Plenty of holiday ideas at home and abroad
JENNY WHITE HEADS STATESIDE TO VISIT THE SPECTACULAR PARKS OF SEAWORLD
THE Brits are some of the most frequent visitors to SeaWorld’s Orlando parks, and it’s easy to see why. With frequent direct flights from major UK airports, getting there is blissfully easy, and the warmth of American hospitality shines through from the moment you get in your taxi to head for your hotel.
I visited the parks this autumn, leaving behind wind and rain and arriving to bright but mellow sunlight, shorts and T-shirt temperatures and the sight of tiny lizards scuttling across the sidewalks.
The pace of life was gloriously easy: no staggering queues, no jostling crowds – just a steady and leisurely flow from one attraction to the next. And what a lot there is to see.
We began in Discovery Cove, a truly beautiful park styled as a tropical island paradise.
Visitor numbers are capped each day so it doesn’t get too crowded, and you can easily divide your day between resort-style relaxation (basking on the white sand beaches, swimming, and eating the above-par food) and exploration.
The vast aviary is a must-see, its colourful birds fluttering down to take food from your hands.
After exploring it on foot, we took a journey down the Wind-away river, which carries swimmers through the aviary and around the park.
For the more adventurous, there is the dolphin lagoon, where you can swim with the park’s resident dolphins.
They are not forced to take part, but given the option to leave their regular enclosure to meet visitors.
Being pulled through the water by a dolphin is an extraordinary experience, the muscular fluidity of its movements giving a taste of the power of these beautiful creatures.
Another highlight was the undersea adventure on the grand reef, where we donned diving helmets and ventured into the depths to meet sea urchins, hermit crabs and fish face to face.
The experience of breathing underwater was new for me, but the attentive diving team made sure we all felt safe and supported, and it was a truly memorable experience.
The next day we headed to Busch Gardens, a 300-acre park based on exotic explorations around the world.
It offers a mix of animal attractions and high adrenaline rides, with a chance to get up close to exotic creatures including tigers, gorillas, orangutans and kangaroos.
The safari ride in an open-topped trailer is a thrilling experience that includes the chance to feed giraffes.
For white knuckle thrills, rides such as Kumba, with its 135ft drop and diving loop; Falcon’s Fury, a dizzying 335ft drop tower, and SheiKra, with its floorless cars, 200ft climb, 90-degree drop and 70mph speeds, are unmissable.
Another joy of visiting Orlando is the local food offerings. While the fare in the park is consistently good, offering a balance of fresh and wholesome options and hearty comfort food, the restaurants in the surrounding area make dining out in the evenings a joy.
Stand-outs included Slate Orlando, whose sizzling, gratinated crab-artichoke dip is the stuff of dreams, and Uncle Julio’s, a dazzling Mexican whose unctuous, intensely cheesy queso and super-sized grilled chicken fajitas are the best I’ve ever tasted.
Of the four parks we visited, Aquatica was my favourite. A vast and pristine water park, it follows SeaWorld’s other sites in offering a mix of relaxation and thrills.
Roa’s Rapids, an epic river to be explored wearing a floatation vest, zips you along at three to four times the speed of a typical waterpark river, taking you past geysers and through waterfalls. Loggerhead Lane, meanwhile, is a lazy river offering a slower pace, flowing past dolphins and exotic fish.
While I found myself taking repeated trips on both, I stacked up the most repeat visits on the park’s newest water slide, Ray Rush. This is a family friendly white-knuckle waterslide which takes groups of up to four people through dizzying drops, twists and turns in inflatable rafts.
Passing through enclosed tubes, a colossal translucent sphere which spins the raft hair-raisingly around the slide walls, and dropping into an open-air halfpipe shaped like a manta ray, around which the rafts soar back and forth before entering the final enclosed tube section, it’s epic, hair-raising and totally addictive.
Ray Rush is one of many waterslides at the park while there’s also an impressive wave machine, beaches for lounging and, again, some decent food and drink offerings.
On the last day of my trip, we visited SeaWorld itself, our first stop being another watery thrill – the new Infinity Falls, the world’s tallest river rapids ride drop.
Piling into a raft and fastening our seatbelts, we plunged down drops and went round sharp bends, being splashed at every turn, before being carried up in a vertical lift for the final plummet down a steep water slide. I have lost count of the number of times we rode that ride without tiring of its novelty.
True to a central part of SeaWorld’s mission, visitors to the ride also have the opportunity to learn about the importance of freshwater conservation through interactive games and stories. Seaworld’s conservation and rescue work is evident throughout the park: another highlight was visiting manatees that had been rescued, often with serious injuries, and brought to the park to recuperate. These enormous, gentle creatures are fascinating to meet up close, as are the park’s penguins, turtles and fish.
SeaWorld has invested millions of dollars conserving wild animals and wild places, as well as supporting critical conservation work on every continent.
The SeaWorld & Busch Gardens Conservation Fund is just one way that guests can get involved in conservation: it supports wildlife research, habitat protection, animal rescue and conservation education in countries all over the world.
Research is another key component of SeaWorld’s
larger commitment to conservation and animal welfare, and includes publishing research, sharing the parks and animals as controlled research environments, and funding and supporting projects around the world.
SeaWorld is also deeply integrated with universities and research organisations, providing access to its animals for scientists conducting studies on a variety of subjects and providing direct support, both material and funding, to field researchers.
How the park’s orca and dolphin performances fit into this is a moot point, but SeaWorld has ceased its orca breeding programme and is adding to its rides, making it easy to have these as the focus of a visit to the park.
Besides Infinity Falls, SeaWorld’s white knuckle experiences include Mako, the tallest, fastest roller coaster in Orlando; Manta, a head first, face-down thrill ride, and Kraken Unleashed, a floorless roller coaster that takes riders at highway speeds to heights of more than 150ft.
After a week exploring all that SeaWorld’s parks have to offer, I was eager to return for more. A day is not long enough to experience everything at each park, so if you go once, expect to become an Orlando regular.
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