Zoosafari Fasanolandia

Fasano, Puglia, Italy – Sunday, April 25th, 2010

As soon as I stepped off the train I discovered I had stepped into a scene from The Godfather. Stone walls and chipped plaster houses with wrought-iron balconies and arched doorways filled the foreground as a Mediterranean sun baked the burnt sienna earth while the slightest of breezes made the tall brown grass and emerald green Cyprus trees lazy bow back and forth. Everything was silent as if it were time for the midday siesta, although I half expected a black Studebaker to come ripping down the road shattering the quiet at any moment, Tommy guns ablazin’. The walk from the train station to the small village of Fasano and then to Zoosafari Fasanolandia would take over an hour, and while it might have been a reasonable idea to call a cab, there was no need to hurry and was perhaps an ideal location to spend a warm, clear Sunday afternoon.

Despite the relative serenity of Fasano, by the time I made it to the gates of Fasanolandia I discovered a surprisingly large quantity of automobiles lined up to gain admission to either the amusement park or the Zoosafari wild animal drive-thru park. The entrance ticket was a very reasonable €8, although the hostess explained to me it only allows for six rides on just the Fasanolandia side of the park, which was slightly frustrating. Not because of this slightly strange admission scheme which I was aware of long before my visit and was fine with (you can buy more individual ride tickets for €2 each), but because I placed my order in what I thought was convincingly spoken Italian and yet without even a moment’s hesitation she replied to me in English. Was it really that obvious?

Fasanolandia is a very unique park in terms of geography as the entire premises are built into the side of a large hill (which in Michigan we’d call a mountain, but it’s all relative). This can mean a bit more physical exertion to get around the midways, but it also makes for a much more interesting presentation. When first entering the gates, it’s difficult to see beyond the rides and shops immediately in front of you, but as you get further back in the park (and thus further up the hill) you’ll find that not only can you see the entire smorgasbord of candy-colored carnival rides laid out beneath you, but you can see for miles overlooking the town and the surrounding rural areas. Very cool. Plenty of shade trees were present along the midways, which have almost an exact opposite feel to them as found at Miragica; low-budget and non-themed, they’re nevertheless very eclectic having been built and remolded piece-by-piece over the years, and the illogical approach to just putting rides wherever they can fit (made extra challenging by the topography) without any sort of larger plan means there’s always with something new to discover around each corner. The result was something I had been sorely missing at the other three Italian theme parks I had visited (especially the high-quality but generic approach at Mirabilandia), which was that this was a park that could not be located anywhere else in the world besides Italy.

The first ride of my day ended up being the Spinning Madness roller coaster by Fabbri, a model I was not familiar with, the main curiosity being the split lift hill. While the lift was nothing to write home about, the rest of the ride proved to be rather intense for a spinning coaster. The car rarely got going like a top but it did seem to change orientation at unpredictable times (perhaps due to a greater imbalance around the pivot point?), and combined the harsh laterals on some of the switchbacks I had a surprisingly wild ride, especially as I was not hanging onto the handlebars but instead my camera to capture the below POV footage.

Up to the time I had crested the lift of the Spinning Madness, it was still a toss-up if the new for 2010 (formerly new for 2009, formerly “…” 2008) Gerstlauer Eurofighter would be another coaster I could notch off on my worldwide list. A few months before I sent an email to the park asking if it would be open by May, and the reply I got back was a vague, “we hope so, but the governmental redtape is a real bitch” (not a direct quote). When I finally had a clear survey of the back of the park from on top of this first coaster I didn’t see any signs of the signature tower in the back of the park, but I went to investigate further anyway. Advertisements for the new coaster are still present, but not only was no operating coaster present, there weren’t any evident signs that ground had even been broken. According to the map it’s supposed to be in the back of the park between the rapids/flume ride and a drop tower, but it wasn’t even evident how it would fit in this narrow strip currently occupied by an asphalt pathway. Unless the status of construction has changed since my visit I’ll hazard a guess that 2011 is iffy for an opening date as well. Looks like we have a contender for the coveted title of the “Flying Turns of Europe”. With this coaster out of the picture I felt less guilty about using one of my six tickets to sample the children’s wacky worm coaster Bruco Miniottovolante, which I also grabbed a hotly anticipated POV video for.

After grabbing a lunch I discovered a hiking nature trail winding its way up the back side of the mountain, an original feature to any park. Getting away from the noise of the midways the trail provided both shade, information about the local flora and fauna which my four months of Italian lessons couldn’t entirely comprehend but was good practice anyway, and to the delight of my inner twelve year old, many different species of lizard darting from my wake, a few hesitating just long enough to let me snap a picture. After twenty minutes of walking the trail finally circled back to the park, where I embarked on ride number three, the Ruota Panoramica Ferris Wheel. Despite being a small fairground model, the views afforded by its hillside location were worth more than just a few pictures.

It had been a while until I had done a bigger thrill attraction, and the nearby Montagne Russe was my answer. The coaster is just an ordinary Zyklon Galaxy model, made slightly more interesting by the fact that they were unable to build it on even ground so half the structure is supported by stilts or other buildings around 15 to 20 feet off the ground. There’s not too much to comment upon the ride itself, as is often the case with older coaster layouts such as this where the emphasis was functionality and the designers more constrained by their engineering limitations rather than creative limitations. They’re sort of beyond the standard analysis of what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in a coaster; it simply is. And that’s what I enjoyed about this one in particular, the flimsy single car plummeting down hills and building momentum around long downward helices, it gives a true sense of what a coaster at its most basic disposition is about, the sense of coasting precariously along tracks over space and time. So many of the ambitious modern coasters, whether I love them or hate them, I find can sometimes remove me from the reality of the experience and it’s like flying through the subconscious. Occasionally all I need is a shaky rusting track beneath me to remind me that what my senses are experiencing are, to some degree, real. This isn’t a recommendation, simply a reflection.

The final coaster to check off my list was another production model design, although this one had a more dubious distinction for being the only one of its kind ever produced before parks had the good sense that it may not have been of the highest quality: Mirage Rosso. This Fabbri inverted design features three rows of three abreast, making this the only 9-seater train I can think of in the world. Two trains ran on the track, and despite the limited number of rides each patron was afforded there was something of a wait for it nevertheless. From the moment we crest the lift hill to the moment we hit the brakes, everything about this coaster is so hilariously wrong… thankfully it wasn’t also so painfully wrong (at least not that much). A curving first drop leads into some sort of non-inverting inclined loop, and after that the only engineer in employment at Fabbri with even the remotest inkling of what the path of a naturally falling body should look like realized he probably wasn’t going to get paid, so he left it to everyone else at the Fabbri plant who based their designs after careful analysis of the roller coasters in a Bug Bunny cartoon. A flat banked s-curve with a trim brake leads into a 100ft. long downhill straight piece of track which remains banked at about 30° because they couldn’t figure out how to unbank it between the bordering left hand curves. Another helical spiral leads into a second block brake run (this one still banked slightly from the helix) which brings the train to a near halt. Compelling some to pump our legs to help it get enough momentum through the upper part of the helix finale, in the last three seconds of the ride it finally gets enough speed diving back to ground level and then it crashes into the final brake run. Thanks are to the Almighty and Perfect Creator, who in His infinite wisdom blessed the designers at Fabbri with at least the intelligence to not attempt style points with an inversion, as that surely would have resulted in the early arrival of the apocalypse. The awful engineering seems offset by a conservative layout that recognizes their own limits, so it’s only like watching a Mystery Science Theater 3000 film in that it’s so bad it’s good.

With Mirage Rosso I had checked off the last coaster-to-do on my list but I still had one hole of my six left to punch on my admission ticket. I contemplated giving one of the coasters a second go, but somehow I felt that would have marginal benefit and I’d be better off with another unique experience. A couple flat rides grabbed my attention, but in the end I decided the log flume African River would be my best option, appearing to have a decently long layout with several drops and lifts utilizing a couple levels of the hillside. As I recall this was a fine choice despite the ten minute wait, although nothing worth extra mention was found along its course so I guess its review will end with this period.

Before leaving I had a look around what animal exhibits were available to Fasanolandia-only ticket holders, and they had most of the usual suspects holed up in concrete enclosures; a few big cats, a few big birds, and a few primates. The gibboni were particularly interesting to watch, performing for their large audience an impressive jungle gym act flinging around from bar to bar, occasionally stopping to wait for an applause. After taking some video I finally needed to start my long walk back to the train station to return to Bari, where I would be returning to Rome later that night after only a minor delay. On the whole Fasanolandia was a charming place to have visited for an afternoon, although I doubt I’ll be rushing out to make a return visit, even if they should ever happen to get their Eurofighter built.

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