Days 63 & 64 - Rides and Rollercoasters!

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Our internet is being pretty rubbish once again, and won't let us upload any of our pictures from the last couple of days, so we will try and get them on as soon as we can! Anyway, on with our adventures:

Yesterday, we woke up pretty early at about 6:30am, knowing that we had a pretty full day ahead of us at Busch Gardens. The reason for the early start was that we first had to walk the 30 minutes or so to Universal Studios so that we could catch the free shuttle bus from there to Busch Gardens at 8:30am. We had our breakfast as usual, got washed and ready, and set out from our room at about 8:00am. We walked all the way to Universal and arrived just in time to see our bus pull into the parking area, quickly hopping on board once we had crossed the road. The bus driver informed us that it would take just over an hour to get to Busch Gardens, so we sat back and rested the entire way - occasionally drifting into a brief sleep.

We finally reached Busch Gardens at about 9:45am (the park didn't open until 10:00am), and waited at the entrance until we were allowed to enter, grabbing a park map while we waited. Eventually the staff came to let us in, and after inspecting the map, made our way to the newest coaster at the park - 'Cheetah Chase'. From the look of the parking area, it wasn't going to be a massively busy day, so we had pretty high hopes of getting on the ride fairly quickly. As we got to the ride, it became apparent that there was pretty much no queue at all, and we walked pretty much straight on to the front row of the ride. It was actually a really fun coaster, it starts with a rolling-launch, with another 2-3 launches positioned at various points on the 3/4 mile track, with high peaks and troughs, as well as a heartline roll too, all at a pretty decent 60mph - not bad!

After leaving the ride, and taking another look at the map, we headed to another one of the park's famous coasters - 'Montu' - which is an inverted one like Nemesis at Alton Towers. once again, we hoped the queue wouldn't be too big, and were happy to find that we could once again walk straight on, this time to the back row, so that we could experience the full speed of the ride. It was very fast and disorienting (as these type of coasters usually are), and was much longer than we expected - we noticed later on the park map that this is actually one of the world's longest inverted roller coasters.

We were on a bit of a roll now, so we decided that we should get all of the five main roller coasters done whilst the queues seemed pretty non-existant. We headed next to 'Gwazi', which was a large wooden roller coaster. After our experience on 'El Toro' at Six Flags, we had pretty high expectations of this, although we weren't too sure whether it would be as fast. Once again, we were able to walk straight on, where they were just running the one side (when it's busier, there is a 'lion' side and a 'tiger' side and the trains race against each other on a twin track). We got onto the 'lion' train right at the back again, and set off up the lift hill. Unfortunately, this ride was quite a lot more rough than 'El Toro' and not quite as fast! We were thrown around as we went over the hills, our lap bars (which were initally fairly loose) got tighter over the duration of the ride, and we seemed to be able to feel every bit of track that we passed over! Thankfully, the trains were pretty well-padded, but we weren't sure whether we wanted to ride that one again - not if we still wanted a spine anyway!

We left the ride (laughing at our ride photo in which we are kind of laughing but with a clear look of pain on our faces!) and headed in the direction of the next ride - Busch Garden's dive coaster; 'Sheikra'. On the way there, we walked through lots of jungle-themed areas (the whole park is themed on different areas of Africa) and past some of the animal enclosures, containing animals such as alligators, turtles, birds and wallabies. We were soon under the shadow of 'Sheikra', which is similar to 'Oblivion' at Alton Towers in that it has a 90 degree vertical drop, but this one drops you from a much higher height (200ft), before looping upside down, soaring around some more track and then dropping you vertically once again! We walked around the queue and once again, there was no queue at all, and we got straight onto the front row. The ride was really fun, and it holds you for quite some time over the edge of the first, larger drop (as Oblivion used to, although it doesn't really do this anymore for some reason). We enjoyed it so much that we decided to go on it again, with the ride ops allowing us to stay on the ride as there was nobody waiting in the queue!

After our re-ride, it was time to ride the last of the main roller coasters in the park - 'Kumba'. We walked over, again passing a few animal enclosures (this park is a mix of theme park and zoo, which is pretty cool) before eventually reaching the entrance. To our delight, once again there was no queue at all, so we decided to wait one train so that we could ride on the front row. This one is a more generic steel roller coaster, riding on the top of the tracks, but once again was much longer than the roller coasters that we are used to riding, with plenty of loops, corkscrews, rolls and spirals throughout, and was also really smooth. Again, we were able to re-ride as there was no queue, so we moved to the back row to see if the experience was any different. It felt a little faster, and was just as enjoyable as our first ride.

By this time, it was around 11:45am, and we had already done all of the main rides - some of them more than once! We decided to start looking for somewhere to eat, so after checking our park map, we headed in the direction of one of the cafes. We weren't QUITE hungry yet, so we first went to an area called 'Jungula'. This mainly consisted of lots of climbing nets, bridges, crawl tubes and rope bridges that both adults and children could make their way around, which took you over and near to a few different animal enclosures. As we entered the area, we noticed a sign pointing to an attraction called 'Jungle Flyers', so we walked up some steps to the ride, which was basically a zipline that took you over the area below before going backwards to the platform. It was a bit of a kiddy ride, and was a little short, but it was quite fun anyway! We then made our way around the 'treetops trails', climbing up a large spiral net with holes at each level to pull yourself through, then through the many climbing nets and tunnels, and over the rope bridges. On our way through, we passed a netted area where loads of MASSIVE bats (called flying foxes) were hanging upside down asleep. After a while, we made our way back down and walked over to the cafe.

We both had fish and chips (which turned out to be more like a fish flatter, with four pieces of breaded fish each - they were kind of like giant fish fingers), and we sat at a table under the shade while we ate, with lots of birds eyeing up our meals as we ate! Once we had eaten all that we could, we decided to let our food go down had a look around the other animal enclosures at the park. We went first to the nearby Orangutan habitat, where a couple of them were sitting right next to the glass but not really showing any interest in the people trying to get their attention! We then went to the tiger enclosure, where we saw one of the tigers sitting there, sucking on its own tail! We assume that it was some sort of comfort thing, probably from when it used to feed from its mother (or a bottle if it was hand-reared!). In an enclosure opposite, there were some more tigers, two of which were white (one of them was a little cross-eyed, which was cute!) and another which looked like a cross between a white tiger and a more traditional orange bengal tiger. We figured that these were likely to be the male tigers, and the other tigers opposite to be the female ones, as these tigers were constantly coming right up the window, trying to get a look in to the tigers which they could see in the window opposite - allowing us to get some great upclose photos of them, and to say that we have literally stared a tiger in the face, just a couple of inches away!

We next went to the elephant habitat, where the elephants had all thrown plenty of dirt on their heads/backs to try and keep cool (it was a hot one today!) and were now just standing around, munching on some hay. We then headed to the 'Serengeti Express Train' station, as we had noticed on the map that the train passed through all of the larger animal habitats (similar to those found at a safari park). We got to the station, where we had to wait around 15 minutes for the next train to arrive. Once on there, we were told that the round trip would take around 35 minutes altogether, which sounded good to us - our feet were getting a little tired! We relaxed as we were given a tour of the park, with a man providing lots of information about the park, the rides and the different animals that we passed. We went past animals such as ostriches, rhinos (one of which looked like it was getting ready to charge at the train - thankfully, it didn't!), giraffes, zebra, and a few different types of antelope.

We eventually reached the station once again (there were a few other stations around the park where we could have got off, but we decided to do the full round trip), and we got off onto the platform and exited through the station. We noticed a sign saying 'Myombe Reserve' just opposite, so we walked over, finding that it consisted of a gorilla and a chimpanzee enclosure. Most of the apes were just sitting around in the sun, and one of the large, silverback gorillas looked a little lost in his own thoughts, with his head resting on his hands in a very human-like fashion!

We were quite close to 'Cheetah Hunt' by this point, and as we enjoyed it so much the first time round, we decided to ride it once again. We noticed that this time there would be a queue of around 15 minutes, which we agreed wasn't too bad for peak time - especially as it appeared that one of the loading stations appeared to have broken, so they were only able to unload/load one train at once, which pretty much doubled the queue time. We eventually reached the front of the queue, where we got onto the back row of the train. It felt a little faster at the back, and we were impressed with the length of the ride - it's almost a mile long, so it seems to last ages! We got off the ride and took a few photos of the cheetah enclosure, which is just below/next to the ride.

We had another check of our park map, and noticed that there was an area where there were a couple of smaller rides that we hadn't yet done. One of these was called 'Sand Serpent', and was like a 'Wild Mouse' ride, with the cars racing around the corners so that you are thrown to the side - it hurt a little, but was pretty funny anyway! We also went to a small roller coaster called 'Scorpion' which had a loop and a few corkscrews, however, as we entered the queueline we noticed that the last train seemed to have got stuck as it made its way back to the loading platform. We waited a little while to see if they could get it moving (there were still people on it waiting to get off), but from the pathetic noises that were coming from it, it didn't look like it would be going any time soon, so we decided not to waste anymore time waiting for it!

Instead, we headed back over to 'Sheikra' to re-ride it once again. Like before, we were able to get straight onto the ride without queueing at all, and we were soon flying down the steep drops. Once we had got off, it was approaching 4:30pm, and we knew that we had to be back at the bus stop by 6pm to catch our bus, so we didn't really have a lot more time left. We checked our map and noticed that there were some bumper cars fairly close to us, so we spent the next few minutes trying to bash into each other in our little cars (there were others on the ride too by the way - it wasn't just us driving around!), which is always fun!

We then caught a cable car back over to the other side of the park, where we got some photos of all of the roller coasters around the park as we passed them. We got off at the other end and noticed that someone was doing a talk at the cheetah enclosure. To our surprise, we noticed that there was a dog in there, which we then found out was the best friend of an eight month old cheetah cub that was out - the other cheetahs had been moved elsewhere whilst these two could have a play. We listened as we learned that the two had been paired up when they were both babies - the dog was only 10 months old - and they were now best buddies and loved playing with each other. However, today seemed like a bit of an off day - the dog and cheetah spent most of their time at opposite ends of the enclosure, with the dog sniffing around and eating grass, whilst the cheetah was lying down at the other end, looking a little bored! We couldn't see the cheetah from where we were, so we walked around to the other end, where we saw him just behind a glass window. As we took photos of him, there was a crazy old lady, plastered in heavy make-up, talking in a heavy New York accent (if any of you have seen 'Friends', she sounded EXACTLY like Joey's agent/manager), saying what a big boy he was, how he was growing up so fast, and how she used to watch him as he slept when he was younger! She appeared to be on her own (everyone else was looking a little weirded out by her too!), and was probably a perfectly nice old lady, but it was still a little creepy!

We walked towards the exit of the park, and made our way towards the bus stop, where we could see our bus pulled up at the stop. We got on and it eventually set off right on time at 6pm, arriving back at Universal Studios at around 7:15pm. We then had to walk the half a mile or so back to the hotel, stopping off at Walgreens for some snacks for our tea, and eventually collapsed onto the bed once we got to our room - our feet throbbing and aching from all of the walking that we had done today! We spent the rest of the night watching TV, eventually falling to sleep at around 11:30pm.

Today, we woke up at about 8:00am with the intentions of being ready to set out at about 10:00am. We did the usual; breakfast, wash, get dressed, packed our bag etc, and were out at pretty much the time we had aimed for, making our way on foot to the entrance to Universal Studios, where we planned to spend a portion of the day. We won't bore you too much with the details, as we did the same as when we visited last week, riding the coasters (most of them twice in a row as the park was pretty quiet), and watching the 'Animal Actors' show again, getting a few videos of the animals doing their tricks.By about 1:30pm we were pretty hungry so went back out onto CityWalk to get a bite to eat, deciding that we had done all we wanted to do at Universal Studios, and that we should pop to the park next door - Islands of Adventure.

Once again, we won't go into detail, it's all the same as when we went before really. We rode our favourite rides, one again most of them twice in a row, although Emma did go on 'Forbidden Journey' on her own, as it made Craig feel sick last time - thankfully there was a single rider queue so she went straight past the 20 minute normal queue and walked straight onto the ride! We also went inside the 'ollivanders Wand Shop', where there was a small show, where a girl was picked from the group and recreating the moment that Harry Potter's wand 'chose' him - trying out a few different wands in the process with disastrous results! We also took some photos in the 'Dragon Challenge' queueline, taking pictures of things such as Hagrid's Hut, the Weasley's car, the Goblet of Fire, the Triwizard cup, som dragon eggs and the floating candles in the rooms that we passed in the queueline. Eventually, at about 5:00pm we decided to call it a day and make our way back to the hotel to rest our feet. We eventually made it back by about 5:45pm and ate some crisps/snacks for tea. Emma spent a while talking to her family on Skype (though video wouldn't work due to our terrible internet), and since then we've just chilled watching T.V and playing on the netbook. We don't plan to do much tomorrow, so we'll probably combine that blog entry with the one for the following day.

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