We took the train from Fukuoka to Huis Ten Bosch, a Dutch themed amusement park. Opens 9-10PM, 7400 yen pp ($52), or can get after 3PM tickets are 5600 yen pp ($39). All the buildings here are replicas of what is in Amsterdam, so walking around the park, you really feel like you are in Europe.
At night is when the magic happens!!! The park lights up and it’s so pretty. The pictures don’t do it justice. Since we were here in October, the park was also decked out for Halloween. It’s fun and if you are limited in time, just buy the after 3PM tickets and go to see the lights at night. Most of the rides are not that great anyways…
Train from Hakata station to Huis Ten Bosch
Huis Ten Bosch JR station is quite cute. They actually even have a JR info desk at the station to exchange JR tickets, or get refunds. It wasn’t listed as a station with this service on the JR website.
Huis Ten Bosch outside is decorated for Halloween already
Outside huis ten Bosch is a shop that sells the famous Nagasaki pork belly buns. Perfect, then I don’t need to eat this in Nagasaki since we already tried the kakuni manjus here!
We stayed at Hotel Nikko Huis Ten Bosch which was really nice since there’s a back entrance to the theme park. We saw this robot roaming around the lawn and wasn’t sure what it was. Is it a mini lawn mower???
Inside the theme park, there’s multiple sections. This section is called Adventure Town and has ropes courses, zip lining, dinosaurs, etc. we just took some pictures here, but didn’t do the activities here because I’m a chicken. Ha ha
In Attraction Town is a trick art room.
Trick Art room had pictures with optical illusions as art. They were pretty cool. This one looks like the lady is reaching outside the picture to pull your shirt!
And this one looks like I’m trapped in Dracula’s wine glass
And here I’m look like I’m sitting on a swing, but this is just a picture of a swing.
At Amsterdam Square they had a show. Songs were all English songs like the gosht busters theme song, the Adam’s family song etc.
In Tower City, Domtoren tower lights up at night with a side waterfall made of strings of lights, and a sea of blue and white lights cover the ground. There are paths going through the lights on the ground, so you feel like you are in a sea of endless lights. It’s so pretty.
Umbrella alley
At 8PM, there is a lantern show by Tower Town (H2 on map). Tons of people staked out a seat already.
The lantern show at the end launches a bunch of drones to make it seem like lanterns are floating up and then they even launched a few mini fireworks!
The fountain show is at 8:30PM, a short walk from where the lantern show was. There’s steps you can sit down on if you go behind the fountain. The show is just as enjoyable from the front as in the back. This is kind of like the Bellagio fountains in Vegas, just this one has colors too.
Exiting the park near harbor town is a row of eateries where it’s lit up with lanterns at night and is quite pretty. You can re-enter the park afterwards with your ticket.
Huis ten Bosch palace lights up at night!
They had a miffy celebration. See miffy in the grass?
We rode up the Ferris wheel and could see all the lights from above.
Halloween lights near Domtoren tower in where they call it the Art Garden
Ferris wheel at night
We had a really good time here and stayed all the way til 10PM, closing time. And even then we didn’t get to do everything. For example, in Attraction town, we only got to ride “horizon adventure” a flooding tornado (not that fun and skippable), “VR white water rafting” (super fun), “deep sea mission rescue” (fun), IS labrinyth (fun), the trick art room (fun). And then in Fantasia world we did the flower room (nice), and the space room (not, great don’t waste your time here). We didn’t have time to do the gondola ride, canal cruiser, and chocolate mansion that I had on my list that I wanted to do because some of the activities that we did do, like the VR white water rafting, had a 50 minute wait time! It’s because they are so inefficient! Each ride has two rafts, holding 4 people each raft. You would think with the long lines they would fill each raft up. But nope, the group of 5 girls in front of us was one ride, so they had 3 empty seats. Then on our ride, there were 3 in one raft and us 2 in the 2nd raft. So again 3 empty seats. Ugh, they should have put us two with the group of five girls in front of us. Seriously. But all aggregations aside, we still recommend checking out this theme park, especially at night.