Malton, Yorkshire, England, UK – Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
I’ve always had a difficult time ‘accepting’ African themed parks, more so than other overused themes such as the old west or science fiction. Part of it might be that it’s identified with an entire natural environment specific to that region of the world rather than man-made objects, so it never really works when the usual gray English overcast weather is omnipresent and all
the trees in the background are all pines. Furthermore there’s less leeway for creative fiction in the African safari park because we know somewhere else in the world at this moment in history we will find the authentic original. You still get certain myths told inside these parks, which wouldn’t be as troubling if we weren’t aware that the version presented to us in the theme park is a grossly naïve romanticization of the real world. Admittedly voodoo and animal spirits make better theme park fodder than poverty and AIDs, but when the attempt is to accurately simulate the African veldt in a lifelike manner then these oversights become a bit more glaring. (However, it could very well possibly be the case that poverty and AIDs are already part of the Yorkshire landscape, in which case the African theme would be highly appropriate. I don’t know much about Yorkshire
except from Monty Python sketches.)
I may have started this report by appearing to give Flamingo Land more credit than it really deserves by describing it as if it were in leagues with other wildlife theme parks such as Busch Gardens Tampa or Disney’s Animal Kingdom. At the same time I want to be careful not to paint a negative picture of the park too early, which I found had a decent collection of rides mixed with nonride experiences. It’s just that the fact is that Flamingo Land is currently in a state of transition from being a carnival rides park to a higher-end theme park. This also makes it a bit harder to place on the spectrum of types of British parks. I’ve noticed that in general there seems to be three types of amusement park one will find on the isle: salty, seaside amusement parks (Blackpool, Great Yarmouth, Adventure Island,
etc.), quaint, rustic countryside parks (Lightwater Valley, Oakwood, Pleasurewood Hills, etc.), and then expensive theme parks owned by Merlin or trying to be like Merlin (Alton Towers, Thorpe, Chessington, Drayton). Flamingo Land was once in the category of the second but starting around the middle of the previous decade they began an attempt to eventually renew themselves within the category of the third by phasing out old rides for new one at a time. It’s a philosophy sympathetic to social mobility that most could agree with for their desire to make something better of themselves through hard work and determination. However, the parts of the park that do represent the investments made under this new philosophy of the management should all be quite agreeable if they’re to represent the building blocks that will eventually form a new park.
I say this all to preface a ride that was one of their first steps to a Brave New Flamingo Land that stands guard near the entrance of the park: Velocity. Opened in 2005 to fill the void of the soon-to-be-departing Schwarzkopf
loopers as Flamingo Land’s
first ‘modern’ coaster, I began to wonder if this was truly a forward step from the primordial chaos of a carnival park to the careful planning and design of a top-rate theme park, or if it wasn’t simply shiny ersatz. A strange design feature required the launch and brake to cross the entry midway, forcing a major thoroughfare to squeeze through a bottleneck set in what seems to be a drainage tunnel. The coaster features a single train of 14 passengers, with evidently no transfer track or even a block brake to hold a second for busier days, which I imagine they might have been expecting if their hopes were to someday become the Busch Gardens of England. The vehicle design is rather strange at first, requiring you to lean forward as if on a Yamaha
motorcycle while a padded brace kicks up from the bottom to secure against your lower back. My personal opinion was that this wasn’t a very comfortable riding arrangement because the forward leaning requires you to be looking up to see forward, and this awkward bend on my neck and back vertebrae was exacerbated when subjected to the unpredictable g-forces of a roller coaster.
Vekoma perhaps realized this limitation so they reeled in their layout to be a rather predictable, forceless affair for the whole ride. The launch feels stronger than I would have anticipated, and a smidgen of weightlessness over the first hill is made more exciting than it otherwise would have been by the unconventional restraints. Everything that follows
is a rather dull, pointless set of helices wrapping over itself on an empty field, with not much felt except for the slop of the cars rattling along the track; after my first ride I was careful to make sure my rear restraining pad didn’t rest too closely against my body because having little wiggle room while being jerked about by your lumbar is not a very pleasant sensation. The layout finishes by running parallel to the launch track with a couple of straight camelback hills, more fun than the preceding helices, if only because one can imagine them being potentially good elements if any airtime were actually present. All in all a somewhat disappointing ride, but hopefully it was just practice as Flamingo Land’s first roller coaster not bought used from the amusement park classifieds or intended for easy disassembly.
‘Tis a shame that two of those coasters that found needing removal to accommodate this new vision were unique Schwarzkopf designs. More perplexing is the other ride that managed to survive the great exodus of 2005 and is in fact still kicking it more than half a decade later, the Vekoma Corkscrew. Maybe since they were still working with Vekoma on their new installations they were able to easily acquire replacement parts to stay running so they figured “what the heck, so long as it keeps paying for itself no harm in keeping our old drinking buddy around?” Indeed, it probably would be advisable to knock a few back before giving the Corkscrew a whirl. I say this having not forgotten my opinion that the other Vekoma corkscrew I had previously been on at Holiday Park was
the dog’s bollocks (yes, I am not mistakenly misusing that idiom).
The key differentiating factor here is that Flamingo Land took it upon themselves to add firm head pads inside the restraints presumably to prevent one’s noggin from getting rattled back and forth by eliminating all excess wiggle room, but this fails to produce any positive benefit since it is the vehicle, not the rider, that is doing all the jolting around in the first place.
Not helping in any way is the deterioration of the ride’s appearance, the white track now sporting a colorful array of grey and brown staining which surely reflects the state of the wheel bogeys that are supposed to smoothly carry us over the track. However, in a stroke of genius Flamingo Land managed to solve any and all problems with this motley attraction
by renaming this section of park as their “Metropolis” theme zone. Aha, now it’s all the better that this corner of the park is evocative of spending a night in the south side of Chicago! It’s keeping ‘in theme’!
Across the concrete lot are two children’s coasters, the older Dragon Coaster and newer Runaway Mine Train; a warning to all the credit collectors out there, they will try to send you around on enough laps with squealing children and parents taking your picture to make sure you will never desire another credit for as long as you live. Moving further back in the park things start to look a bit brighter and cleaner if not that much higher quality when you get to the Wild Mouse, a ride of standard ilk with all the requisite brutal turns and
drop it requires. Eventually you get to the ‘real’ themed zones such as the Seaside Adventure section which seems to be dressed up as a New England coastal town à la Thorpe Park only without any good rides. Of primary interest is the Cliff Hanger, an S&S tower ride. I have not had anything new to say about the last couple of tower rides and this one doesn’t change that, so I will replace any comments on the ride with an unrelated joke that also makes you think. At a meeting of the Oxford department of philosophy and angel suddenly appears and says to the faculty head, “I will grant you whichever of three blessings you choose: Wisdom, Beauty, or ten million pounds.”
Without hesitation the professor chooses Wisdom. There is a flash of lightning and the professor appears transformed, but he just sits there staring down at the table. One of his colleagues whispers, “Say something.”
The professor finally speaks: “I should have taken the money.”
Around the next corner in the Lost Kingdom Reserve does Flamingo Land finally start feeling like a legitimate theme park. Set at opposite ends of a large clean plaza are the park’s two worthwhile roller coasters, hidden behind customized stone entryways and with an abundance of flora. It’s nearly a shame really, because while it’s still a long way off from Orlando’s or even Merlin’s best work, this increase in quality towards the back of the park only reveals how unnecessarily tacky and trivial everything that came
before it was. With “Metropolis” being just artful misdirection to get people (fans, at least) to ignore that it’s still a PoS carnival and not an homage to the Fritz Lang silent film masterpiece (German Expressionism would actually make a pretty kickass theme zone, I think), and Seaside Adventures being pleasant but small and seemingly not in line with the rest of the African theme, they are both rendered nearly negligible by the time you reach the Lost Kingdom rides and the rest of the animal park it connects to. (There are a couple other theme zones but like Metropolis, the “theme” is a rather vague descriptor).
Mumbo Jumbo is essentially identical to Steel Hawg if you can imagine it transplanted from the flat farmlands of Indiana to the flat farmlands of Yorkshire. If you want a more detailed account of this layout’s merits I recommend reading that page first then returning. The overall progression and sequencing of the elements I so admired in 2008 are all still present in this 2009-built version, as is the unique approach to achieving special G-forces not through changing velocities but changing one’s orientation to the constant 1-G pull of gravity… altogether making it my pick
for the best ride in the park by a decent margin.
However, despite having a plunge 1° deeper than Steel Hawg’s 111° first drop (could I even tell the difference; or for that matter, at these angles does a marginally steeper drop even make for a marginally better drop?), I have to say that I still prefer the original ride. Perhaps my memories might be recalled with a faint rose tinting, though I did seem to notice a lot more shaking on Mumbo Jumbo especially around the inversions and high banking, as if the wheel grips hadn’t been tightened as much as they needed to be. It was certainly minor and endured nothing on the other side of uncomfortable, but when the coaster is shooting for so many style points
especially when it’s otherwise at low speeds, when it fails to glide through the maneuvers with the precision one expects the flaw becomes that much more distracting.
The other thing I noticed that was different between Mumbo Jumbo and Steel Hawg was the midcourse block brake segments had replaced the series of traditional pinch brakes (mostly all off in Steel Hawg’s case) with a mixture of friction calipers and magnetic fins. Presumably this was to reduce wear but it also means the train always catches with fins and the ride is accordingly taken just a little bit slower. The absence of any tall trees or other structures immediately nearby also made judging one’s orientation a bit harder which robbed some of the effect of the crazy maneuvering. On the positive side, hourly throughput has been improved with the addition of a fifth car,
although the chances of them all running efficiently simultaneously seems improbable.
Steel Hawg had two of four cars the day I was there while Mumbo Jumbo ran three of five, and neither required even that many in accords with the actual attendance numbers. The requirement to get off and circle down the exit ramp and back and forth through the queue switchbacks for all rerides got a bit annoying, too.
A short walk across the plaza effective for easy coaster marathoning was Kumali, my second custom Vekoma SLC in two days (although there are actually similar models in Asia, and I didn’t actually get to ride the SLC from the previous day, so I guess that statement is not as impressive as I originally wanted it to sound). I had high hopes for this one because I had heard from many that it was possibly the smoothest SLC in Vekoma’s portfolio. However, since I generally don’t find SLCs to be terribly rough anyway I was therefore expecting to discover a flight on gossamer wings, perhaps setting hopes too high.
Indeed, due to aging or spring slowness, I only found Kumali slightly smoother than average, with still enough vibrations to remind me that I’m not on one of the super-modern, super-expensive coasters that always make the top ten polls in their first year while I stand on the sidelines griping that the layout has no sense of narrative or originality. Unfortunately I would still be standing on those sidelines, this time I just wouldn’t have to defend against the rebuttal “but it’s so smooth!”
Personally, I much prefer the classic SLC layout to this modified version. The classic is so dynamic and relentless,
the perfect pacing of inverting between non-inverting elements such that all the maneuvers complement each other and it doesn’t blow its wad too early. Kumali on the other hand gets into a more monotonous grind from the beginning of sweeping up and down and back up and down between singular ‘big’ elements and then finishing early, imitating more closely the style of their chief competitor’s
inverted coasters only to lesser effect.
The sweeping first drop holds steady at the bottom a bit longer to complete enough of curve to make it a partial helix, nice for the sustained speed but also establishing a slower pace between elements from the beginning. Instead of the famous double rollover that traditionally opens these rides we get a decidedly more vanilla vertical loop, replacing the variety of sensations and symmetry of design with a constant, indivisible extension of positive G’s. The next part is my favorite, pulling up shortly above some fake rocks and a pond into the cobra roll, which does have that symmetry and variety of sensations I was missing from the first maneuver.
Exiting the cobra roll there’s a camelback heartline roll. This element is strange because it doesn’t seem to use as low of a heartline as other inverted coasters that feature this maneuver; the track seems to rotate at a point that seems better described as “hairlining”, though it could also easily be the case that this element was designed as an especially inline elevated corkscrew. Regardless of what it is, it means that you’re not going to feel very much weightlessness but the sensation of being pushed around by the rotation (more so in the lower extremities) is more pronounced than normal. Personally I thought this might be a slight improvement as I can never feel the weightlessness
anyway, although the rate of rotation in this maneuver is drawn out longer so that sort of defeats its main advantage.
This all would have counted as a nice first act on another coaster, but it’s going to have to make do as our second act as well… and we have to accept the fact that the third act finale pretty much sucks. The inclined helix looks cool from the ground but is quite a dull ending for the riders, nothing more than
very light positives for a few seconds and a changing scenery if you look down at your toes. The final brakes arrive only four maneuvers after the initial drop (five if you want to count the cobra roll as two), and I couldn’t help but feel slightly cheated by an unnecessarily brief experience. Some of the Asian versions such as at Happy Valley Chengdu include a second helix before the ending, but given my impressions on the first I’m doubtful I will regard that as much of an improvement. To be sure it’s still enjoyable for the merits it has, and I would have preferred this layout to a classic version anyway just because it was something new to try. I tried getting as many rerides as single train operation would get me in a day (slow not because of long lines but because of long dispatch times waiting to get enough people to fill another train). Or, at least as many rerides as I could stand before I had listened to the “Dare you ride Kumaliiii” prerecorded message for the last time.
A few other rides populate the park like the Lost River Ride, which appeared to be of high-caliber for a shoot-the-chute due to a lengthy pre-lift channel that wandered through several animal exhibits providing close-up looks at the tortoises, and a bit further back for the lions. I elected not to ride it for myself due to the incredible drenching people appeared to get at the bottom of a splashdown reservoir themed to an African watering hole infected with malaria. A couple other rides included the Flip Flop, a suspended spinning disk ride from Fabbri that also appeared as though it could have been a soaker due to a couple of geysers placed beneath either end of the arc of the swing, but determined that these were positioned so as to have the appearance of getting close to the water without actually getting anyone’s
feet wet. I gave it a try and it proved to be an effective gimmick that made what would have otherwise been another off-the-shelf flat ride more fun. Long cycle, too; beware anyone who gets a bit queasy on these types of spinning rides. Lastly there was the Sky Flyer, a classic carnival style double inverter that I was pleased to see in operation as these rides are honestly more fun than most of the modern flat rides being installed into parks today. The simple, uncomplicated sensation of being pushed up, around, and then upside down a giant loop while locked in a cage has a feeling of simple, immediate reality to it that more aggressively disorienting rides fail to achieve. I’m really frustrated because I remember tying this into a deeper philosophical concept that might have had something to do with Schopenhauer while on the ride, 
but failed to make a physical note of the idea and now I can only remember having the idea but not the idea itself. That’s the way life is, sometimes.
I was not prepared for just how large this park really is. With the zoo the total acreage is quite considerable, a stroll around the perimeter would likely take the better part of an hour to complete; a far cry from the seaside parks I had been spending my time at for the previous three days where it’s entirely possible to see from one side to the other not far above ground level. It’s a deceptive layout too, because the main midway most follow from the entrance to the back of the park is not too long, but the path back down around the other side of the perimeter continues for nearly twice as far as much of the zoo area extends beyond
the front gate parallel to the parking lot. The animal exhibits aren’t the first-class re-creations of the creature’s native landscape, but I’m pretty sure much of that is for humans rather than the animals themselves, and Flamingo Land at least provides an ample amount of grazing room for their inhabitants, who mostly all seemed well-fed and content to zoo life. There’s also a small petting zoo back here with a couple more small rides including the third children’s coaster, which I was too big to go on for the credit. One thing I found odd was that for a place calling itself Flamingo Land, you’d expect the flamingo exhibit to be of particular importance, but instead it was just a moderate flock tucked in the middle of the zoo viewable only from a long distance across the pond. I will let this photo slideshow sum up anything else that needs to be said.
In the end I had to concede that whatever misgivings I might have had particularly towards the beginning, the day at Flamingo Land had been a successful one, aided by the clear, bright sky. As noted earlier, Mumbo Jumbo and Kumali’s close proximity to each other made for a good location to kill the last hour and a half of time in the park before the too-early 5:00pm closing hour arrived. There was a rumor a while back that Flamingo Land was considering building the UK’s first GCI wooden coaster, and I could hardly think of a better use of capital funds if that is to be true.
Personally I hope they don’t stop redeveloping their land, the Metropolis section in particular I think needs to go entirely. Maybe some of the rides such as Velocity can remain provided they get a facelift,
but that is one corner of the park that is in desperate need of attention especially because it’s where all first and last impressions are made. Even if Flamingo Land has a long ways to go before proving itself to be one of the UK’s best parks, it seems keen on proving itself as one of the UK’s fastest growing and ambitious parks, and if that philosophy can hold out through the next decade or two there should likely be a pretty damn good park at the end of it.
An hour or so of bus and train riding back to York, I had a full evening left but no activities planned. Thankfully, York was a town where it had a few noteworthy sights of its own to take. Thus I undertook an evening stroll around the city with camera in tow, and a few lovely shots were provided by this remarkably well-preserved historical center. The York Minster is the primary structure that brings tourists to Yorkshire, sadly shut for the evening by the time I made my rounds, but no less impressive on the outside. The downtown district was an exceptionally pleasant place to walk around; a shame most of the shops were closed save for a few pubs as I would have liked to have planned a bit more time to see and explore the city. One funny thought I had was that I can now say I’ve been to Old York before I’ve been to New York, which I guess makes sense: see the original before seeing the sequel. I did not stay out too late as I knew I had a very long and exciting day ahead of me.
Comments