I had the opportunity to visit Efteling earlier this year.

https://www.parkz.com.au/parks/NL/Kaatsheuvel/Efteling/

 

(If the gallery is giving you grief, you can just work through sequentially from here https://www.parkz.com.au/photo/17882-Efteling/gallery/sort/newest/location/park-147-Efteling/offset/0 using the left and right arrows )

It's located about 80km south of Amsterdam, though I stayed at a B&B in Tilburg, 10km south, and got a bus there from Tilburg station (Which run quite frequently)

I also elected to get a ‘Ticket Extra’, for 10 EUR extra, which gets you in 30 min earlier, plus a meal in the park, which seemed like good value, and quick way to sneak in a couple of attractions.

The park is impressive, immaculately landscaped, and very spread out, with a lot of pathways to cover. I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

 

 

The first ride I did was Spookslot, which is essentially an animatronic show, where you stand looking at an old castle, and various peppers ghost/ lighting / animatronic effects are triggered as the dead come to life. My favourite part was when the ground starts rumbling and moving under the tombstones.

The other early opening ride worth doing is Vogel Rok, which is probably the most family friendly coaster in the park (Actually, the lack of a “kiddy coaster” at Efteling is quite suprising, but in general shies away from mini kiddy flats) The coaster was mostly in the dark, and “fun”, if not that memorable (since it spent  a lot of time just doing endless helixes one way then the other, but there were a few cool laser effects and onboard music. At the start of the ride you see  a giant egg, then as the ride progresses you see large mythical birds suspended around the track, culminating in passing through the mouth of one.

With the walking time, that was the 30 min headstart consumed, so I just beat the masses to Baron 1898 , the parks dive machine coaster.

This was great, with an amazing level of theming, and entertaining pre-shows (thankfully captioned). The whole ride has this perfect Victorian era vibe about it, and doesn’t try to go down the typical grimy/rusty mine theme.

 

When you leave the station you stop in a sort of pre lift room, where some female ghosts sing a beautiful song telling you that you are all doomed, then it’s up the lift, pause for a second, then down the vertical drop. From there is a couple of inversions, a helix, hump and brakes. It’s not the strongest coaster out there, fun and re-rideable, but really it’s the theming that holds this experience up.  No queue meant I was able to get a front and a back row ride in, via single rider.

Check out the parks 360 pov, really captures the feel of the ride well

I spent the next half hour getting a lap on each side of Joris en de Draak.

Best coaster in the park! This one is mostly a racing coaster, with tracks running in the same direction most of the time, save for a couple of turns where they go for a “head on” near miss. GCIs racers are their strong suit, and this is no exception, it just belts along, has heaps of little moments of airtime, and really good interaction between the tracks. In particular, there is a section where the tracks intertwine (like the Kraken Racer at Funfields) so you are constantly going over and under each other, culminating in passing a big dragon animatronic.

 

When you reach the end, there is a banner hanging from a pole that spins to point at the winning train, and then when you arrive at the station, banners drop from the roof to “congratulate” the winners. I got a front row one on one side, and a back row go on the other before moving on.

Also worth mentioning is the super catchy soundtrack:

 

 

Next up I headed to the nearby Vliegende Hollander , a water coaster from the same guys that brought us the Sea Viper and Arkham trains.

Like Baron, this one has amazing queue and dark ride theming, but a bit of a meh coaster experience. This one works well, you go into a building, and inside slip through a rip in a painting on the wall to find a hidden passage, this leads to a dock, where you board your boat.

As you leave the dock you pass through the harbour gates, into foggy darkness, with howling winds, squawking sea birds, with only a lantern on your boat lighting the way. It’s atmospheric AF, and one of the best examples of setting the scene that ive seen on a ride. Suddnely, hell breaks loose, and explosions go off around the boat, rain pours around you, and then the ghost of the flying Dutchman is coming towards you. Then There’s a small drop into the broken hull of the ship, and you start heading up the lift hill. As you reach the top, a booming voice shouts something, then the doors open and you go down the main curving drop. From there is a couple of turns and hills, and finally the splashdown. The boat slowly drifts back towards the building and you disembark.

Going by the time stamps of my photos, I think the next thing I did was Bob, which still took a little while, despite using single rider. It’s an Intamin bobsled, so compared to the Mack ones, they feel a bit more out of control, but they do bash around a bit more, so I’m ambivalent towards them. This one is due to close next year, to be replaced by a racing family coaster.

No need to ride Pirana, you could see the whole layout and nothing really took me…

Moving across the park, I took the scenic route through the Sprookjesbros which is a huge fairly tale village full of dioramas, and the original part of the park, but with a bit of modern magic, so none of this going on.

I would have liked to have had a proper look through this bit, but given time constraints, I moved through fairly quickly. Kicking myself that I missed the Indian Water Lilies display.

At this point, I grabbed a fastpass thingy for a seat at Raveleijn, before joining the 30 minute, but constantly moving queue for Droomvlutch. This is a suspended dark ride, with cars that can rotates, so I guess similar to ET, sans bikes. This one was a series of fantasy themed scenes (hence the name dream flight), like ET, there was a scene where you fly over a diorama, there were lots of scenes with trolls and faries in the forest, many of which you pass over at high level.

 I thought the coolest one was this long spiralling helix towards the end of the ride, where you face inwards and circulated around a giant tree and waterfall, picking up speed, with various creatures at different levels. There was also a cool fibre optic tunnel with lots of stars too.

Next up was Villa Volta. I love these so much It’s a mad house in a somewhat unassuming building. No translation available for this one, the preshow was an animatronic of leathery old man rabbiting on. Eventually you proceed to the main ride, a room that revolves around you, with various other props on the wall (vases, mirrors etc) that tilt with the room to really make the effect convincing. Add the rousing sound track, and it’s a close tie between this and Hex at Alton for the best mad house ride.

I had a bit of time to spare before Raveleijn, so I checked out the Efteling Museum and the Diorama, and enjoyed the ambience of Anton Pieck Plein.

Raveleijn is a large arena show. The story is that some kids are out hiking, and discover a hidden city, when they enter,  they are magically transformed into horseback heroes, and are called upon to fight an evil guy who has taken over the city. There were some pretty cool effects, such as characters appearing/disappearing underwater from a pond in the middle of the arena. There were trained ravens (?), plenty of horse stunt riding, and a final battle with this mechanised fire breathing 5 headed dragon. Fortunately, headsets are available with English dubbing, or else I would have been quite lost.

Perhaps my only criticisim is that the set is set up weirdly, with a narrow  bit of space at the front, and big bulky pieces right in the middle, so it felt cramped.

I CBF typing all the characters names, so have a look here if you want to know more

https://www.efteling.com/en/kids/profiles/raveleijn

After the show, I went on Pagode, the observation tower, or rather the flying island.

This is a platform on a huge arm that gets lifted up, for a view over the park. It’s open air too, so no filthy glass blocking your shots. The park is quite spread out though with a lot of trees, and it was still April, so a bit of moisture in the atmosphere, so net result is the aerial pics seem like they don’t show much.

 

 

Right, time to finally get on the newest ride, Symbolica, which conveniently has a single rider queue, reducing the impetus to get here early. The only downside to this is that the ride has three story options to choose from, and as a single rider, you don’t get to pick. Not to worry, on my two rides, I got 2 different ones, which was good enough for me.

The preshow is fun, with the kings assistant reading a long list of rules, and then the jester magically revealing the passage to the ride.

Im not sure what to make of this one, like Droomvlutch, its an exercise in just looking at pretty stuff basically. You pass through various rooms in the palace, with whimsical things coming to life. The coolest scene IMO was the garden greenhouse, when all of a sudden a whale is swimming around outside, and the glass cracks and water pours in.

The final scene of the ride puts the trackless system to good use, with three cars dancing around each other in the banquet hall.

So overall, it’s superbly themed, but perhaps was anti climatic compared to your Disney dark rides.

Next was the last remaining coaster, Python. This one operates with a time booking system, which I had missed earlier in the day, so I had to wait till later in the afternoon  till they open it for general riders. It has a single rider line too.

It was a fun coaster, it has recently had its track replaced, and has the new gen Vekoma trains, so nothing to complain about. It’s still pretty basic in terms of layout…two loops, two corkscrews and a helix.

There were still a couple of dark rides to go, so I did Fata Morgana, this one is like Pirates of the Carribean, if it were Arabian, so lots of wax animatronics and basic movement, through different stereotypical scenes.

 

The other dark ride was Carnaval (sic) Festival, which a knock off of it’s a small world, but with haunted mansion style 3 seater buggies that move continuously and can rotate. Aimed at kids!

It contained hillarous stereotypes, but despite going around the world, they missed Australia.

I’d wanted to go another re-ride on Joris en de Draak, but the ride had closed early compared to the rest due to a private party, which annoyed me a bit to be honest, especially since the ride only opened with one train first thing.

So with my last bit of time in the park, I did a re-ride on Symbolica and Baron 1898, then intentionally took the scenic route back to the entrance through Volk von Laaf and Sprookjesbros. Everything was off, but there was ample opportunity to take photos.

 

So that’s Efteling!

I think it’s one of the best parks I have visited, combining great theming, great rides, and a really pleasant setting . The food was nice, the ambience and music were nice too, and it was great to see how they have preserved classic attractions.

Originally I was going to give myself 2 days, and if you did things at a slightly slower pace, you could definitely fill out two days. As it was, I didn’t see any indoor shows at the theatre, or have a sit down meal, and I could have spent longer seeing sprookjesbros. The World of Color style fountain show was closed for maintenance too.

But, as circumstances ended up, I’d done everything I wanted to, and there is no discounted two day pass, and I wasn’t sure about paying another days ticket for essentially re-rides, so I elected leave it at that, and go to the Hague the next day instead, and schedule extra time to explore there / see a couple of smaller parks down that way.

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After Efteling, I noticed that it wasn’t going to be too far (25km0 to jump on a train and bus that evening to check out Baarle Hertog.

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4413687,4.9335558,13.58z

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Hertog

This is basically a holdover from medieval times, where there is a complex patchwork of Dutch and Belgian territory within the town, including a part where there is an island of Belgian territory, and then a pocket of dutch territory within that. Houses and shops have international borders running through them. Does this truly count as visiting another country?

Edited December 24, 20187 yr by Gazza

WOW, looks amazing! will have to add this onto the To do list for sure. 

Had the opportunity to visit in July, amazing theme park!