First of all, this thing looks really cool! It's huge but you can easily see the entire thing from the path in front of it. It makes for an amazing la...
First of all, this thing looks really cool! It's huge but you can easily see the entire thing from the path in front of it. It makes for an amazing landmark and is one of the park's most beautiful focal points. I really like how the queue line as well as the ride itself make great use of the wooden support structure and place you right in the middle of a jungle of wood.
The ride experience itself is a mix of good and bad. I'll start with the lift hill which was a fun surprise. It starts at an absolute crawl as the train first makes contact but then quickly speeds up until you are soaring up the thing. It felt like one of the faster lift hills I've been on by the end of it. The rest of the layout is fairly nice and the ride itself is quite long. It's not that thrilling, but once again I appreciated how the support structure is used and it makes for a nice, atmospheric ride.
For the most part the ride isn't that rough (I sat near the middle of the train in the front row of the car on the right side), however there are two moments which jerk you so roughly that they threaten to give you whiplash or send your head into the side of the car. Also your legs may be a little banged up after getting off. If not for those two awful instances of headbanging I would give this a full star higher.
Finally, capacity is definitely an issue. This coaster only operates one train on each side and it's a fairly long layout so there is a lot of waiting for the train to come back to the station. This train (course 2) had much shorter lines when I went and given the difference in ratings on here it appears to be the better liked of the two. I did not ride the other course so I unfortunately cannot compare.
Despite its flaws I think this is a magnificent ride and I hope La Ronde keeps it around for years to come. If they could somehow fix those two whiplash moments I would seriously love this coaster.
