Tag Archives: ratanga

Kiddie coaster

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Kiddie Coaster
Yup, that's right, even though it's actually aimed at young kids we took a ride or two on the Bushwacker roller coaster (at Ratanga Junction). The ride wasn't really fast enough, and finished way too quickly.

As mentioned, it is intended for young kids, so to be fair - it was fun-ish. Although, next time, if the queues at the Cobra, Monkey Falls, or Diamond Devil are short enough then I think we'll just spend our time alternating between those three. :)

Diamond Devil

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Diamond Devil
From my previous photo you probably noticed that we visited Ratanga Junction, our local theme park. Kerry-Anne bought one of the Groupon deals that gave us 10 tickets to visit the theme park at a massive price reduction.

We voted this ride, Diamond Devil (the one in my previous photo) as the third best ride in the park. The number one position, naturally, went to the park's twisting-two-times-looping roller coaster, the Cobra (check this video), and the number two position most certainly always goes to Monkey Falls.

Fast food at Ratanga Junction

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Fast food at Ratanga Junction
I've sung Ratanga Junction's praises in my last two posts - so to add some balance to the mix I thought I'd express my opinion about the food outlets trading in the theme park.

As with any theme park, I guess, one's not allowed to bring food or drinks into the park - which means that the park's able to charge a premium for food that's not of a particular high quality. The situation basically feels to me like: "eat what there is and pay our price, or starve".

Now, I guess I should confess that I haven't visited Ratanga on a normal-operating day for a couple of years, so it's possible that I wouldn't feel as ripped off and dissatisfied as I did those years back. It's also possible that folk who love greasy fast food wouldn't mind paying premium to enjoy lunch in "The wildest place in Africa".

What's your experience of Ratanga Junction's catering been? How about similar theme parks? Am I being silly, are they all pretty much the same?

Theme parks!

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Theme parks!
Most people, when asked which ride they love most at Ratanga Junction, will answer "The Cobra" (the big rollercoaster that you're able to see, sticking out like a sore thumb, when driving past along the N1 highway).

As I mentioned to Jonathan in a comment on my previous post - for me, the ideal day at Ratanga Junction would consist of numerous consecutive rides on The Cobra, Monkey Falls and Crocodile Gorge. What are your favourite theme-park rides?

We struck it lucky one day and visited the theme park on a quiet day. There was no queuing to speak of and we literally road The Cobra a dozen or more times! It was fantastic!

F*ROCK at Ratanga Junction

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Etienne Janse Van Rensburg - bassist for CrashCarBurn
We spent an awesome Saturday night taking photos of some of South Africa's most talented musicians performing at F*ROCK, an indoor rock festival held at Ratanga Junction. I had a really hard time choosing just one shot for the main post (we ended up with 253 photos of 8 bands, which you can see in our F*ROCK photo albums), and I even enlisted the help of my Twitter friends to help me choose at one point.

I eventually settled on this shot of Etienne Janse van Rensburg, the bass guitarist for the hugely popular CrashCarBurn. It was the first time I'd seen them perform live, and I was pretty impressed - in addition to their own original material, they played a medley of cover versions, which the crowd absolutely loved, and to make it all even more fun, they tossed out a flock of giant (no, really, GIANT) balloons for all of us to play with while they performed. Too cool for words, that was.

Check out all our photos from F*ROCK here (and visit the bands' websites to have a listen to their music):

By the way, if you have any interest in web culture and digital marketing, or if you'd just like to hear what I sound like, download a couple of episodes of The Digital Edge podcast, hosted by Saul Kropman and Jarred Cinman. My job is to sound like a girl in the news section each week, which I think I'm managing to do fairly well so far... and I promise you that the rest of the podcast is really worth a listen. ;-)