Happy Valley Chengdu

This guide to Happy Valley Chengdu tours the park's wooden roller coaster, the Great Desert-Rally, built in 2017 by the American firm Great Coasters International, and explains why the ride creaks by design as thousands of overlapping boards flex under a passing train instead of staying rigid like steel. It traces the park itself back to its 2009 opening as the third in its chain, built for roughly 2.3 billion yuan of imported timber, steel and concrete on the edge of the city. Stand at the base of the wooden structure and look up at the lattice rising above you, board by board, the way American wooden coasters have been built for a century.