What goes up, should come down. This is an important factor it’s good to bear in mind when you end up sitting in a curler coaster automobile, slowly getting chain-lifted up with the remainder of the vehicles to the primary excessive level of the journey.
The different necessary factor is that this: You can shut your eyes all through the entire journey if it turns into insufferable.
The factor is, although, even with your eyes closed you’ll be able to nonetheless really feel each twist, flip and plunge the curler coaster takes.
The feeling I get when the curler coaster drops or goes via an inversion (turning the other way up) is so intense that I typically want it could cease proper there after which, even when we have been nonetheless halfway via the observe.
They’ll simply have to seek out one other approach to transport me again right down to the bottom.
Sometime within the late Nineties, the Sunway Lagoon theme park in Selangor had the Triple Loop Coaster, a 30m-or-so-high curler coaster with, because the identify suggests, three loops. The observe was simply over 1km lengthy, and if my reminiscence serves me proper, it was inbuilt entrance of the theme park entrance, and it was pink or lilac in color.
As any individual who suffers from a fear of heights, I’ve at all times wished to seek out methods to beat it. And so I believed that happening a scary-looking curler coaster would assist me do exactly that.
It didn’t work.
It might be as a result of I had closed my eyes midway via the primary loop… though I’m not actually satisfied that seeing the precise drop, or seeing the world upside-down from such a nice peak, will lastly remedy me of my phobia.
After that first try, I used to be “traumatised” and vowed by no means to journey one other curler coaster ever once more.
A pair of years later, throughout an project to Los Angeles, I made a decision to attempt the Back To The Future: The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood. It was a simulator journey and I believed the expertise can be completely different as riders can be sitting inside a “DeLorean” that’s lifted simply a few metres off the bottom. A giant display screen in entrance would then show 3D variations of well-known scenes from the primary film that includes the automobile.
It was not as scary as using a curler coaster however it was nonetheless nerve-racking. However, I loved the expertise.
I’ve gone on a number of curler coasters and simulator rides after that (the Harry Potter And The Forbidden Journey Ride at Universal Studios Japan in Osaka was very memorable as I may truly hear my bones cracking through the journey – digital Quidditch is a actual ache, of us!), and I hold telling myself “never again” after every one.
The newest misadventure was at Skytropolis, Resorts World Genting’s indoor theme park, the place reporters have been invited to attempt the Super Glider curler coaster and the RoboCoaster VR simulator journey. The Super Glider is near 20m excessive, runs for 290m lengthy and has two inversions.
The RoboCoaster is designed as a big robotic (assume: Transformers) which spins 360° a few instances, suspending riders within the air and lifting them off their seats for what looks as if infinite seconds. This is when riders are purported to expertise weightlessness, and really feel like they’re flying. Fun, proper?
Unfortunately, not everybody will expertise that. Some, like me, will really feel like it’s the finish of days.
I’ll by no means overcome my fear of heights however hey, at the very least the phobia did push me to attempt issues I by no means thought I’d. And that’s at all times a win.
