Hong Kong is so amazing with so many great sites to see! If your looking for my full 4 Day itinerary you can find it HERE. Our Hong Kong Itinerary Day 3 – Ocean Park, was a break from sightseeing and just hanging at the park all day. It’s an aquarium and amusement Park. I’ll be sharing info and tips about Ocean park in this post.
You can find my Day 1 itinerary of the Kowloon area HERE, and Day 2 of the Lantau Area HERE.
Ocean Park is an amusement park & aquarium that has lots to offer as well as lots of animals to see. There are a few ways to get a good deal on the tickets. You can purchase them online and it’ll even give you an option to purchase a ticket that includes a meal. I did consider doing this however chose not to. After getting to the park and seeing the HUGE line of people waiting to use their free food voucher I’m so glad we didn’t buy that ticket. We probably wouldn’t have used the food voucher as the line was ridiculous! I found that you can get the best deal by finding a local CTS travel office and purchasing the tickets there! At the office we paid 1380 hkd/$175 for all 4 of us, all over 12 years old requiring the adult tickets. Online it would’ve been 1752 hkd/$224 used for 4. So we saved $50 by using CTS!
And even better news is that they recently opened a MTR line that goes to Ocean Park! Before you had to bus out there and back. It was literally a 2 min ride from the station near our hotel. It was 22 hkd/$2.80 usd for our family of 4. Again we used our Octopus card.
We got there about a half hour before opening and there was already a queue started for getting into the park. We were able to get in line near the beginning and got in fairly quickly when the park opened. You can download a free Ocean Park app to check waiting times of rides, etc. We did this on the phone that the hotel loaned us that was included with our room.
Again I had done research on how to ‘beat’ the crowds, as we do that when we hit amusement parks all over the world. Helps us to get through the park with very little waiting time and to do everything we want in a few hours instead of all day.
I knew that we needed to head up to The Summit area via the train. The train is neat and done in a 20,000 leagues under the sea kinda theme. There was literally NO queue for the train and we jumped right on. At the Summit we found that the larger rides didn’t open for another 30 mins. We took advantage of the time and rode the Ocean Park Tower with no queue! This provides some amazing views of the park and I highly recommend it if there is no line.
After that we went and checked out the Pacific Pier to see the seals. There is also a great vending machine in this area that dispenses slushy Cokes, we loved it!
We headed over to Thrill Mountain to start on the rides. Their big coaster, Hair Raiser, is in this area. It was our first stop and there was almost no line. We finished this area quickly due to it being so uncrowded and headed to the next area.
We took the escalators down to Adventure land where we did the Mine Train and the Raging River. Again no lines so we got through the rides quickly
Using the escalators we headed back up to The Summit area and finished out the rides there including the coaster, The Dragon. We also went through the Shark Mystique and it was not crowded at all. It’s from this area that we took the amazing cable car ride! The secret at Ocean Park is to train up and take the cable cars down to avoid a queue. As we were walking to the cable cars we seen a huge line and I was getting nervous, but as we walked up we realized that the line was for people trying to use the food vouchers from the online tickets! We walked right up to the cable car and go on with no line!
The cable car experience was amazing! However some in my family are not fans of heights and weren’t quite as excited as I was for this long scenic ride! As we were getting close to the bottom you could see the huge queue of people waiting to ride the cable cars up.
At this point we were starting to get hungry and hit up the food stalls in The Waterfront area near where the cable cars drop you off. We found the MUST try egg waffles and they were delicious! It was like a belgium waffle but light and airy, so good! We grabbed a few others snacks as well. Prices weren’t horrible as we only spent around $53 usd in the park on food for all 4 of us for lunch/snacks.
We went to the Giant Panda Experience hoping to see Pandas but there was a sign up saying it was mating season and not one panda was to be found. Bea was disappointed about that.
We also checked out The Grand Aquarium, this was our longest queue of the day and it took about 15 minutes for us to get in as they only allow so many people in at a time.
By this point the kids were getting tired and felt like they had seen and done enough in the park. It was around 3:30 pm so we had spent around 5.5 hours in the park. We’re not ones to stay and close the park down. Satisfied that we’d gotten our money worth we headed back toward the hotel to find some dinner.
We took the MTR back to the station that was a 5 min walk from our hotel. Again it was a whole 22 hkd/$2.80 usd for our family of 4. Walking back to the hotel we seen this delicious looking pizza place and decided to check it out since we were all pretty hungry after our long day. This was our most expensive meal in Hong Kong but it was so fantastic it was worth it! And we did get a lot of food for the money. We got 3 pizzas, 1 pasta, and 5 sodas for 800 hkd/$102. The pizzas were like those you’d find in Italy and simply divine! We headed back to the hotel with full bellies and ready to relax.
One of our favorite things to do was people watch from our window view of the hotel. It was neat to get a glimpse into the Hong Kong lifestyle as there were apartments right across the street from us. The locals hang dry their laundry even outside the windows of the super tall buildings! You could see laundry scattered all the way down the building where it had blown off to never be retrieved again.
Overall our kids had a good time at Ocean Park, it wasn’t a Six Flags or anything super exciting but I did like that it also had an aquarium and animals so you felt like you were getting a good deal for the money. I know lots of people go to Disney in Hong Kong but with teens I knew they’d be bored to tears, especially after we had just done the one in Paris not that long ago.
If your heading to check out Ocean Park I hope that you find this information helpful!
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