minutes as it moves, but there’s about a five-minute pause while the heart of the parade is in the hub that adds to this.
After the parade we went to the 1:45PM showing of Mickey and the Wondrous Book. This is a fun show that’s pretty much a standard Disney jukebox musical, but with a cute Olaf storyline. The show was a mix of Cantonese and English (mostly Cantonese, except the songs). There were subtitles in English on one side of the stage and in Chinese (I believe Traditional, but I’m unsure) on the other.
Zoe asked to get a quick ride on Ant-Man in next. While I was happy to oblige, the ride gods were not with us and the ride broke down pretty much right after we got on it. We wound up getting a recovery pass to use the Premier Access queue later, but it still cost us about 30 minutes of our day. (Emily managed to make use of that time, heading to the Starbucks on Main Street, which had no wait.)
After last night’s speeding through core rides, I’d promised Zoe that we’d take time to walk around and check out anything fun we happened by, so at around 3PM we decided to “take a lap.”
Sorry for the awful food photography, even by my standards
We grabbed a few snacks—some fruit and delicious banana coconut fritters from Wayfinders Table and some caramel popcorn from a cart.
In Grizzly Gulch, Zoe was determined to use these water cannons.
I checked out a small streetmosphere show while Zoe got wet, and then we made our way over to Mystic Point which has this fun visual gag photo spot.
One attraction we hadn’t seen yet was Fairy Tale Forest. This is a fine little walkthrough attraction with miniature sets from Disney stories. Most Disney castle parks have some version of this concept, but I’m not sure what the right approach is. This specific one feels a little anticlimactic, but I sometimes feel like the Storybook Land Canal Boats in Disneyland (California) require a bit much time for a simple tour of miniatures.
In World of Frozen, I went on a quest to spot an easter egg. From this Disney Parks Blog post, I’d learned that the cats from Olaf’s Frozen Adventure can be spotted in Hong Kong Disneyland and Disney Adventure World (Paris). This one of the pair is found behind a window seen from inside Golden Crocus Inn.
In Fantasyland, we happened on one really cool thing I didn’t even know about—this “Dream Makers” bronze statue of Walt and Mickey on a bench, near the carousel.
The statue is inspired by the famous story Walt tells of conceiving of Disneyland while sitting on a bench as his daughters rode the carousel at Griffith Park. I quite like the idea of the parks all having distinct statues (it's a mix of unique and duplicates now), and this one is a particularly thoughtful placement. Maybe it speaks to me so much because of Zoe’s love of carousels.
After nearly 2 hours of walking around, we decided to “get back to work”. Zoe picked Philharmagic, and of course we walked into the queue right after the doors closed. We saw Philharmagic most recently in February at Disney California Adventure, but one of the benefits ("benefits") of a leisurely trip to Hong Kong Disneyland is that I get to say “yes” when my kid requests something absurd, like waiting any amount of time for Philharmagic.
The most important ride we hadn’t ridden yet was Jungle River Cruise, so we headed there next. Jungle River Cruise is basically Jungle Cruise but with an extra, exciting scene. It’s definitely worth fitting into the day.
Jungle River Cruise is offered in three languages—Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. The waits are, allegedly, kept consistent across all three, presumably due to bi- or trilingual speakers. On that note, I have to say honestly that if it’s the Cast Member performance aspect of Jungle Cruise that you love, then you might be disappointed here (assuming you speak only English). I don’t love Jungle Cruise in any case, but it would be a bit much to expect a Cantonese-English bilingual speaker to be able to handle such a…unique…script as Jungle Cruise with “American” delivery.
For dinner, we placed a mobile order for Malai Kofta at Wayfinders' Table while Zoe ran around the Liki Tikis (tiki statues that spray water). This was one of the better meals we had at Hong Kong Disneyland, and right up our alley.
We headed to Tomorrowland around 6:20PM to redeem our recovery passes for Ant-Man, but first happened upon a short wait for Orbitron as it reopened from a closure. This a pretty standard aerial carousel, but there’s a button on the side that makes space noises.
Zoe and I redeemed our recovery passes for a quick ride on Ant-Man before grabbing an additional snack at Starliner Diner. The inside had some cool Marvel art, including this Marvels piece:
If you're only going to be at a faraway Disney park once in your life, try to pop into as many spaces as possible, you'll find some cool stuff.
We had time before the nighttime show and Mystic Manor was posting a 10-minute wait, so we made Zoe give that one another try. It went fine, but ya just can’t make your kids love the things you love.
Wanting to make sure we had a decent spot for the nighttime show, we headed to Main Street around 8:30PM. We wanted to get some shopping/browsing done, too, and we grabbed some ice cream bars to snack on.
The nighttime show Momentous: Party in the Night Sky is a mix of drones, fireworks, and projections. The drone-heavy part lasts about 7 minutes, and a lot of guests left after that. Nothing in the show particularly hit for us, and the 21-minute length felt a bit much.
Of course, we said the same thing about the parade. Hong Kong Disneyland is a locals park, and it’s not surprising that these 20th Anniversary features are a bit more time-consuming than necessary since they need to make locals feel like their visit is really ”worth it.”
Adding to my bias in particular is the fact that we’d exhausted Zoe so much that by halfway through the show I was hip-carrying a sleeping 5-year-old.
Because of the sleeping-child situation, we decided to take the bus back to the hotel. It’s really not a notably shorter walk to the bus versus the hotel, about 5 minutes versus 10 minutes, but we also just wanted to give the bus a try. We wound up boarding at 9:27PM and getting to the hotel at about 9:32PM.