Friday 8 May 2015

Selva Magica

Day 2 saw us take a day-trip to Guadalajara, a city that I'd been fortunate enough to visit before and on that occasion was home to two parks; a well known big park called Selva Magica and a small city park with a couple of coasters called Park Rehilete; that park was actually a new discovery back then.

Since that trip the latter park had closed leaving just the single park but in doing our research we'd found a few new places to check out but we thought we'd start the day with the one park that everyone knows about, Selva Magica


The park opened around 25 years ago and is located in the north of the city adjacent to the city zoo. Outside of the park there was a nice rescued Diego Rivera piece, an artist we'd been encountering a bit more later on in the trip.

When we arrived it was fair to say quite a few other people had arrived too and rather sadly the "rides unavailable" board had Titan listed, which was as shame as I really enjoyed that ride last time. Fortunately since that visit the park had added one new coaster, which was open and it was a special one!


The Bullet is another Schwarzkopf coaster, and this one like most of the rides has a well travelled history. Originally called "Wiener Looping" this coaster started it's life in Vienna (if you knew German the clue is in the name) in 1982 where it quickly picked up a reputation for being quite intense and noisy. Unfortunately due to that noise problem the ride was shut down. In 1984 it popped up in Florida where it lasted a couple of years before being sold to a German showman who toured with it until he got fed up with it. During his ownership the launch was altered reducing the intensity and the noise.

In 1991 the ride was bought by Flamingo Land in Yorkshire and I was fortunate to have ridden it during a club trip at the start of my interest in coasters. Then one day out of the blue, and surprising most people it was taken down and removed. No official reason was given but unofficially the frequent maintenance of the ride was leading to the ride not being open as much as the park would have liked. The Bullet was written off in 2005.

For years the community discussed what had happened to the ride and rued its loss. At the same time as losing The Bullet, the park also removed their other Schwarzkopf coaster. That one appeared elsewhere in Mexico, but The Bullet didn't make the same journey.

Then in 2013 after almost 8 years of not being seen it was announced that the ride was going to appear in Selva Magica. It too had made the trip to a new home in Mexico and it opened at the end of that year.

and I'm pleased to say it is running extremely well in its new location. I'd forgotten about it's angled station - not one to board if you're drunk! Operations were great with a really good team efficiently moving people through the ride and having no problem with glasses with a strap. I think a lot of the locals were hesitant to ride as it wasn't until well in the day that a queue had formed...yes, that did unfortunately mean all our rides were walk on and we had free reign to sit where we want or stay on for another go! Partly the parks fault as this ride can only be ridden if you've paid for the more expensive ticket.

The ride is still pretty punchy. I can only imagine what it was like with the original launch.

Titan, the bizarre out-and-back ride was the one that was down today, but the maintenance guys were working on it. Would our run of near-good luck come through again?

This was quite a popular ride with every run being full and the elicited screams attracting more people to it. It was quite boring :)


It looked a bit like Old Bob from The Black Hole

and looked to be as well looked after :)


This rather sad ride is Catarina, the park's Zierer ride. It's now standing unloved and with no engineers working on this one I think its fair to say it isn't going to be around much longer.



Tornado is another Schwarzkopf coaster (yes, them again). This is a well known model called the Jet Star 3 or Jumbo Jet of which 7 were made. This one started out at Busch Gardens Williamsburg, travelled to Mexico City before coming here in 2002. For those who remember The Beast at Alton Towers, this is the same type of ride. 

This is a great ride and no lap bar meant you could just jump in and ride, and if you were feeling silly enough you could stand up and die. Fortunately people in this park had enough common sense not to do it.

I think the ride is missing.

Ahh, the maintenance guys are enjoying a ride on the Titan coaster. We'll assume it's looking good but a quick trip to the station revealed it wasn't ready to open yet.


We killed some time by enjoying the go-kart track.  For some reason they decided we had to wear a neck brace, and they put me to the back.

Needless to say I had no chance of winning so played the part of the photographer for those who finished ahead of me. 


Jubile is a Pinfari Galaxi. Next!

Another ride that did well with the crowds. I'll assume it was on the cheaper wristband.

With ride operators getting ready in the Titan station it didn't take too long for the ride to open. Excellent!


This was a ride that Jeppe and I were almost thrown out of when we rode it last time.
There's a sentence that hopefully got a reaction, and we really nearly did. We rode it twice and on the second lap we stayed in the back row as there was no queue. However the staff didn't think to check the lap bar, and we were too busy talking about how good the ride was to pull it down ourselves so when the train went over the lift hill the forces ejected us out of the seat and we very quickly grabbed the handrail along the back of the row in front to get us back into the seat.

So this time I ensured I was fasted in and let Tal and Thomas ride the back. The coaster is still great despite it's weird layout.

Having done Titan we had a few more goes on The Bullet. It'd have been a shame not to.

On entering the park, heading left takes you to the coasters. Heading right on the other hand takes you to the children's area.


This is Alice, a walkthrough tour of how children are made.

Complete with foetus. It was too hot in here to stick around for too long, and I'm certain the baby wasn't mine so I didn't need to wait around for the results. 

F.A.R.T.H.E.R.




This part of the park contains a sizeable collection of rides that are more suited for the little kids rather than the big one.

I only took a pic of the toilets because last time the men and women signs were a little politically incorrect, but they've been changed now.


In amongst the rides is a really cool haunted walkthrough. It was being operated by a single chap who would run the ride for small groups and then spend the entire attraction jumping out on us, scaring us and doing some very eerie impressions including a rather uncomfortable kid in distress.

and having ridden all the operating coasters (Catarina is all but dead) we said goodbye to the park to go exploring elsewhere in Selva Magica

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