Theme Parks!

The first theme park that we headed for was Movie World. This is owned by Warner Brothers and is also called Hollywood on the Gold Coast. The only negative comment about the park we would make is that it was quite small and there was a severe lack of characters around to get your picture with!! I was looking forward to meeting Daffy Duck and Yosemite Sam but it wasn't to be. What we did see though was a good few rides mixed in with some shows.

The first ride that we went on was the biggest ride that they had - the Superman Escape. This was insane as you travel from 0-100km/hr in just 2 seconds, experiencing 4.2G's followed by -1G!

After this we headed to check out a cool Shrek 4D movie. This was quite good and had us getting soaked as donkey sneezed on you as well as having hundreds of spiders jumping out at you amongst other things.

The next ride of the day was the Lethal Weapon. After Gemma came off she felt as if she had went 12 rounds with Mike Tyson her head had been battered about so much!

From here it was time to check out the Scooby Doo Coaster. We had no idea what to expect from this and at first it started off like a ghost train. Then however you hit a dead end and the carriage was taken up on a lift before we wer thrown backwards down a hill and it turned into a decent roller coaster. The second time we went on was made even more fun with the little girl behind us who is now no doubt traumatised from Scooby for the rest of her life!

It was time to take in another show after this and we went to see how they film a car chase. This was a good insight into how a film is produced and included plenty of fast driving and various stunts.

The second last ride was the Batman Sling. This was a crappier version of the Playstation at Blackpool but was still a good laugh.

The last ride of the day was a Batman simulator ride which started off cool but ended with me almost throwing up! It was weird that all the big rides didn't make me ill but a crappy simulator did!

Dreamworld:

Next on the list was Dreamworld. This had some really cool rides as well as over 800 animals. We didn't want to waste too much time so we thought we would hit the rides before going to see the animals.

First up was a log ride which turned out to be crap. Luckily the rides got much better from here!

The first big ride we took on was the Giant Drop. This was a massive tower 39 stories high (119m). What it does is take you up to the top and leave you suspended there for around 1 minute that seems like a lifetime before dropping you. On the way down you reach speeds of 161km/hr almost as fast as skydiving!

Next on the list was a realy cool motorbike rollercoaster designed by professional racer Mick Doohan. This was not bad, the best thing was that your seat was actualy a full scale racing motorbike.

It was now time to hit another big one - Tower of Terror! For anyone whos been to Florida, it's different from that one. Its a rollercoaster that shoots you along before propelling you straight up a vertical rail at 160km/hr until it stops for a second and flys back down to the bottom again!

After this it was time to go on the Cyclone, the tallest rollercoaster in the Southern Hemisphere. This was again quite good and we ended up on it twice in a row at the end of the day as there was no queue!

After we had managed to get on all the rides a few times we headed to see a tiger show. Even though it wasn't that long ago we had seen tigers we can't get enough of them! They are fantastic animals and its good to see that here they have succesfuly managed to breed several types of tigers, some of which are either extinct, or only number a few hundred in the wild.






































We then walked through the other wildlife area where we seen the usual crocs, kangaroos, dingos, koalas etc.











































The final themepark was White Water World which is connected to Dreamworld. This is a brand new waterpark and you can tell with all the modern rides that it has. It was fantastic and the best ride was the Hydrocoaster which is the first uphill waterslide in the world. It is basically a rollercoaster except instead of being strapped in, you are clinging on to a rubber ring as you get propelled up and down and all round about!

The good thing about these parks being connected is that after we had been on all the water slides millions of times we were able to walk back into Dreamworld and try out all the rides again as well as seeing the tigers. This time we were even able to get up close to a tiger and clap it!!! It has to be one of the coolest things I have done on this trip.