Dagang Park

Dagang Park is a small city park to the South-East of Tianjin and the second contingency park for Happy Valley being closed. Having so many parks in China makes it difficult to plan a trip that does everything in an area but the upside is that there are a lot of parks to visit when the planned itinerary goes awry.

The park was pretty immaculate and looked in fact to have had a bit of an overhaul. The masonry was spotless perhaps indicating that it hadn't been there for long. A small kids zoo sits in the North-West corner of the park, and that had been there for some time.

For some odd reason the park was displaying a fighter jet. Now I'm used to seeing this sort of thing at parks with military statues but that wasn't the case here. On the satellite imagery the plane was on the south bank of the central lake and served as an indicator that we were in the right park but here it was in amongst the trees to the east (not that I didn't trust our driver but this hobby gets you into some pretty remote places and it's good to be sure you're being taken where you've asked to). The plane being moved was an ominous sign that the imagery was out-of-date.Hopefully the coaster was still here.

The fact my next photo is of a young kid feeding pigeons is a sign that the coaster was long gone, and had been replaced with an equally child-friendly, although not coaster-enthusiast-friendly sand pit.

So our guide had a chat with some of the locals who told us that it had gone around a year earlier and when asked what had happened to the rides were told that some of them had joined a new park to the north, so we headed there next. It was also amusing that the people here assumed we were Russians, and took delight in being told we were from the UK and the US. I guess westerners don't visit this park too often.

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