Discover the fearsome legend of the yeti at Expedition EVEREST -- a high-speed train adventure that combines coaster like thrills with the excitement of a close encounter of the hairy kind.

The Expedition Everest adventure begins when guests board an old mountain railway destined for Mount Everest. The train rolls through thick bamboo forests, past thundering waterfalls, along shimmering glacier fields and climbs higher and higher through the snow-capped peaks.

Suddenly the thrills intensify as the train races both forward and backward through mountain caverns and icy canyons as guests head for an inevitable face-to-muzzle showdown with the mysterious yeti -- known to some as the abominable snowman. Nearly 200 feet high but looking much higher, Expedition Everest is located in the Asia section of the Animal Kingdom theme park.

Telling a story
The park guests at Everest theoretically are trekkers who want to ride a train through an abandoned tea plantation to the lower mountains. These trekkers first walk through the village, beneath slightly tattered prayer flags whose decorations are mainly mythical animals, lest copying actual flag designs offend anyone.

Before the trekkers enter the offices to reach the train cars, they are funneled past shrines in a pagoda courtyard with statues and several smaller representations of the yeti, who is protecting the forbidden mountain, his domain. The riders are given lots of visual clues as to what they might encounter. Sharp-eyed riders might notice in one shrine the Coke bottle that bears a label in Nepalese.

Two entrepreneurs, Norbu and Bob, have decided to make a buck off an abandoned tea plantation. They ignore the villagers'  warning that this is the land of the yeti 'the guardian of the realm of the snows', and should be left alone.

Instead, Norbu and Bob use the old "donkey engines" that formerly hauled rail cars of tea leaves to carry 34 trekkers per trainload through a bamboo forest, past waterfalls, across an 80-foot-long bridge - which has minimal guard rails - and into the mountain's caves on the way to their base camp.

That's when the real thrills begin, as the train encounters torn-up tracks, races backward, plunges 80 feet outside the mountain - "This is where the onride pictures are taken" - and finally comes into contact with the yeti.

Photo by Emma Y

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