Tony, the kids and I went on the East London Hemingways rollercoaster simulator ride today! (31 March 2012) It was AWESOME! Only 5 minutes, and cost R40 each but was a first time simulator ride for all 4 of us and it was just totally fantastically wonderfully AWESOME!

Had to wait about 30 minutes in the queue and then climbed hopped up the 2 or 3 steps into the metal-looking rectangular room and sat in the “rollercoaster-looking” car thing – only space for 4 people 2 in front and 2 in back – we let the boys sit in front.

There’s a black and white large video screen thing set up on the outside so you can watch the people in the seats during their rides, (but you can’t see the 3D movie that they see) so we had a good idea of how much we might be thrown around, tilted, shaken, wobbled, jerked, bounced around ahead of time.

We all wear 3D glasses, you sit down and the leg bar safety thing comes over your legs and clicks or locks into place. You hold onto a bar in front of you. Nice well-padded seats, and then the helper leaves you, closes the door and switches on the 5 minute 3D movie that you already chose outside when you paid.

There are 10 rides or 3D movies to choose from. We chose Snow Coaster.

3D glasses are on and the 3D movie and the simulator ride starts.

Oh – my – word. Like fast forward, down the slanting rickety wobbly semi-broken rollercoaster tracks very very high up in an icy and snowy mountainous region. You see snow falling, you feel the snow – some landed on my nostrils ha ha (4D effect – must have been soap suds or something ha ha).

At first felt slightly dizzy, nauseous and nervous, but when I told myself to relax and just go with it, I felt better. It felt like we were going so so very very fast.

Then the rollercoaster tracks go down and up (really fast) and you’re flying through the air high up in the mountains cos the tracks are broken off, there are no more tracks!

Then rollercoaster tracks appear again and so you land on them and continue at a fast pace hurtling through ice and snow and mountains on these rickety semi-broken red rollercoaster tracks.

Then a terradactil bird dinosaur thing with a loooooong beak appears in front of you and the roller coaster car stops dead still. The bird thing does not like us, oh no, and starts pecking at us like crazy (through our imaginary “glass” protection of a rollercoaster car windscreen and glass goes flying everywhere and all over us) with it’s long beak and then it’s gone,

and then it appears again, comes over us and picks up the entire car (you can see it’s huge claws clutching the rollercoaster car just on the side of your face) and it flies off with us over the roller coaster high in the sky, then it tilts us, and, drops us, HEAD FIRST DOWNWARD, straight down and we’re just FALLING like into the depths of hell head first but it’s like a jagged-walled ice tunnel going STRAIGHT down!

Land at the bottom with a thud, and off on the roller coaster again ducking branches that are fallen over the track just just above our heads.

Big STEEP long downhill and sharp bend at the bottom and the tracks all tilted, and then dead stop again in front of a mammoth huge elephant thing that lifts us up with it’s tusks and jiggles us around, then thud, puts the rollercoaster car down again.

And it’s all over.

I think I was perspiring.

It was AWESOME!

Not sure all the different forms of excitement in the ride happened in the order I described above, or exactly like I described; it was all so incredibly fast and exciting.

Addictive, wanna try the other simulator rides too – there’s a cosmic one, a snow ride one, a glacier ride, a haunted forest one, a wild one, a classic rollercoaster simulator ride one, a king python one (that one is just not for me though!) – and two others can’t remember what now.

We would even have gone right away again, but didn’t want to wait in the queue again and it looked like we’d wait closer to an hour this time, and we still wanted to take the boys to lunch too. We’re glad we didn’t have a big lunch just before the ride, and I hope the Hemingways managers of the rides have something for cleaning up if anybody (over 18) goes on any of these Hemingways rollercoaster simulator rides with a hangover.

Was awesome, awesome, awesome!

© Copyright Teresa Schultz