The Tahitian Terrace at Hong Kong Disneyland

I love Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland. It might even be my favorite attraction at Disneyland. It is the theme, its unique sense of place and comedy. Behind the Tiki Room at Disneyland in the current location of Aladdin's Oasis used to be a wonderful restaurant called the Tahitian Terrace. The Tahitian Terrace was a restaurant with an accompanying dinner show and achieved much the same sense of place as the Tiki Room. IT also had an awesome logo and posters. In one of the Disneyland TV shows that is part of the Walt Disney Treasures set there is a scene featuring the Tahitian Terrace where we see a couple watching a performance by a young scantily clad lady dancing. The man, who is slightly overweight and balding is entranced by both the chicken he is eating and the woman dance, his wife on the other hand who looks like a teacher, wearing thick glasses and a frumpy top is merely staring at her food and looking entirely bored. For some reason this scene helped me fall in love with the Tahitian Terrace. Currently Adventureland in both Disneyland and Walt Disney World are in dire need of more restaurants and so I constantly hope that they will reopen the Tahitian Terrace.

So you can guess I was extremely excited when I saw the Tahitian Terrace on the map in Adventureland at Hong Kong Disneyland. I'm convinced that my pictures of it have been lost as I could only find two, but remember walking around and taking many of the small details.

Here is the main building that comprises the ordering area and kitchen for the Tahitian Terrace. One of the problems with this restaurant is that there is no Tiki room for it too complement. While it is clear Disney thinks that the Tiki Room in its original form is outdated as they have replaced two out of the three in the world with horrible abominations featuring newer characters shoved in, the truth is Hong Kong Disneyland does not have nearly enough attractions so anything would've done it some good. None the less the Tahitian Terrace plays tribute to the Tiki Room in some fun ways.

Anyone who has ridden the Tiki Room in any of its incarnations should recognize this at the Tiki Gods who line the columns of the Tiki Room and chant with their audio animatronic eyes and mouths. Here they are just decoration sprinkled around the exterior. Here you can see the outdoor seating area for the restaurant. I desperately wanted to eat here so that I could experience a version of the Tahitian Terrace but it was closed throughout my stay. 

Sadly these two pictures are the only ones I can find at this time of the Tahitian Terrace, but on the other side of the Tahitian Terrace the shrubs are lined with Birds of Paradise the followers which are referenced in the Enchanted Tiki Room song and appear as singing animatronics in the original line. While the logo for this Tahitian Terrace is similar to the original it has discarded the exact lines of the early sixties and embraced a more rugged styling albeit reminiscent of the original. 

If you'd like to learn more about The original Tahitian Terrace I highly recommend you check out Warner Weis' wonderful site Yesterland. 

Alain Littaye's site Disney and More: The Artwork Collection has some great photos of Hong Kong's Tahitian Terrace about mid-way through the page here in his interview with Imagineer Tom Morris.

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Hopefully I'll be able to dig up more about Hong Kong's Tahitian Terrace in the future

The Jungle Cruise at Hong Kong Disneyland

Every Magic Kingdom style Disney park has had the Jungle Cruise and Hong Kong was no exception. But this Jungle Cruise is completely different from any other for many reasons. This park had no Frontierland when it opened and hence no Rivers of America giving the Jungle Cruise and Adventureland a lot more room. The Jungle Cruise in Hong Kong is formatted much like the Rivers of America a large circular body of water. I was extremely excited about the Jungle Cruise having more room for new gags and animals. I was sorely disappointed, but we'll get there.

This sign got me really excited because one of the Jungle Cruise's classic gags involves an Elephant spraying water and then coming up as if it were going to spray again right when the boat goes by only to scare the passengers. I thought that on this ride there might be some meta joke for imagineers and visitors to different parks that here the elephant would actually spray you. It does not. Also an awesome sign directly above this one which I neglected to take a picture of shows the three lines and the three versions of the Jungle Cruise. Here in Hong Kong the Jungle Cruise is offered in Three Languages: English, Cantonese and Mandarin and hence has three lines. 

Say goodbye to the people at the dock, because you'll never see them again. 

At Hong Kong Disneyland in order to get to the Tarzan Treehouse you have to take a boat similar to the boats to Huck Finn island. We had to wait for this one to pass. 

Now the tricky matter of our skipper. I want to first say a few things. Out skipper whose name I didn't catch speaks english better or at least as well as I will ever speak another language and her superior gave her the job of Jungle Cruise skipper. She absolutely did her best. That being said, she was absolutely terrible. Speaking english as a second language makes it almost impossible to understand why or what makes the word play funny and hence our skipper memorized the content rather than the words. Although the silver lining is that this taught me I knew all of the Jungle Cruise jokes as I leaned over to my father and whispered the jokes in his ear. 

Elephants! 

I thought we were going to get sprayed here, but we remained completely dry.

Here is the temple! Scary and mysterious. More flubbed jokes. Still the same as Walt Disney World's Jungle Cruise

Here we have Ganesh the indian god of beginnings and gateways, I believe that this is slightly different. 

Crocodiles! Aaahh

Apes destroying the camp!! AAHHH! Still nothing funny.

The scene with all the animals. 

The Africans getting the "point." In some versions these adventurers are white. 

I'm gonna take some time to talk about my general feelings about this ride now before we get to the one new scene. I mean the natives have abandon the place so it seems like a good time to talk. Because this Jungle Cruise area was so much larger I expected the experience of the ride to be larger, feature new scenes and new visual tableaux. It has one and we'll get to that next, but everything else is exactly the same. I was disappointed. Not only is the extra size not taken advantage of, it actively hurts the ride. It is not hard to believe you are in a new river in a new part of the world when you cannot see the stretch of river you were just on, but it is nearly impossible when your skipper yells, "now we're on the nile" and you can see the amazon directly behind you. It's ridiculous. While some of you may be thinking, but they still added an extra scene. Sure that's true, but they also took out the scene with the two jokes that never fail to make me laugh. The took out the water fall which is passed through twice thanks to the twists and turns of the jungle cruise. My favorite jokes are: "Here we have Schweitzer Falls named after Mr. Albert Falls" and "Ladies and Gentlemen the backside of water!!!!!" Classic. So essentially they destroyed a lot of what made the Jungle Cruise a semi-believable attraction, really what held it together. Let's hope this last scene is really great. 

Here is the Toad/Monster like face that we are stuck by. Previously the boat has attempted to go around the rock formation, but a huge water jet explodes about five feet in front of the boat. Oh this is what they were talking about when they said you might get wet. No one got wet. Then as we try the corridor between the rocks and the scary monster face another water cannon goes off directly in front of the boat (no one gets wet). After that . . . 

All of this fire is burning simultaneously and the groans are getting louder and louder excited for a serious fireball we get this:

A puffy cloud of smoke, albeit a rather large one. The idea is that the Water gods and the fire gods are fighting and our Jungle Cruise boat is stuck in the middle. While I understand that this situation is ripe for comedy absolutely none of it was conveyed by our skipper at all. Because this was the one new scene I had no idea what the jokes were supposed to be and took it completely seriously. Now stay tuned for my Japanese Jungle Cruise ride where I understood about 50% of what was being said and laughed more than almost any other time on the Jungle Cruise

One last straggling baby Elephant. 

I wanted to show a few pictures of the Jungle Cruise building because I believe they adequately show what the Jungle Cruise show building was like in 1955 Disneyland opened to the public. Also I just like it. 

Actually I take back what I said above, I'm almost 100% sure that the roof of the 1955 Jungle Cruise building was wood, although I do believe the overall structure is similar. 

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