Australia 01/18 – Sea World

Day 7

We arrived at Australia’s Gold Coast airport at 8 in the morning and thanks to my inability to sleep on planes I had now been awake for about 24 hours.

Our airline of choice was Scoot, an ultra low cost airline based in Singapore. The reviews of Scoot were worrying to say the least but there was no way our trip would have been as ambitious as it was if we hadn’t saved huge amounts of money on all of our flights. I’m no reviewer of airlines but I’ll say this, I’ve paid much more for worse, Scoot was fine, pretty good even.

Australian border force is exactly as it’s portrayed in the media. Strict, a little intense and extremely funny.

We had a shock when we were collecting our hire car, it was covered in dents and scratches but the paper work listed it as being clean. In any other country you’d have to report every single mark and get it noted down and countersigned before leaving the lot or risk massive fees on return. In Australia however it didn’t matter at all and in fact the car hire lady found it funny that we were worried about it.

While Singapore’s climate was a massive shock to the system, at worst it made you sweat and feel disgusting. Australia’s though, it’s pure evil. I got badly sunburnt on the way to the first park, in the car, with sun lotion on… Oh and this was only the beginning.

Sea World

I apologise if my recollection of this park is hazy but I was ruined for most of today. Literally falling asleep standing up and at points auto piloting to a ride or animal enclosure then coming to and wondering how I got there.

It took over an hour of heavy traffic to get to Sea World, just enough time to get sun burnt and fight falling asleep about 50 times.

Sea World is what you’d expect from the name, a marine based zoo but we aren’t really here for that, we are here for the 3 coasters they have.

Spongebob’s Boating School Blast – I don’t normally talk about the very clearly kiddie coasters but there’s so little to talk about at Sea World, so here goes. This coaster was memorable for 2 reasons, it was when I decided that Australia might be too hot and it was when I got the impression they aren’t used to seeing grown men squeezing into children’s coasters to get the credit.

Storm Coaster – This clone Mack water coaster with enclosed sections was pretty disgusting. These things do nothing at all for me but at least many of the others look nice, this was just surounded by rusting shipping containers and had the splashdown in a slightly themed warehouse. My opinion of Storm Coaster also wasn’t helped by the queue going through an enclosed metal section that was insanely hot and loud, not at all what you want when you’ve been awake for 30 hours.

Jet Rescue – If it wasn’t for this Intamin family launch coaster my opinion of the park would have been more negative, thankfully though Jet Rescue is awesome. I was expecting a tamer much smaller version of Juvelen and while yes the layout is tiny, this thing packs a serious punch. While Juvelen builds up a surprising intensity, Jet Rescue stays at that from dispatch till brakes.

My opinion of the animal based stuff the park had to offer was that it was nothing special. You could put that down to being awake for 30 hours or doing the amazing Singapore Zoo a few days before though.

Much like me the park as a whole felt rather worn out and tired, with Jet Rescue being the only redeeming feature.

Thankfully though it seems things will improve in 2020 when the park are adding a massive Gravity woodie to their collection.

Once we got back to the car I was pretty much the walking dead and remember only random moments.

Almost losing the exhaust in the car park.

A grass hopper as big as my hand on a window.

A ghetto motel.

Then I was out.

Thanks for reading, click here for day 8 of this mega trip where we visit Movie World and ride the awesome DC Rivals.