Kebab
Giga Poster
PortAventura, iconic for it's stunning scenery, Spanish sun and spectacular rides (rollercoasters for that matter). Not many parks have the same effect as PA, it's just a park that keeps you coming back for more and more, despite how intolerable the heat can become, and how many times you've already whored Dragon Khan, PortAventura does not fail on that matter.
I'll try and keep this short and sweet, seeing as I've done PortAventura reports time and time before, I don't really want to blabber on whats already been said. So I'll start with what everyone has been waiting for (drum roll please...)
Shambhalalalala. Drastically changing skylines since 2012! This Hyper is huge, and can be seen as soon as you leave the aeroplane in Reus, this structure towers over anything in the area (Asides Hurakan Condor, but then again, it's just a 300 foot stick), and I must be honest, from a distance, really fits in with the park nicely!
Cutting to the chase now, Shambhala in all its elegant aesthetic glory; rides like a monster! B&M Hyper coasters, notorious for being 'forceless', 'cookie-cutter' and 'air-timeless'?... Really did give me the wrong impression indeed.
The queue for Shambhala was rammed, peaking out to 2-3 hours on some afternoons (Thank God for the single rider queue, it was empty during a 2 hour wait, meaning walk-on re-rides!), and the queue line area itself left a little be desired (just imagine a fusion of Furius Baco and Dragon Khans queue line). They did have some nice touches, like TV screens showing footage of the construction, but no real theming effort was made here.
As soon as you depart the station, you're taken up to the top of a steep 255' sheer drop. The lift allows you to have some interesting views of the park, I could even see the fountain show in Mediterreanea (the entrance land to the park), and it's quite a distance away. You realise how high you actually are when you look right and find yourself adjacent to the top of Hurakan Condor (gulp* that is pretty high...), and then suddenly you begin to level out above the straight near-vertical drop.
The drop feels great with some nice sustained floater that seems to last for centuries, suddenly you are pummelled straight down into a forceful pull out through a tiny tunnel, then flying back out of your seat as you glide over the 205' air-time hill.
Then you enter one of the highlight elements of the rollercoaster, the 'ampersand turnaround', and here you find some really bizarre G's and headchopper, exiting this helix (almost identical to the drop shape on Alpengeist) you hit some strong G's, similar to the intensity of Nemesis' valley helix. As you're on the verge of blacking out (I was anyway...) you shoot over the speed hill providing my most favourite moment of air-time here, some great ejector, and the coaster is left to a medley of floater hills and a splashdown.
Shambhala is outstanding, and by far the best coaster in the park, not as intense as Khan but far more enjoyable nevertheless. I give it a solid 10/10, and has now become my favourite coaster.
Because I'm a lazy ****, I'll leave the rest of the report as photos (even though I didn't take many at all), but if you have any questions please do ask. Thank you.
The end.
