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How to do Shanghai Disneyland in One Day

Challis Hackley
Oct 23, 2017
4 min read

You can't go to Shanghai and not go to Disney. Well you totally can if that's not your cup of tea but I really enjoyed it. When we first thought about going to Shanghai Disneyland, we thought we should do it over two days, Friday and Saturday, but as we looked at maps of the park we realized that we didn't need two days to ride all the rides and see everything because its a relatively small park. So we planned for one, with the possibility of a second day. The park opened at 8:00 AM, which is about when we left our hostel, so we took the metro and got there around 9:00 AM. It wasn't super busy, probably because we went on a weekday, but we got our tickets, no problem and started off.

Here's a couple thing that you should know before going to Shanghai Disneyland, There are seven areas to the parks, five of them have rides in them and there are thirteen rides as well as other fun stuff to do and see.

Tomorrowland

Tron

Buzz Lightyear

Jet Packs

Fantasy Land

Hunny Pot Spin

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

Peter Pan's Flight

Seven Dwarfs Mine Train

Voyage to the Crystal Grotto

Gardens of Imagination

Dumbo the Flying Elephant

Fantasia Carousel

Treasure Cove

Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure

Adventure Isle

Soaring Over the Horizons

Roaring Rapids

For the first hour or so we kind of wandered around the Gardens of Imagination and took pictures and then watched the performance at the castle. they had performances from Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Brave, and Frozen. It was kind of weird to hear classic Disney songs in, what I assumed to be, Mandarin, but some of the other ones must not translate very well because they lip-synced those in English.

After that we headed over to Tomorrowland and We got the fast past for Tron and went on the Buzz Lightyear ride while we waited for that. The effects for the Tron ride are seriously epic, very cool, and definitely one of my favorite rides in the park. The ride itself is great. It looks like a couple sets of lightcycles and you sit down on the motorcycle and lean forward and then the harness comes down and rests on your back so that you won't fly away. I felt so cool riding it.

We also went to this Stitch Encounter thing that I thought was going to be a ride. It's kind of a cool premise but it was all in Chinese so we couldn't understand any of it. So you go into the room and it's kind of like a movie theater and you see Stitch on the big screen and then all the sudden he turns around and starts talking to you. And this lady comes around with a microphone and you have a legit conversation with Stitch. Like he would ask them their names and they would say it and he would say it back, sometimes make fun of it because people would laugh. It was kind of cool to watch; I just wish I knew what he was saying.

We also stopped by the Marvel Exhibit where you could take pictures with Avenger's impersonators and look at replicas of all the suits and armors. Cool stuff.

Then we went to Fantasy Land. I think they really like Snow White here, because she was the first princess out during the performance and of the eleven to thirteen Disney Princesses, she was one of five that made it into the performance. And them the castle was all about her. You do around inside and they have different scenes and versions of her movie playing out on screens throughout the castle.

While we were in Fantasy Lands we went on the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, the Peter Pan's Flight, and Voyage to the Crystal Grotto. We got a fast-pass for the Peter Pan ride and went on the seven dwarfs ride in the meantime. I really like the Peter Pan ride. You get into a pirate ship boat, and sit down. The track is on the ceiling, so the floor drops away and it feels like your floating through the air in a pirate ship. It was surreal.

And then there was Treasure Cove which has my favorite ride in the entire park: Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure. There was a parade or something going on when we first rode the ride so we breezed through the line and only had to wait for like seven minutes, which was kind of a shame because the waiting areas and the lines looked really cool and I would have actually liked to hang out there and take it all in. Pirates of the Caribbean is one of my favorite movies of all time but I think even if it wasn't, this still might have been my favorite ride because the effects were amazing. There are multiple times where you come into another room and the entire wall is a screen that shows amazing scenes. It was awe-inspiring. So much so that as soon as we got off, I hurried and got back in line to ride it again.

Next we hit up and Adventure Isle rode Soaring Over the Horizons and Roaring Rapids. Both of which were great. Soaring over the Horizons is one ride that you can find in California Disneyland and it's like a 4D movie where you travel the world and can actually smell it as you got. Roaring Rapids was a water ride so we got soaked afterwards but it was worth it.

By that point it had started to rain, but we weren't finished yet. We had ridden all the ride that we really wanted to and so we headed back to Tomorrowland to ride the Tron ride again and the Jetpacks.

It was raining pretty hard by then and none of us had brought jackets so we headed indoors at Micky Avenue and Downtown Disney for some souvenir shopping and stuck around until like 8:30 PM for the lightshow projected onto the castle. After that we followed all the crowds to the metro station and headed back to our hostel. We were all cold, wet, tired, and hungry by the time we got back to our room, but we were all still in a pretty good mood. The after-glow of the happiest place on earth.