A very swift airport transfer and we arrive in Hue. The former capital of Vietnam.
Room with a view.
Wishing for something completely different, we located Hue Abandoned Water Park. It sounded interesting on-line but wasn’t quite the secret it was made out to be.
Once a bustling aquatic playground, nestled amidst the pine hills of Hue, this water park spans an area of 50 hectares.
Thanks to a 3.24 million USD investment by Hue Tourism Company, Thuy Tien Park had a luxury restaurant area, aquarium, lake yacht, water park system and majestic water music stage with a capacity of 2,500 seats.
Thuy Tien Park was officially opened to welcome guests in 2004, even though it was not fully completed at that time.
It wasn’t long before it was deemed unsuitable, inefficient and eventually forced to close. The Lake’s tourist site has been an abandoned park for a considerable period of time despite changing ownership.
As we arrived at the entrance there was no one there and despite the No Entry signs we went in.
The Main entrance to the Water Park.
The guards were apparently open to bribes for entry if they are in a good mood, but that was not the case for us. The guard actually came and found us, not to throw us out, but to tell us we were going in the wrong direction. He showed us the correct route and told us who we pay our 10,000 Dong entry fee to. There was even a little makeshift stall selling drinks - All the hype about it being secret and forgotten and lost is all a bit of nonsense.
The lake has some sculptures dotted around that are slowly disintegrating.
The cows are real.
The giant dragon sculpture was once a highlight at Hue Water Park. It still looks pretty impressive.
You can walk through the dragon, climb through his ribcage and go out into his mouth.
The remnants of the murals are quite dark and surreal images.
At the base of the dragon, entwined and overgrown with trees, are the remnants of the the aquariums Now smashed up and graffitied upon it’s still possible to imagine how it would have originally looked. The tanks used to contain a number of crocodiles at one point.
A rusty sign shows you the way to the the waterslides. They are still pretty intact but the water is green and stagnant. The buildings are collapsing and the changing rooms are covered in graffiti.
It looks quite attractive, but I dread to think what must be living in this algae water.
Water slide changing rooms.
All three slides meander through the trees down to the stagnant pool below.
Over the other side of the lake, opposite the dragon is the stadium for the stage and musical fountain, it is pretty monumental.
The entrance to the stadium is worn and covered with grass. The seats are disintegrating bit by bit, but it was worth climbing up to the top to see the stage and water fountain.
We grabbed a drink and noticed a plethora of buildings and coffee shops outside the complex, I wondered if they had set up around the time of the waterpark to piggyback on its success.
By the time we left quite a few people had turned up to the secret water park.
The whole experience of exploring Ho Thuy Tien had not been quite what I had expected. It was different but not quite as covert and a bit underwhelming. The days of its secret location being passed around on bits of paper are long gone. Judging by the amount of detritus and graffiti there youngsters now use it as their hangout.