With the trip coming to an end we had time for one more park visit, this time a couple of hours down the coast in the seaside resort town of Pattaya. The park here is owned by the same people as the abandoned Wonder Wheel Park and is home to 2 coasters although only one has ever run, and that was the one we were hoping to ride today.
This is Pattaya Tower. It has three revolving restaurants and a number of cable attractions running off it. These include a cable car, a death slide and a bucket ride. None of them appealed to me so we didn't bother with them. It was also too humid for us so we only wanted to stay here as long as we had to.
The Formula One coaster has never got to run, and when we spoke to the ride ops of the other coaster later they told us it was because the ride was too dangerous. Like the coasters in Bangkok this ride had been left abandoned...which meant we got to climb all over this one too. Every cloud has a silver lining.
The car was still there but had lost some of it's seating.
The launch track view of the tower.
The launch track from the side.
The launch track from the point where the car goes vertical. Well it's not everyday you get to stick your head up through the tracks like this.
Looking up the tower section of the ride. I did decided to climb up the ladder just so I could say I've done it...not all the way up, about 20 ft up.
The entrance to the park proper. Tacky, isn't it?
This is a rather cutely themed carousel. The ticket booth for the rides is close to this.
The rest of the rides are of varying quality. This one looked quite new.
I liked what they'd done with the restraints on this one.
The coaster has a small spiral lift hill.
The car looked to be identical to the ones on the other rides bar the additional wheel sticking out the side that allows it to engage with the lift hill. I've no idea who made these but they've not been seen anywhere else.
We think this might be the problem with the rides. That lap bar is horrendous and even though the seats are a little deeper and reclined than usual that lap bar presses into the sternum perfectly leaving the purple bars lying horizontal given no leeway whatsoever. Could you imagine how painful that would be on the launched tower ride? The transition to vertical would punch you firmly across the width of your ribs. I'm going to guess that when the ride operator referred to the other coaster as "too dangerous" this is what he meant.
The Slalom coaster has an interesting layout with a series of terrain following hairpin turns and a series of bunny hops bringing it back to the station. The ride operators very kindly allowed us to ride it twice. On the first we braced the whole way around and on the second realising we didn't have to we just sat back and enjoyed the ride. Somehow the restraint worked.
This is the cable car ride up to the tower. The ground station is next to the beach.
Pattaya Beach is alright, not as nice as some of the others we'd encountered on the trip by any means. Pattaya also seems to be a resort frequented by holidaying Russians and there's more signs in their language than in English.
On our way out of Pattaya we saw this small collection of rides, clearly home to some sort of travelling fair.
So we finished the trip with a rather unusual coaster and fitting finale to a very unusual trip.
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