In the land of never ending summer, our “coaster season” was coming to a close. We didn’t have plans or interest in doing anything else this fall, which meant that this day in September would be when we packed it in and got ready for the long winter. And if you’re gonna pick a theme park to celebrate love of the roller coaster, man, there’s few better options than Busch Gardens Tampa. Just a little over an hour away from Orlando’s tourist district and a really easy ride from our hotel (Westin Universal Blvd), given the close proximity we had to I-4. It was kinda a bummer to take such quick leave of our nice room, but we had to jet.
Buzzing through the gate easily with our Discovery Cove name badges, we had about a 20 minute wait to look at the map and determine a course of action for the day. It wasn’t really necessary to plan, however. Lines never exceeded 10 minutes for just about anything here at Busch Gardens, and most coasters stayed at walk-on levels the entire day. Like Cedar Point, Busch Gardens opens with the national anthem, which feels a bit strange when the entryway of the park is themed to Morocco. Hey, it is the thought that counts, right?
-COASTERS-
Cheetah Hunt (A#653/M#341): I’d heard a lot of different things about this ride coming into this trip – I’d heard it was underwhelming, fun, boring, exciting, unique, middling – lots of completely different and varying stuff. Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect, and set my expectations really low. Most people who’ve heard of this ride and would read a long trip report by now know what it does – it has three launches, an inversion, lots of hills, and is themed to Cheetahs. Loosely. Coaster nerds look at Cheetah Hunt and think “Maverick”. And with good reason; the restraints are basically the same; some small changes to prevent fingers being broken from holding the restraints from behind in loading/unloading but otherwise they look and feel exactly the same. The trains look similar, just longer. And it launches.
In action, Cheetah Hunt is not Maverick, and that I say in the best possible way. Maverick is a wild, intense attraction that, because of those restraints being positioned at a frankly bizarre angle, means the lateral motion can catch riders on the neck or chin with the shoulder harnesses. This is not terribly fun, and while Maverick is technically about the most thrilling ride ever constructed, it is also the kind of ride that was so questionably designed, an inversion was built and removed prior to opening, and the kind of ride that has, since day one, featured a high speed launch almost immediately into magnetic brakes (lest it beat you half to death).
Cheetah Hunt is not that intense. Expect that level of intensity, and you’ll be sorely disappointed. Nor is it a family ride, as the 48″ height requirement is certainly tribute to. It is a fun ride, and it is, I think, fairly thrilling. I guess if Cheetah Hunt is not thrilling, I feel sorry for you and wonder why it is you even bother to keep riding roller coasters any more. There’s three launches, yes. The first basically just gets you going, and after a slow diving curve under a pathway, you end up in the second, much more substantial launch, which throws you up this immense tower of turns that has become the ride’s signature. Up that high, certainly there’s not much force involved. It is more or less scenic and kind of a nice pause. Then there’s some solid airtime as you dismount and head onto the “out” leg of the run through a trench.
After the zero-G roll and block, you go through the best part of the ride, which is the twists and turns of the old Rhino Rally course through a tight, water filled canyon, complete with waterfalls and theming. After that, you blast out of that area, over and airtime hill, and then some swoopy drops and turns before returning to the station. None of the swoopy sections really produce airtime, but they also don’t produce painful lateral g-force.
The ride puts through passengers thanks to having a bunch of trains and seemed to work pretty well on the day we were there. I can see complaints from various members of the theme park community which I am willing to entertain: The theme is pretty poorly conceived of and ineffectively portrayed in the ride. If anything, it seems like we’re poachers or something. The tunnels and troughs don’t really make any sense here, but then again neither does the zig-zag through the canyon. I could ove rthink it, but with coasters, my general thought process is, “does this excite me enough to where I am only thinking about the motions of the ride when I’m on it?” and this does that without alternately making me think, “how badly is this stupid fucking thing going to hurt?” Because if the latter didn’t matter to me, I’d rather go develop some masochistic fetishes and save myself a lot of money.
Gwazi: On the opposite spectrum of “how badly will this hurt?” is the soon to depart this mortal coil Gwazi. At this stage, good riddance. New trains and minimum track work was done since my last visit to Busch Gardens, and to be blunt, Busch Gardens simply didn’t follow through to make this ride the quality attraction it was 10 years ago. This isn’t a bum GCI, this is a park that never understood from the beginning how to operate a wood coaster or maintain it. It is a testament to GCI’s skill as builders that the ride was as good as it was for as long as it was, actually. Today, the Tiger track is covered over and is a handicapped ramp, meaning half the dueling coaster doesn’t work at all. Soon enough, it is rumored, none of it will, it will all get bulldozed, and that’s that. We won’t be able to complain any longer about their attendants checking for seat belts first and then lap bars because they’ll both be scrap.
Kevin Yee talks about “declining by degrees” with regards to Disney World, and I can almost kinda sorta see what he’s saying, even if I don’t entirely disagree with it. I think he has a clear premise in his head and he’s thought it out enough to have a whole orthodoxy and logic as to why things are the way they are. With Busch Gardens, there’s no Kevin Yee there to say things like, “Hey, you know what looks like a failed park? One with a barely operational wood coaster rotting in the middle of it!” And that is what is happening here. You look around at this, and at the closure of the sit down area in Crown Colony, and closure of a bunch of other rides on “seasonal” basis that didn’t used to close, and you have to start thinking that this is a park that is not moving forwards. It is, at best, moving laterally, and changing focus.
Busch Gardens has changed focus before, after all. When it started, it was a brewery tour with a wild animal park attached. Today, its a theme park filled with coasters and a zoo attached. That is clearly how they see themselves, and I think they’re going to pursue thrills more straightforwardly now. That’s my general sense. Fewer family rides, more big steel. They feel less like one of Central Florida’s great parks, and more and more like a run of the mill 70s era regional themer.
Montu: Classic B&M Inverted coaster that has all the bells and whistles which everyone adores. You get the inversions that have the “snap over” when there’s a direction change, you have the more abrupt entry to the loops, you have elevation changes vis-a-vis trenches built for the ride. Montu is just such an incredible ride. There’s a timelessness to that ride that very, very few other steel coasters have.
Kumba: There’s a big contingent of people that still love Kumba, but I’m not as large a fan. It is plenty forceful and has a fun layout, but at 20 years or so old, the ride is showing some age with vibration. It does have the classic sort of B&M layout; 7 inversions, interlocking barrel rolls, all that jazz. It may be anathema for some to hear, but these days I prefer Kraken more. This is still a really great ride, however. It is here at a park where it is my 4th favorite steel coaster, but that’s only because the park is filled with so many other really good steel coasters.
Shiekra: Yet another phenomenal ride. For a ride that, on paper, does so little, those two vertical drops really take it to a different level. Throw in the themed elements, that great wingover inversion, the water splashdown; that stuff is just money in the bank. I really have no clue how I could go back and ride Oblivion again at this point after being so spoiled with both Shiekra and Griffon here in the states. I thought Oblivion was totally overrated 11 years ago; I can’t imagine what I’d think now.
Scorpion: Is this themed? Is it modern? Is it the best? Who cares. Classic Looping Star from Schwarzcopf with high-gs, lapbars, and lots of fun.
-OTHER ATTRACTIONS-
Right now, there’s a lot of construction going on around the park. And by around the park, I specifically mean in “Timbuktu”. And by a lot of construction, I mean, “some stuff is being pulverized and a lot of rides aren’t being operated. So in lieu of probably close to 1/3 of the non-coaster rides being down, we didn’t ride a whole lot of non-coaster rides. OK, we only rode Serengeti Express all the way around. It was nice enough, didn’t have an auto-spiel, and you actually got to a significant number of animals.
Animal exhibits still have some strong value here; you can see hippos, rhinos, cheetahs, lions, orangutans, tigers, and elephants. Basically, your big 5 and then some. The tiger enclosure is probably the one I find most impressive – the cheetah one is well themed as, I guess a fallen African temple or something. Aviary area is not bad, but at this point, we’ve done so many really good ones I think it kinda came across flatly for us.
-FOOD-
Busch Gardens Tampa’s selection of food is pretty much not at the level it used to be. We ate some OK food over by the Jungala section of the park, and stopped by the old Brewery building for drinks later, but neither was a highlight. Actually, in spite of it being over 90, the brewery building was totally empty. We were the only people in there for several minutes. Positioned next to Gwazi, it feels sad. The closest thing to a food highlight was my ranch seasoned spiral cut potato on a stick.
-INTANGIBLE STUFF/RANTING/CONCLUSION-
Busch Gardens Tampa is, increasingly, becoming less and less of a destination park to tourists. But interestingly, for coaster enthusiasts, nothing has really changed about the status of the place. Driven to thrill rides, Busch Gardens completely lacks a dark ride, doesn’t have a full service restaurant, and seems to be moving towards minimizing the focus on animals to instead focus on rides. As a theme park, lots of things could be said about the place lacking proper coherent theme, what with Australia randomly being thrown in when the entire park was built and designed to be approached as Africa north (entrance) to south (ending in the deepest Congo). I see these things as well as anyone else.
Ultimately, I go to theme parks not because of individual buildings or small things tucked away in corners that are supposed to make them feel more “real”, if you assume that they are fake or not of their own construct or whatever. And I say this because, you know, there’s a lot of “themed” entertainment outside the realm of Orlando that is as coherent or more coherent than Orlando would be. The average murder mystery dinner theater is more coherent than most/all theme parks, but I don’t review it because I think it is stupid. I review theme parks because theme parks are, by and large, also amusement parks, and amusement parks have rides, and I like rides. Very straightforward statement. Busch Gardens has some leeway with me to go towards being not so good in many of its theme park elements because ultimately, as long as the rides run at an optimum enough efficiency/maintenance level, that stuff is irrelevant. I suspect strongly that I’m not alone in feeling that way. I also suspect the management is aware.
Gwazi, naturally, is not such a ride, and the state of the Timbuktu section is sub-Six Flags, so not everything is perfect here. I get that. I also don’t get the feeling that I’ll see the park improve in those specific areas. When you break it down, the whole Sea World family of parks are flawed to some degree. But nothing and no one is perfect. I still think the Discovery Cove package is as good a deal as any in Orlando, and would recommend it to those looking to do parks down there with no less a thumbs up than Disney or Universal, as horrifying as respective fanboys for both might feel.
If I try really hard to feel some type of way about Busch Gardens Tampa, I’m left conflicted about what I do think versus what I think I should perhaps feel. What did I feel when I left? Sad.
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