This is Expedition Everest at the Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World.
We know for a fact that Expedition Everest is 199.5 feet tall.
We also know that the real Mount Everest tops out at 29,032 feet.
So from that, we know that Expedition Everest is one hundred-and-forty-five and a half times
smaller than the real Mount Everest.
The question that was posed to me a couple of weeks back was that if you scaled up Expedition
Everest to be as tall as the real Mount Everest, how big would the rest of the Animal Kingdom
be if it was scaled up along with it?
So let’s find out.
Before we get into numbers, I need to clear something up.
Technically speaking, you don’t go to the peak of Mount Everest on the ride.
Joe Rohde: On Expedition Everest, we the guests come to this Tibetan village that surrounds
us because we want to get to Everest, which we can see right through the pass!
There’s these entrepreneurs in town, Norbu and Bob, they’re ready to comply!
However, Everest is reached through the Forbidden Mountains, and all the local Tibetan people,
they’re freaked out and they don’t want us to go and they’re worried about the yeti
who they think is really real and they think he’s going to get us!
All that to say: the top of Expedition Everest isn’t supposed to be the top of Mount Everest.
And since the main mountain of the ride is fictional, we don’t know how tall it’s
“supposed” to be.
Of course, that kind of ruins the premise of the question I was asked, so for the fun
of the video we’re just going to pretend that the whole thing here is Mount Everest.
Anyway.
let’s start at the top: the Animal Kingdom as a whole.
The Animal Kingdom is 580 acres or 2.3 square kilometers.
Scaled up proportionally so that Expedition Everest was as tall as the real deal, the
new Animal Kingdom would be 340.5 square kilometers or just over 84,000 acres.
That’s over five and a half times the size of Manhattan
The parking lot of the Animal Kingdom, sitting at 438,000 square meters, would scale up to
around 64 square kilometers.
That’s a parking lot that’s about two-thirds the size of Walt Disney World altogether.
Now imagine losing your car in that parking lot.
Good luck.
Discovery Island, at 54,000 square meters would jump to over 7.8 million square meters
or nearly 2,000 acres.
That’s 12 times the size of Disneyland.
As for the Tree of Life on Discovery Island?
That tree would go from 145 feet tall to 21,100 feet tall, or nearly six and a half thousand
meters.
The redwood, Hyperion, in California is said to be the tallest tree in the world at 379
feet.
So the tree of life would be about 55.6 Hyperions tall.
Or if you want to go by manmade structures, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai stands as the tallest
building in the world at 2,716 feet.
So the Tree of Life would be nearly eight Burj Khalifas tall.
So… pretty tall.
But let’s talk about everyone’s favorite part of the Animal Kingdom.
A land filled with detail and crafted with care.
A wondrous place that transports you altogether to a land that definitely doesn’t feel like
Disney anymore.
Dinorama.
The theme park area that was meant to look like a run-down carnival area that has since
become an actual run-down carnival area is 6,300 square meters or one and a half acres.
Scaled up along with the rest of the park, it would become over 900,000 square meters.
That’s 228 acres.
That’s a Dinorama that’s over twice the size of the Magic Kingdom.
I don’t even know what you would put in a Dinorama that big.
A lot of expensive carnival games I imagine.
As for Pandora, the floating mountains of the Avatar-based land measure out at 156 feet,
or 47.5 meters.
So in the scaled-up Animal Kingdom, those rocks would level off at 22,700 feet or just
under 7000 meters.
That’s actually higher up than the actual floating mountains in the movies are supposed
to be.
Now scaling up the park this much would obviously make for some longer experiences.
For instance, the Maharajah Jungle Trek which is a walk-through attraction would suddenly
be a 33 mile or 53-kilometer hike.
So at a nice steady pace of 3 miles per hour, you’re looking at an 11-hour walk.
Talk about spending the whole day on one attraction.
The Wildlife Express Train and its nearly one-mile journey would become a 138 mile or
222-kilometer train ride.
Considering the train itself travels at around 8 miles per hour, you’d better plan to be
on that train for a little over 17 hours on a round-trip.
But neither of those compare to the Kilamanjaro Safaris.
The original attraction comes in at just around 1.8 miles or 2.8 kilometers.
That means the scaled-up version would be 259 miles or 417 kilometers.
In a normal car that would be a long drive, but nothing too bad.
However, the safaris trucks are limited at a speed of around 10mph.
So that safaris adventure would take nearly 26 hours to complete.
I imagine that after 24 hours Disney would just charge you for another day of park entry…
because it’s Disney.
So I guess the moral of this video is that maybe it’s a good idea that Expedition Everest,
and by extension the whole Animal Kingdom, isn’t built to match the scale of the real
thing.
That’d be one big theme park.
Although maybe the -30 degree temps you’d experience on the roller coaster would be
a nice break from the Orlando heat.