Search the Community

Volcano Bay https://www.parkz.com.au/attraction/volcano-bay A couple of weeks ago I finally got to visit Volcano Bay in Orlando. Got a pretty good run at the place, the weather was rainy, but it was also warm and humid, and the water is kept at a perfect temperature, which was fine for this South East Queenslander. The net result was a dead park, and walk ons for almost everything. I was in and out in about 4 hours, and that was with re-rides, a lap to take some photos and mucking around to have lunch. Entry to the park is a bit of a pain in the arse if park hopping. You have to walk right to the back of the car park, where they have built a bus station, for shuttles to the park. Nothing screams tropical getaway like this? IDK maybe they could have built a shutte train from Citywalk itself and called it the Pineapple Express or something? But they make up for it when you arrive because its legitimately one of the nicest park entries anywhere. Overall impressions, has one of the most impressive slide line ups anywhere, and I guess what sets them apart is they are typically much longer than other installs. This means much longer climbs to the top, but it also means you get quite a lengthy ride every time. Theming is nice and has been beautifully styled, but for me it's still fundamentally a water park, just with all the signs and handrails etc better themed than usual. None of the slides really had any additional theming or SFX on them. There were lots of nice details to spot if you keep your eyes peeled. Most of the technical wizardly is reserved for the various interative Tapu Tapu things you can activate with your RFID wristband. This ranged from interactive fountains to underwater features, right through to light shows in a cool little walkthrough hidden inside the volcano. This wristband is also used to make ride reservations, though given the non existent crowds it went unnoticed, though you still tap in on each ride, so i guess they get super accurate guest flow statistics! The Punga Racers Body Slides and the 'normal' lazy river Kopiko Wai were closed for annual maintenance but I didn't really care, and of course the Runamukka Reef (get it? run amok) is just for the kids. Onto the slides. Ohno and Ohya drop slides Drop slides that finish a few meters above the pool, with some nice waterfalls. Fun to watch and quite attractive. The nicest feature was the interative kids pool next door with big spinning fountains that would throw water in a giant spiral pattern. Maku Puihi Round Raft Rides I'll get my one moan out of the way early. Yes there are a couple of attractions with catchy sounding names, and I can see they were trying to keep to the theme with these tribal sounding words, but for most of the rides the names they have are just not memorable. Which of these slides was Maku and which was Puihi? I dunno? It's not like something such as "Perfect Storm" or "Mammoth Falls" or "Summit Plummet" where at least its kind of fun and catchy and gives you an idea of what the ride might be like. I guess thats why they have given them captions like "Round Raft Rides", anhow, whinge over. The one that is the big saucer type slide is actually pretty good, even if the saucer is a visual gimmick, since this was quite a fast slide and you rode up on the walls a fair bit on the turns. The double tornado slide is the 36ft model, so its Smaller than the 45ft Tornado at Adventure Park Geelong, but bigger than the 24ft Tantrum Alley at at Raging Waters Sydney. Despite this, it might as well been as rough as the 24ft ones, but didn't really have all the extra turns and helices that come with it, so it felt quite short, but also lacked the signature tornado airtime. ehhh. Te Awa - The Fearless River This is a high speed lazy river, so fast in fact you have to wear a life jacket, which you'd never see in Aus lol. This was great, its fun to power swim along, and there are some big waves, including a huge surge of water that gets released periodically, and happened to go off right as i was in front of the inlet. Woosh! Waturi Beach Bit of a miss. Looks great, but the waves are definitely underpowered. Typhoon Lagoon reigns supreme as the best wave pool in Orlando. I did like how they had a spinning dial on a tower that would rotate to show a wave icon when the waves came on. Taniwah Tubes Take the Temple of Huey from WWW and make it 3x higher and this is what you get. What is also nice is the way rafts have a conveyor, which land on a mezzanine below the start deck. So you only have to carry your raft one flight of stairs, and there is none of that muck around with queuing separately at the bottom for a raft. Another minor grumble, all 4 slides were running and had water going down them, but they only had 2 of 4 open, and yeah they are pretty similar, but one had this intense looking double helix I wanted to try and of course that was the one that was not available and they weren't rotating. The green one was standard raft slide stuff, but the blue ones had a bit more kick, with Proslides Explosion Curves, which are like their take on the constrictor, so you got a little head spin on each helix. Krakatau Aqua Coaster Again, like Supertubes at WWW if you made it several times longer. Im not normally that big on water coaster type slides, because to be honest straight gentle drops in a raft just aren't all that thrilling (though the uphill slighty bumpy LIM launches are fun). I guess i just prefer slides that wash you around a bit and feel out of control. Give me a tornado or a wave any day. These slides just repeat the same trick over and over. Somehow, my head was just at the right height to get hit by every single sprayer that wets the surface, so the whole time I'm squinting trying to avoid chlorinated mist in my eyes. The one big thumbs up I'll give this is the completely over the top theming of the station and the beautiful landscaping around the first couple of drops. Why did they do such massive safety fences? They almost treat it like a real roller coaster in terms of safety. Ko'okiri Body Plunge The biggest and baddest, it's a straight trapdoor drop from the very top of the volcano. This has the fun gimmick of transparent sections a the top, and again at the bottom where the slide passes through a swimming pool, so people can swim right up and apparently watch as you shoot past. Aaaand of course you get water in your face the whole time so can't really see much, and half the drop is in darkness so perhaps you lose the sense of speed a bit. Gave it a couple of goes because that intial trap door release is still pretty cool. The bit passing through the pool is nice on paper, but doesn't really work in practice because physics. If you keep your head above water and try to look at the tube the refraction of light means you end up seeing shimmering instead, though if you put your head underwater and open your eyes then yeah you can see a split second splatter when the rider goes past. Kala & Ta Nui Serpentine Body Slides Also from the top of the Volcano are a couple of turbo tunnel slides with trapdoors (again only 1 was open). This was the only ride where I was given a return time (The whole of 10 mins). The climb up the Volcano is very cool, with the staircase zig zagging through the tangle of slides and supports. The ride down has a bit less water in your face and consists of several very fast turns, so you cover a lot of slide in short space of time. Only did this one once. Honu ika Moana - Turtle & Whale A couple more decent family raft slides. Again with the naming, the blue slide is apparently the Turtle and the green one is Whale, so try and figure that one out. The Green one is mammoth type slide, without any gimmicks, and you know what it was legitmatley one of the best slides the park, it was long, it was fast, you got good wall time, and the straights in between actually work well because they give the rafts a chance to wash around. The double tornado wave is really good too. These rides are heaps of fun to begin with, but having the 2nd drop following from the first is a bit of genius because you get this scary moment where it feels like you could go airborne. Of course its all highly calculated and you get two big airtime moments. Worth a couple rides, especially if you can get a fully loaded raft. Overall, yes I'd recommend the place, especially if you have a multi day ticket to Universal since if you get bored you can go sit on Hagrids or Velocicoaster for the rest of the day. The slides are all mostly better versions of your favourites.

Photos: https://www.parkz.com.au/search/photos/location/jamberoo-action-park This summer I decided to do a road trip down the Princes Highway from Brisbane to Melbourne. I had not been to Jamberoo Action Park for about 10 years, but the addition of Perfect Storm and Velocity Falls made for a good excuse to make a pit stop. Dates and timings meant I had no choice but to visit on Boxing Day. Normally you’d avoid a park on a public holiday in the middle of summer, but my fears were unfounded and it turned out to be “busy” but not unbearable, helped a bit by the operations being good. I drove down from Taree that morning so didn’t get there till about 11. First impressions, wow the trees have certainly grown a bit. If there is an award for the nicest looking car park, Jamberoo gets it. In fact, the park as whole is well hidden. The boundary is surrounded by a line of trees, so you see none of it until the entrance to the car park. I headed in, avoided the crowds by getting the lockers near the mini golf / pizza place and actually started on Taipan. Last time i was here they only had left side running, so made sure I did the right with the helix instead. Similar comments as my last visit, its quite a fast slide and quite lengthy so it feels like a bit of a space warp. It doesn’t wash wildly onto the walls like Mammoth Falls. Due to its tucked away location it was a walk on. Right, time to take on Velocity Falls. At first I was wondering how they spent $10m on a mat racer and a couple of drop slides, but really it's an entire major new area with pathways everywhere, literal mountains moved for earthworks, several new bridges, and even 10 ‘luxe’ type cabanas that more resembled a proper caravan park type cabin than a picnic shelter. Yeah the plants need to grow in and yeah some minor things need to be finished, but judging by the rest of the park it'll look very lush in a couple of years. Heaps of rockwork, and even some waterfalls running underneath (The bridge for the bobsled also doubles as a footbridge) Stinger Twist is a skybox drop slide like wedgie, but it is followed by a few enclosed twists and turns down the hill, not unlike the River Rapids at WnW. Surprisingly less intense than i expected, after the initial helix, it actually peters out a bit and you do the rest of the turns at a steady pace. Not much water spraying in your face either so thats a plus. If you've ridden Wedgie you’ll know it can be quite full on with its forces, this one is more moderate. Stinger Bump is the other one and is more just a very drawn out speed slide. This one seemed to throw an absurd amount of spray up so ended up riding half squinting all the way down until eventually there was a bit more water around me, indicating i had reached the runout. Couldn’t really feel the drops because they were so gradual. Both slides had about a 20 min wait. They are popular with thrillseekers, though obviously capacity is limited. They did seem to have an issue with people getting in the wrong queue (and lifeguards would constantly make announcements to the queue to tell you to make sure you are in the right line), and having two similarly coloured slides doesn’t help. I’d suggest extra signs and stencils every few metres along the queue to help, to supplement the sign at the front of the queue. Octo Racer (Why did they pick sea creatures for the ride names in a waterfall themed area?) is a highlight. Excellent capacity, they were operating in a common sense manner starting one race as soon as the previous one had crossed the finish line (Plenty of time for people to clear out before others reached the bottom). The intermediate open air “rally points” sort of don't work since they are so short, so you seldom see other competitors, especially if they are more than a few body lengths ahead or behind. It’s not really until the final stretch where you see everyone at once. The enclosed sections are good. I preferred starting from the ‘middle’ lanes, because the helix on those lanes gets tighter towards the bottom so a sense of increasing force and speed and It gets even faster in the twister section. Also have to give credit for the little things. It has a good timing system, with beeps, not just lights, and it gives you your time in addition to your placing. The start tubs are nicely designed, positioned at waist height so you can lean into them instead of crashing onto your chest. Ended up doing 4 laps, trying each relative lane position from the middle to the edge. The last new slide I had to tackle was Perfect Storm. The line was huge, stretching a good 50m down the hill from the load area. Again, high capacity saves the day. The park had four staffers at the top. Two pulling rafts off the belt and two loaders, so they were more or less able to send people down as quickly as they would load, so the line moved quite fast and was probably only 20-30 mins. It helps too that the queue line is really nice, with trees on both side, so its very shady. As for the slide, it's surprisingly rapid fire. Normally these tornadoes with long lead ins can be a bit lumbering as you make your way around the turns an helices. On this, you drop almost immediately into the first funnel, a brief S bend leads into the next funnel, and from that its pretty much a straight away into the big drop, so it wastes no time at all really. My 2nd ride was in a fully loaded raft so crazy airtime, and almost a little scary since it felt like we were headed towards the pointy end with too much speed. In fact the final helix is very fast too, you can expecct to bank high. The main letdown is that the big funnel had none of the thunder and lighting SFX, and wasn't all that dark. Still a good ride, but I would have liked to have ridden it in its prime. At least the outside looks cool, and quite impressive how much stuff that structure could take. Also, was the school bus in the theming supposed to be a South Park reference? Surprisingly, the line for Perfect Storm was only slightly longer than Funnel Web. Yeah Perfect Storm is better, but not that much better would you believe. Jamberoo Express is a trackless train that does a lap around the park, even running steeply up the hill along a high road behind Taipan, Velocity falls and Perfect Storm. The driver commented they are getting a more powerful engine, since the current one struggles a bit with the hills. We had to stop a couple of times to make sure it didnt overheat. The park has evidently spent heaps on roads up here, since there are full on concrete bridges at a couple of points. Was hoping to get some shots of the rides, but the trees they have planted obscure most of them. A good problem to have I guess? I did one go on the Bobsled to reaquaint myself The main wait seemed to be for the chair lift, but the Advanced track itself was quite empty (Most seemed to be going on the beginner track and it was hilarious seeing the number of slow riders with 7 or 8 people backed up behind) It's good how the park actively discourages slow people from using it. It seemed the top area was a bit of a bottleneck. The line for the easy track seemed to block the hard track, which meant the capacity of the hard track wasn't being used that efficiently. Was good for me though since i could do a no brakes run to the bottom, and it's a pretty good run overall. The new tunnel under the walkway to top of Velocity falls is a real headchopper, but you lose a bit of speed on the new bridge. I'm not sure why I skipped Rapid River last time I was at the park, but I'm glad I did it this time! The park was enforcing a single lap policy, so it was only about 5 mins to line up and get a tube. It's the nicest lazy river in Australia, heavily shaded by mature trees, and a few elements on the way. From the entry point you drift past some low fountains that shoot across the channel. No avoiding these and plenty of giggles from everyone. On a long straight section you pass over some spa bubblers, which dont really generate much movement but do tickle your feet. The course is built up against a hillside, so the best part is a cave, which also features a wave generator. Holes in the ceiling have water trickling down through, much like rainwater seeping into sinkhole. Finally, you pass a set of cascades running into the channel, so drift towards these if you want to get wet. Went for a dip in Outback Bay, its rather quite shallow, even 2/3 of the way out you can touch the bottom. Credit to them for playing the Boxing Day test on the big screen! I decided to close out on the one freefall attraction I haven't ridden in Aus. The Rock. Slight nerves on this one, but hey, if little kids are jumping off so could I. I built up to the 5m jump by doing the little drop slide that's 2m up first. Anyhow, it's not too bad, over quicker than you expect, and very refreshing! Overall, Jamberoo is a great place. The whole day felt hassle free. In the space of 5 hours (had to leave at 4pm) i managed 13 attractions, which wasn't too bad considering I was just ambling along amongst the crowds. It's clear capacity is a huge focus, staff were good and the park feels nicely presented and easily the best landscaped in the country.

Skara Sommarland 17th of July The day after I went to Tusenfryd I went to Skara Sommarland. The park is about 120km east of Gothenburg (Where Liseberg is located) https://www.parkz.com.au/attraction/skara-sommarland This park was sort of a 50-50 for me in terms of dedicating holiday time. The main reason to go here to to try Tranan, the worlds only S&S Free Fly coaster, but the park also has a few cool Proslides too, so i decided to give it a few hours. Wouldn’t necessarily be for everyone. I didn't actually do a whole lot here, most of the rides are fairly generic, but still there was enough to keep me busy. To get here you can get a train to Skovde (From Gothenburg) and then a bus to the park. Sweden actually has good buses. You’ll see coaches that form part of the local transport system and covered under the same fares that supplement the normal urban buses, and they run at a usable frequency, eg about every hour. Only hiccup was the day was a Sunday, so trains start later, and I could only get to the park about an hour after opening. Not that it was really a problem. First impressions is that the place reminded me of a bigger version of Adventure park geelong, lots of open lawns and picnic areas, a few lakes, with a smattering of amusement rides and water slides. They also had cable water skiing and some go kart tracks, so its definitely more amusement park than theme park. The presentation was ok, they’ve done up some parts, but it still feels like an older park. I started off with Spinner. This is a Maurer spinning coaster back before they produced the XC2000 with its overbanked turns and cool stuff. It’s more like a normal wild mouse, but lacking any sort of steep drops. Good bit of spinning, but otherwise nothing to write home about. Up next was Tranan. I’m glad I got to ride it since I don’t think another one will ever be built, except maybe if a random park in China decides it wants one. The gimmick is that its kind of like a wing coaster, but the seats stay level like on a suspended coaster / 7 dwarves mine train, so the track can do twists and run inverted or upright, and the cars themselves never go upside down. In particular the twists are interesting because one side of the car goes ‘over the top’ and the other sweeps underneath. You sit in shallow seats with a seat belt that locks electronically. Overall, it’s “okay” Temporarily delving into some physics, but because the seats are so far off the heartline of the coaster, it makes some of the sensations of the ride feel a bit weird and awkward, rather than the “free fly” it purports to be. You imagine the car going around a corner at a certain speed. The seats on the outside are going around a wider radius, so go ‘faster’, and likewise the seats on the inside follow a smaller radius and go ‘slower’. Its a bit like when you are on a classic Whip ride and get that jerk of acceleration when you go around the pulley at the end. So because of this you feel lurching like the train is hitting a brake, or accelerating suddenly whenever you reach a turn, and the swinging car is a bit wobbly. The layout is a few back to back turns and a couple of twists, so you well and truly can experience what the ride can do. For example see this pic of the first drop. Immediatley after coming off the first drop you feel like you slow down straight away in the inside seats because its almost like you are pivoting and turning on the spot. The outside on the other hand feels way faster. So its still fun, an interesting gimmick and mechanically impressive, but doesn’t necessarily result in an enhanced ride experience. Temper your expectations I got changed and headed into the water park. Yep you heard right, there’s an outdoor seasonal water park in a place with a harsh snowy winter, so it makes it even more laughable when people said Melbourne was too cold for water parks. The water was heated, but it still felt a teensy bit cool. They had a nice cloakroom rather than lockers which was a godsend considering i had my luggage. They had a couple of those old school concrete slides (Like Mountain Rapids at AW or Krakatoas at Blue Lagoon) Quite lengthy and interesting, with a few bumps and pools. Big Drop is a trap door freefall slide, but was interesting in that it went through an underground tunnel. I like freefall slides so another winner. The Snakepit is a group of 3 generic proslide bodyslides. Proslide put a fair bit of kick into these, and they are pretty darn intense, particularly the green enclosed one. The Racer is a 4 lane racer, A bit of a hold up at the top when a little kid freaked out when confronted with the view from the top and the prospect of riding head first, and then the Dad tried to convince the kid to go. Sheesh if the kid doesn’t want to go, then don’t waste time upsetting them by trying to force it. Good air on the dips by employing professional riding methods. There was a Tornado Wave called Cobra but skipped that one. The other one I wanted to try was Waka Waka, a really long raft slide with 4 of those proslide flying Saucer Elements. They are totally a gimmick of course since all they do is provide a slightly nicer view out of the slide on the turns, but overall it’s still an objectively good slide due to the ballistic pacing and force you get on the back to back turns. And it’s looooong. I was done with the water park so grabbed a bite at the water park cafe and headed back into the dry park. The queues on Tranan had dropped off so I did a couple more goes on that to cement my opinions on it and make the most of what would likely be my only time to ever ride it. They also had Snake. I love these high speed booster flat rides, but this one was spiced up with an additional arm that makes the circular rotation more irregular, so sometimes you do a big circle, and sometimes an extra tight one with some force. At only 8 per cycle the queue moved a bit slow, but I got some relief when they called for a single rider. Had a stroll around and looked at the rest of the park. The last coaster was Gruvbanan, a mack powered coaster. The coaster is about 3 helices and some turns. One of the helices is in a big shed but it doesn’t really make it dark inside. The ride is built on a mound, with the queue cutting through in a trench underneath, so you walk through a long gold mine to reach the station, so points for them making that effort. With time to kill till the next bus I did another lap on Spinner and a couple more on Tranan since it was down to a walk on at this point. So overall, the park is pleasant enough, but I would only really bother if you are uber curious about Tranan. Otherwise, it’s nothing you wouldn’t have seen before. Check out all the photos here: https://www.parkz.com.au/search/photos/location/skara-sommarland

For a laugh, last weekend myself and @Luke did a "water slide crawl" around a few aquatic centers in Melbourne to try a few new proslide and whitewater attractions. We didn't do all the substantial aquatic centers, but still got to try a few unique ones. If you're a Victorian, and Funfields/Gumbuya just isn't enough, and want to kill a couple of hours one weekend, this is a cheap fun activity. We started at Aquapulse Werribee, which has a Proslide Pipeline , as well as a Tornado 24 / Behemoth Bowl 40 hybrid. The raft slide was pretty pedestrian...Cut Snake at WWW is more intense, though it did have a small drop at the end with a small pop of air. What you see is what you get, with a couple of figure 8s. The hybrid slide was much better. The Tornado section did seem to lose speed a lot quicker than other ones, it seemed to gather a lot more water at the bottom, which made it a little rough, and after a couple of oscillations you'd come to a near halt. The other half was better, particularly when riding backwards, with a bit of a head rush/dizziness in the helix, and more speed in the bowl compared to the quite frankly sluggish Double Bowlseye in Sydney. A steep drop out of the bowl makes for an exciting finish. I've ridden the double Tornado 24 at Watermarc in Greensbourough, and I thought that one had the better funnels. The next stop was Aquanation in Ringwood. This turned out to be the most expensive....All of the centres cost about $9 to get in, but this one charged another $8 or so to use the slides. This one has a Twister enclosed bodyslide, and a Skybox drop slide with a 360 helix. Both of theme were fairly comfortable., but we were getting some shoulder blade marks by the end. The skybox slide felt a little less intense than the wedgie. When you ride, it's bizzare, and you don't notice the steepness of the helix. When you ride it feels more like you are going around a flat turn. The body slide was good fun, but gets pretty wild towards the end, owing to a fairly short recovery distance between one turn and the next, so you'd be coming into the wall of the next turn at a somewhat oblique angle, causing some strong forces and a fair bit of water thrown across you. The final stop was Frankston PARC. We had to laugh when the promotional screens at reception, on their loop of media, had one screen that said something along the lines of "Sometimes staff make mistakes, we are only human, please do not yell at staff". Truly, we were in Frankston. This place has both a Constrictor slide, and an Aquasphere / Python fusion slide from Whitewater West (A Python is one size up from the Rattler seen at Gumubya/WnW Sydney) The Constrictor only had a couple of the actual constrictor elements, so it didn't stack up to the intensity of the one in Sydney. Just as it was picking up speed, it was over, nor was it as dark. The back seat is the better one on this, because you get a bit of a "flick"/drifting type sensation in the helices. The Python slide has had a chequered history. Originally it was three aquaspheres on this ride, but a number of injuries shortly after opening led to its closure. Now there is just one sphere, and the rest of the slide was rebuilt, with the Python element as the new ending. You can just see the aquasphere element below, sort of looking like a soccer ball. The operations here were a bit of a clusterf, with a single harried staff member trying to run both slides, with what was quite obviously a complex procedural process. Each rider had to be weighed every time, and the raft had to be secured with snap on carabiners and cables to hold it in place at the start tub, and then released for dispatch. Neither ride was anywhere near running at capacity. What was cool is that they had one of those vertical raft conveyors, so neither slide required you carry a raft up. So, the Python. This thing is unique. It's the most camp thing ever to start with, owing to being fitted with a control panel at the start where you can pick your sound track and lighting pattern We heard plenty of American surf guitar tunes, "it's raining men" and jingle bells during our rides. The lights were neither here nor there, just a few colour changing led spotlights. As for the slide, the aquasphere part is wild, and you practically go vertical on the first one. I can see how this would have been crazy if there were three in a row. On some rides, the water builds up behind you in the first tunnel, so when you drop into to the sphere and climb the wall, the water behind you rushes in just as you are coming back down, and whack! you get swamped. The following twists and turns are all in the dark and felt a little bumpy between the seams, so you get a bit of a bottom massage. The final python element is pretty wild too, with a steep drop in, and fairly sustained oscilations as you move down the chamber, right to the end. Again, the water that builds up behind your raft follows you into the main chamber, but instead what happens is that it the mass of water just misses you, goes up the wall and is thrown over itself in a tsunami, which is pretty spectacular to watch. So thats our day, to sum up the Werribee slides are quite and enjoyable and refined, the ones at Ringwood are good, but perhaps not the best value for money. The Frankston ones have that wild WTF factor about them.

This article appeared in today's Hervey Bay Independent Newspaper... The full article can be found online here: http://theindy.com.a...revive-tourism/ As a local I will endeavour to bring any updates as they come to hand. The backlash from the NIMBY lot as well as local Indigenous elders has already started, but with a council keen to boost local tourism this could go ahead. The 1 year deadline seems a little ambitious though. For the record the proposed site is an abandoned caravan park so claims of cultural significance or wildlife preservation that have been made this morning are nonsense. Fingers crossed common sense prevails as the area badly needs an attraction like this.