The evening before, while drinking some beers with the local Finns, they told us about an abandoned water park close by. Since I love seeing abandoned places we decided to go there this morning.
Hồ Thủy Tiên is a lake about 20 minutes from the city Hue. The water park was built in the early 2000s and was abandoned shortly after. The details on the story are a bit vague and hard to come by though. I’ve read that it was open for about 3 years and also that it was never opened at all.
The park itself was very easy to find. Just enter it on google maps and it will guide you directly to the main entrance. A big no visitors sign lets you know that you can not under any circumstances enter the park. They even posted a security guard at the entrance who immediately told us that we can’t enter. We might or might not have accidentally lost 50'000 VND (~2 CHF) at the checkpoint… The guard was a bit preoccupied looking another way, so we snuck in through the entry gate. We couldn’t take any pictures there or we’d probably not have been able to enter any more.
A road leads up to the main park area where you’re greeted by a quick look on some kind of an amphitheater. We decided to take the route on the left side of the lake, leading us to the main attraction first. A huge concrete dragon figure connects the shores via bridges. After walking accross the bridge (riding is not recommended there because of all the glass shards lying around) we found a about 10m high building with different sections.
On the bottom floor there is an aquarium room, which is all broken by now. There is also a walk way around with a shark door and some cave-like path. On the first floor there is what seems to have been a restaurant once. Nowadays it’s just broken glass and some good subjects for photos. On the top floor one can see the view out of the dragon’s mouth. For security reasons we didn’t go any further or enter the dragon’s mouth, although I’m sure a lot of people have done that before us.
The second attraction is a platform with three waterslides. They aren’t terribly high or exciting but I’m sure they’d give some thrill to children. There is also a children’s pool right next to them although the water looks even less appetizing than it normally does.
We finished our tour by visiting the amphitheater we’ve seen upon entering. We have no idea what kind of show they did in there. We thought it might have been some dolphin show, but the water is too shallow and it had some kind of metal piping in there as well.
If you’re planning on visiting yourself: There is a back entrance which was not guarded when we left through it. Since the “guards” seemed to be just locals trying to make some money, I’d assume they won’t bother you too much… You can find it here and enter directly behind the amphitheater. Another advantage by doing it this way around is that you probably don’t need to park your motorbikes with the other locals providing a watched parking spot.
