Suoi Tien Theme Park in Ho Chi Minh City

As part of a Christmas gift from grandparents, we went to Suoi Tien Theme Park in Ho Chi Minh City with some friends. The entry is quite spectacular!

It is a Buddhist themed park and has a small amusement park, waterpark, some temples, and gardens on the property. Some attractions, like the waterpark, require a separate entrance fee.

We attended on a school day, and assumed that this would protect us from hoards of children. Boy, were we wrong!

It looked like it was school field trip day!  There were HUNDREDS upon HUNDREDS of school kids!

As you can see, the park did not hold back in décor and atmosphere. Sadly, they were pretty strict about height for their major slide (pretty tame ride on a tube), and they had whole areas roped off to prevent swimming in deeper water. Was it because the school kids were there?  We weren’t sure. Either way…this place had a lot of shallow pools with great playground equipment to romp on.

Our friend who is married to a Vietnamese told us that the Vietnamese aren’t swimmers. That explains why everything is only knee to waist deep, and why they won’t let bigger kids like Ella go on the water slide. I also wore a shirt over my swimsuit, as my friend warned me that I would be stared at, otherwise. Adult women swim in clothes (or maybe they don’t swim at all?), and kids in swimsuits.

After fighting off kids left and right for several hours, we were finally all tired out. Seriously—you couldn’t move without getting shoved by kids on inner tubes, and our kids couldn’t go down a small slide without worrying about another kid coming right behind them. That didn’t detract from their fun, but after several hours of fun we were tired out–and got out to dry and change into our clothes. After 15 minutes, we returned and this is what everything looked like:

Apparently it was then also time for the school kids to go home, too! The pools were EMPTY!!  We  had already gone through the stress of drying and changing the kids clothes, and we were admittedly all tired from playing. We asked the girls if they wanted to swim more, and they turned us down. Wow. So, we stuck with our original plan and simply found some snack food before leaving. The school kids were waiting in groups to exit the park.

Do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched? The school children just hovered around us…

Overall, it was a great day. But if we had known to expect school kids…we  certainly would have held off until afternoon to miss the crowds!

Coulda-shoulda-woulda!  Thanks Mom & Dad for the Christmas present fun!