Typhoon Lagoon is comparable in size to Blizzard Beach. Eleven waterslides and streams, some as long as 420 feet, drop from the top of a 100-foot-tall man-made mountain. Landscaping and an aftermath-of-a-typhoon theme add interest and a sense of adventure to the wet rides.
Guests enter Typhoon Lagoon through a misty rain forest, then emerge in a ramshackle tropical town where concessions and services are situated. Special sets make every ride an odyssey as swimmers encounter bat caves, lagoons and pools, spinning rocks, formations of dinosaur bones, and many other imponderables.
Typhoon Lagoon has its own parking lot but no lodging. Disney resort and campground guests can commute to the water park on Disney buses.
If you indulge in all features of Typhoon Lagoon, admission is a fair value. If you go primarily for the slides, you’ll have only 2 early-morning hours to enjoy them before the wait becomes prohibitive.
Typhoon Lagoon provides water adventure for all ages. Activity pools for young children and families feature geysers, tame slides, bubble jets, and fountains. For the older and more adventurous are the enclosed Humunga Kowabunga speed slides, corkscrew Storm Slides, and three whitewater-raft rides (plus one children's rapids ride) plopping off mount mayday. Billed as a "water roller coaster," Crush 'N' Gusherconsists of a series of flumes and spillways that course through an abandoned tropical fruit–processing plant. It features tubes that hold one or two people, and you can choose from three different routes: Banana Blaster, Coconut Crusher, and Pineapple Plunger, ranging from 410 to 420 feet long. Only Crush ’n’ Gusher and the Humunga Kowabunga speed slides (where you can hit 30 miles an hour) have a minimum height requirement of 48 inches.
A Waterloo, Ontario, mom found Typhoon Lagoon more strenuous than she’d anticipated:
I wish I’d been prepared for the fact that we’d have to haul the tubes up the stairs of Crush ’n’ Gusher. My daughter was not strong enough to carry hers, so I had to lug them up by myself. I was EXHAUSTED by the end of the day, and my arms ached for a couple of days afterward. Had I known that was the case, I would have started lifting weights several months before our trip in preparation!
A New Jersey reader agreed:
Thumbs WAY DOWN to the designer who made several places in the queue for Storm Slides where the stairs go DOWN then back UP then back DOWN then UP again—leading to all guests walking UP extra needless fights of stairs. BOO!
Slower metabolisms will enjoy the scenic, meandering, 2,100-foot-long stream that floats tubers through a hidden grotto and rain forest. And, of course, the sedentary will usually find plenty of sun to sleep in. Typhoon Lagoon's Surf Pool and Shark Reef are unique, the former being the world’s largest inland surf facility, with waves up to 6 feet high (enough, so Disney says, to “encompass an ocean liner”). Shark Reef is a saltwater snorkeling pool with tropical fish.
