Park: Walibi Belgium

A mate was going to go over to the continent for a couple of parks and he very kindly opened up an invitation for me to tag along. He'd do all the driving, I'd just have to keep him awake for the long drives as the plan would go through Belgium to Cologne in Germany.

Our first park was Walibi Belgium which was having an extended run for Halloween.

This year it opened Pulsar, a new water coaster but it also had opened up a number of scare mazes, which would be pretty cool.

It was going to be a busy day, and we had to rework a plan to ride the new stuff, then do what we can before the mazes opened up in the evening.

A nice Autumnal day and it wasn't too cold and we had no skies in the cloud. 

First up, Pulsar, a new shuttle water coaster.

To help capacity the station comes with a turntable allowing the rather efficient operators to load a second car whilst the first was running the back and forth track.

The ride features a bi-directional launch system that accelerates the boat between spikes.

Rather cleverly the final drop is the only one that creates a splash.

This video shows how they've cleverly engineered this.

The drop tower still stands over the other rides and was running really well all day.

Some attempt was made at the Halloween theming.

Tal had more to ride at this park than I, which meant I could duck out of rides like this kiddy coaster.

In a previous visit I had ridden Turbine, the park's Schwarzkopf coaster. Following complaints of noise the park decided to fully enclose it, which must have been some financial undertaking but a great way to keep the coaster in the park. Being enclosed made the loop much more interesting as there was no horizon to focus on resulting on the loop feeling like it was going around more than it actually was.

Tal also needed Loop Garou, the wooden coaster. This was running well although when we were queueing to get our scare maze tickets we saw it stall on the lift hill then rather worryingly roll back through the catch mechanism for a little bit before stopping properly. The staff, to their credit were quick to respond and had the ride running soon after.

There were a number of scare mazes and by the time we'd gotten to the ticket office, and shouted off a kid who thought he could jump the queue (jerk) some of them had already filled up. We got the ones we could and headed back into the park. The mazes all had pre-allocated times which meant we also had some time to enjoy the park still. 

The asylum is the biggest attraction and had some cool scares like having to walk through a dining hall where some of the actors are mixed amongst robed dummies, and another section where the ceiling drops in. The exit had people running out being chased by a chainsaw wielding clown, which was cool.

We also did a mine one which was pretty cool and the miners shovels they were scraping the ground with must be pretty sharp as they were throwing sparks.

I'm pleased with how this photo came out. This is the Sally Dark Ride which is still very good. The better you do at the shooting the more of the ride you get to see. Unfortunately our car didn't score high enough to go into the extended journey (our weak links were two randoms in front of us)

The best scare maze by far was the first one we did and one that wasn't advertised with the others. We'd picked up a ticket at the start of the day without realising what it was, and when we realised we'd picked up a scare maze ticket we were pretty excited.

As for the maze, the story is that you've to help a DJ find his mixing partner. The pre-show is great as you watch a large joker face become more and more lit up as a trance track plays then as a countdown hits zero the room is filled with a smoke cannon and a number of chainsaw wielding clowns burst into the room from nowhere and somehow you're on the edge of a hayfield with lasers going over your heads and strobe lights all over the place. You have 2 minutes to escape the maze, which is more than enough time to have an absolutely incredible scary time. This was so much fun.

We didn't actually get over to the other side of the park where the boomerang is. The scare mazes over there were the ones we couldn't get a ticket for.

"Enjoy the Day, Fear the Night". We liked this, and the park have done an incredible job with their Halloween event. We know for next time just how busy this event gets and we did say we should come back.

A cool steam punk chap on the way out.