Where it all started

It seems that the people of Wuhan have started partying again, with the snap above purporting to be a recent music festival cum party in the Wuhan Playa Maya Water Park.

A snap which came in the new-to-me webp format, according to Wikipedia at reference 1, a bit of image technology developed by Google. But I had to resort to Microsoft's Snip & Sketch to produce the jpg you can see here.

Next problem was to find out who operated this water park, which proved difficult, partly because variations on this name seem to be used all over the world. After a while I got to the report at reference 2 which I was able to download and which features a 'Star Wars' flavoured cover picture from Disneyland at Anaheim which I did not recognise at all. Must have changed a bit in the twenty years or so since I was passing through. A report which contains lots of lists of the top ten this and top twenty that.

TEA is the 'Themed Entertainment Association', presumably a trade associated for large entertainments of this sort, while AECOM seems to be the economics bit of the large engineering outfit at reference 3, quite possibly involved in the construction of these places and their flashy attractions.

From there I get to Shenzhen Overseas Chinese Town Company Limited, OCT for short, said to be an operator of parks and with a web site at reference 4. In Chinese but with enough pictures to confirm that this is a big park operator. And with the translation offered by Edge providing even more confirmation. But I have yet to track down the place in Wuhan.

PS: AECOM also seem to be mixed up with W. S. Atkins here at Epsom, a company which I thought had been swallowed up in something called SNC-Lavalin. And with the business at Stonehenge noticed at reference 5, from which they have landed what looks like a fat consultancy contract.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP.

Reference 2: Theme Index and Museum Index: The Global Attractions Attendance Report - TEA/AECOM - 2019.

Reference 3: https://aecom.com/.

Reference 4: https://www.octholding.com/.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/08/ten-minutes-on-a303.html.