Six Flags Mexico

The next park was the biggest of the trip and the main reason for my wanting to come back.

Six Flags is an American chain that has currently has 2 foreign parks. One in Canada and this one in Mexico. Historically they had some in Europe and there are plans for one in Dubai but currently there are only these two. I'd visited this park in 2008 and we'd had a really good day marred only by our experience on a horrible wooden coaster called Medusa. The rides down sign today only made reference to a single spin ride so it looked like all the coasters would be open. A bonus as I'd missed one last time due to maintenance, and since the last visit they'd added some more.

A few years ago the ride was rebuilt with a new steel track retrofitted onto the wooden structure and when done to some US rides had led to those rides having great reviews. The company involved with the technology "Rocky Mountain Coasters" were initially labelled as "wood killers" but as the positive reviews poured in were rebadged as "ride saviours" and a "company to keep an eye on". So not one to fall for hype this was going to be my first Rocky Mountain Coaster and I was quite excited.

So we headed over to Medusa first where I was told I couldn't take my bag into the station. Argh! frustrating. So I went to the nearby lockers which wanted 20 dollars for an hour but it wasn't working. So I went back and complained what was the point in enforcing lockers that don't work. In my bad Spanish this came out as "Locker no function". A passing member of staff did understand and took me to another locker area close by as Tal and Thomas went on ahead. Not wanting to get annoyed any more I just paid for the maximum 3 hours (yup, 60 bucks) and made my way back to the ride.

So don't take a bag into the park if you want to ride. Lesson learnt!

That's the ride and we were pleased to see it was running. The queue area is pretty long and includes a fun house, a lap of the inside of the ride (perfect for photos) and a little cattle grid, which we could bypass today before making your way up into the station.

The red track is what Rocky Mountain have put in. The wooden structure is the old wooden coaster.

Loading operations is always annoying insisting the train be filled from the front. If you wanted to ride in the back row you had to let enough people in ahead of you to get it. On a positive at the start of the day when there was no queue we were allowed to remain in the train and be sent out for another go and with the big crowds at the entrance not really finding their way to the ride we were able to have quite a number of goes first thing.

So how is the ride? In the front rows its really smooth with plenty of air time and with absolutely no dead spots anywhere on its layout. I recommend you don't watch videos of these RMT coasters and experience them spoiler free as the ride is full of interesting elements from the outset. For that reason I'm not going to go into detail here only to say the further back we rode the more intense the ride experience and as someone who's ridden their fair share of coasters getting those "wow" moments from a coaster are few and far between, but I had one on this ride when we eventually got the back row. I don't know what triggered it but at some point the ride put me through so many elements so quickly that I was flung out of my seat and caught by the train in such a manner that I unable to comprehend what I'd just gone through. All I could do was burst out laughing in defence. I think the nearest comparison would be like the return leg of The Voyage at Holiday World but with inversions thrown in for good fun (and a smoother ride to boot). 

The last time I rode Medusa people were full of smiles when the train came back into station because the riders had survived with their teeth intact. This time they were coming back into the station because they knew they'd just experienced a world class coaster. Now I'm excited about what else Rocky Mountain are going to do and clearly the park owners are as excited about them as Six Flags now have them revitalising a number of their old wooden coasters throughout the chain. This can only be a good thing.

I'm happy to be captivated by the ride and I was only petrified a little!

So with my bag and camera all locked away the first half of the day was spent doing the riding. The second half of the day was photos which is why the sequence is now all messed up.

The big coaster in the background is Superman. We rode that one last but it was a really fun ride made more fun by a group of singing and screaming girls who'd break into a chorus of "one more go" when we'd get back into the station, an instruction the ride operators were more than happy to heed. 

The SLC is their Batman ride. Despite the ride down notification at the entrance this never run today with the train stuck on the lift hill. An apparent issue with the lift hill motor had rendered the ride closed. So trust Six Flags to have an OBNO ride (Open But Not Operating). I remember last time having a one-man rave under this ride to the trance music that was playing in the park. Not today though.

The StarFlyer ride was pretty decent and the operators were doing a good job keeping the queue moving through it.

There were no stunt shows today :(

I don't know why I elected to ride this having done so before but we were the first to ride it as it opened just as we reached it. If only we'd gotten VIP treatment like that on Medusa. It was as bad as you can imagine.

A couple of the prizes available to those who can thrown balls in barrels or flip frogs onto lilypads.

Grrr! But if there's one park that's going to rely on corporate sponsorship it's this one.

Tsunami was the ride that was closed last time so I was happy to get it this time even if we did have to compete with a crowd formed of Azteca Bank employees.

The Joker was another new ride and our strategy of having the group of 3 on a car of 4 paid off here as we got a really good spin on the coaster making this a really fun ride. This used to be in the San Francisco Park before being moved here. Their loss!

This ride also has a fun house queue line. How cool is that entrance?

Not as cool as this pineapple. It reminds me of a supermarket advert from the 80s where a load of animated food stuffs sing "don't go". Can anyone remember it?

No umbrellas or teddy bears on this ride.

We split up in the afternoon and I thought I'd go and check out the Terminator dark ride which wasn't a dark ride at all. It was a laser tag game that went on for about 40 minutes. I felt a bit ridiculous but somehow managed to come 3rd in a group of 12 which I was happy with.

This is a little more cartoony than the Universal one. He seems quite happy to have been caught.

This restaurant is air-conditioned and the food was good so recommend that if you plan to avoid the busy periods. We had the whole place to ourselves just by avoiding lunchtime. 

I meant to have my picture taken like he was going to shoot me in the back of the head but I forgot to come back to it :(

Another new coaster was the Dark Knight coaster, which Six Flags installed a number of in the same year into several parks in the chain. When Six Flags buy cookie cut rides in bulk you know they're not going to be that good and this is the case here. The ride is just an enclosed mouse, albeit with some scenery and effects not all of which were working. A couple of gel-like projection screens were working really well midway through the ride though. 

This is Roller, the parks' rollerskater and a ride that could easily be rethemed as "Baby Medusa" offering a Medusa experience for the younger visitors.

I don't know what to say!

Seeing this reminded me of one of the most stupid youtube comments of all time.

There's a kiddy park within the park. The roulette wheel theming was a nice touch.

In the afternoon we had a brief shower but it soon passed allowing Tal and Thomas to go and ride Medusa some more with no queue. With the three hours having passed I was reunited with my bag so sat this out.

There were some character meets. If I volunteered to do this I wonder how much weight I'd lose?

and we finished our day with a UV dance show, which was pretty good before saying goodbye to the park. Despite the annoyance with Medusa where you really would expect a world class park to be able to put luggage stores on the platform, our day went well. One coaster down which selfishly I'd already ridden meant that I'd now done everything here. Medusa is a world-class coaster and easily one of my favourite coasters in the world. It's also convinced me into doing more trips in the US where they're installing more rides similar to this.

With the day done we still had some time spare to visit something else.

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