Until just a few weeks ago I’d never even heard of this theme park. I only found out about it after searching for somewhere with waterslides to take my son Berry for the holiday weekend.
The Lost World of Tambun was certainly not the first place to pop up in the search results, far from it. But a quick look through the reviews quickly brought this park to my attention.
The reviews were full of words like
“underrated”, “a pleasant surprise” and “exceeded all expectations”.
At less than rm100 per person, I decided it would be worth a try and wasted no time in booking my tickets online at a relative discount to the walk-in price. I used Wonderfly, but there are other websites such as Klook.com.
Foreigners are charged slightly more than Malaysians but in any case it’s still cheaper to book online whatever your nationality.
When we have a fun trip planned, we like to tell our 5 years old Berry about it 2-3 days in advance, just long enough for him to work up a bit of excitement!
Sure enough, by the Thursday, he had already told all of his teachers and classmates where we would be spending the weekend.
I’m not sure I’d ever seen him so excited! I just hoped I hadn’t built the occasion up a bit too much and that it would be a bit of a let down.
I was cautiously optimistic. Berry had the day off school on the Friday (we don’t normally do that but it was a special occasion!).
We set off for Ipoh around 11am and stopped half way at the motorway services for an amazing ikan pari assam pedas (Spicy-sour stingray).
Service station food in Malaysia is surprisingly good, by the way. Thinking about it, why shouldn’t it be?
In a lot of countries, people seem to be satisfied with complete and utter junk at motorway service stations, but not in Malaysia.
Once Bryn and finished his second plate of stingray, we were back on our way and before we knew it we had arrived at Ipoh and were checking into our hotel.
An excellent steamboat buffet, a good night’s sleep (we were going to need it!) and a few nasi lemak later, we finally headed towards our
destination, nestled among the famous limestone hills just to the east of Ipoh.
Berry’s excitement level were now through the roof, and just when we thought it couldn’t get any higher, we spotted one of those brown tourist signs: The Lost World of Tambun.
On arrival at the park, things didn’t really get off to a very good start. We were told we wouldn’t be able to take ANY food or drink inside – not even water – and promptly had our bags confiscated (they were, of course, full of food). Bryn’s custard apples were going to have to wait.
I couldn’t believe they weren’t even going to let us take our water bottles in, especially for Berry who would presumably be charging about in the sun all day and bound to be at risk of dehydration.
Obviously they expected us to buy it all in there, and 5 times the usual price no doubt.
We managed to strike a deal which let us exit later for a quick drink and go back in again, though normally, they made it very clear, this was not allowed.
“Special exception, just for you sir”. Well thank you very much! But I have to say we were not at all impressed with this new policy (apparently it had only just come into effect the previous year).
It was all uphill from there though. We did have a slight issue with our online tickets, but this ended up being basically our own fault as we really should have checked that we had received the QR code.
We only had a screenshot showing our order number. Just make sure that you also have email confirmation displaying the scannable QR code.
Once we finally made it inside, it was hours of fun – and not just for Berry! Bryn now has an excuse to come to these kind of parks!
A whole day is about right to properly sample all of the attractions. Better to get there in the morning, otherwise you are likely to run out of time and may not be able to try everything.
If you are worried you might not have enough time, I would advise leaving until later those attractions which are open into the evening, namely the hot springs, luminous forest, and main wave pool.
Another advantage of arriving early is that there will likely be very few people there so you can drastically reduce waiting time on the popular waterslides.
Not that overcrowdedness was ever really a problem for us. I wonder if this will change as more people find out about the park?
They don’t give out maps at the entrance so to help you plan your day you might want to take a photo of the park layout displayed on the large sign to the right when you walk in.
The park doesn’t really have zones and the locations of things are all a bit haphazard but fortunately the place isn’t so big that this was ever really an issue. For the most part you can just wander around and take it as it comes. Here are some of the attractions that we enjoyed the most and you really should not miss.
The waterslides!
These were probably Berry’s favorite things in the whole park (closely followed, funnily enough, by the capybaras!). As a side note, in order to ride these you will need to carry one of the giant yellow figure-8 inflatable
things up to the starting point. You will see these yellow things all over the park. It took us a while to figure out that while they are provided for free on the waterslides, if you wish to take one away for your personal use in one of the swimming pools, you’ll need to pay (rm20) to hire one.
As we found out
rather embarrassingly, you can’t just help yourself to one that you see lying around, as it will have already been paid for by someone else.
Anyway where were we, back to the waterslides. There are 3 groups of waterslides. The first, you can see from the entrance when you walk in, located on the hill directly in front of you just behind the main pool/beach area. You get to choose between “closed”, “open” and “semi-open”. We found that “semi- open” was the fastest! All 3 end with a steep drop followed by a big splash (of course!).
Just around the corner from these is a separate pair of slides with the added feature that the standard steep drop is now followed by a climb back up at the other end, at which point you inevitably fall back
again (backwards) to the finish point. Berry is still only 5 years old and found it absolutely thrilling, but grown-ups will love these too!
Finally there is the hot springs waterslide. You can save this until the evening if you like, as being part of the hot springs it stays open when the others are shut.
Non-waterslide attractions Other than the waterslides, here are the attractions that impressed us the most, in no particular order. Childrens’ fun pools! One of the center-pieces of the whole park is the wave pool/artificial beach that you encounter right in
front of the entrance and which is featured on most of the advertisements and promotional videos. In addition to this there are a couple of other pools packed with mini slides, things to climb on, tunnels to climb through, water guns, you name it. Great fun for all ages.
Hot Springs!
This is a sprawling complex of variously themed, shaped, and sized bathing areas with water at different temperatures ranging from cold to ridiculously hot. It takes a while to explore all of them! There are
tunnels, bridges, caves, towers. Really good. Like just about everything throughout the park, all generations will appreciate this.
Feed the animals!
Berry loved this. You can get up close to quite a range of exotic mammals, reptiles and birds, many of which are from tropical South America.
Normally you need to pay (a small amount) for the seeds, etc, but Berry being as cute as he is, we managed to have him smile at the lady and get it for free! If you walk
right to the end you will be rewarded with a stunning enclosed-lake-within-the-limestone natural feature. It’s worth it!
Feed the hippo!
This is a separate attraction of its own, right at the far end of the park, after the luminous forest.
Again, natural scenery on the way here. You may have to queue for a few minutes. You’ll get a large bucket of fruits and vegetables for 10 ringgit.
You then proceed to the feeding station and basically tip it into the hippo’s mouth, one item at a time. Rides (roller coaster, zip line, chairs-spinning-around) I wouldn’t say these are the highest priority attractions; they’re fine, it’s just that everything else is so
good, I wouldn’t particularly recommend prioritizing these unless you have more than a single day to spend here. Note that we didn’t have time to try the zip line, looked fun though.
Tiger show!
A bit boring, I thought, well again, compared to the really quality attractions.
Luminous Forest!
We have heard that this is exceptional! However we missed it! Of all the attractions we didn’t get around to visiting (admittedly there weren’t many), this was the one that I most wished we had been able to. Apparently an entire section of natural forest is lit up (after dark) and the effect is superb.
Fire Breathing Show!
This was to blame for our missing the luminous forest. Fortunately, we all enjoyed this. The only way you can really not enjoy it is if you’ve already seen a lot of fire breathing and are fed up with it. I imagine most fire breathing shows are somewhat similar. If you are not familiar with the concept then it’s great!
The show starts after dark once the remainder of the park (with the exception of the luminous forest) is mostly shut, and we found it was the perfect end to the day. Don’t try the.. Er, .. petrol drinking at home.
Lost World of Tambun Theme Park
Address: 1, Persiaran Lagun Sunway 1, Sunway City Ipoh, 31150 Ipoh, Perak
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