SeaWorld, Orlando

SeaWorld is my favourite park in Orlando. It's full of whales, dolphins, sharks, stingrays, penguins - real ones, ride-ones, toy ones and several shows to showcase some amazing talent.

If you want to be in the centre soakzone, you'll need to take park advice and get there early, but the seats are great everywhere. Up high and out of the 'zone will save your camera and you can get some amazing shots as the whales leap, splash, surf and ski.
It's amazing what they'll do, but I love when the audience starts calling for Shamu and waving their hands, encouraging Shamu to give us a splash.


Those crazy enough to sit in the soakzone are gonna get it!

If you really want to get soaked AND take photos, go see the show more than once. It's on several times a day! Don't forget to go high up out of the soakzone and get a really good overview of the whales.

TGTips In the soakzone seats you will get wet so protect your camera, passport & wallet with a zippy polythene bag you can slip in your pocket, or, for the less daring, take a rain poncho. You'll need it!

Across from the Shamu Stadium, the Wild Arctic base station introduces you to polar bears (they're my kind of bears - usually asleep), huge walruses and the cutest beluga whales. The glass walls allow you to see these animals above and below the water. But be warned, this might be Orlando, but there's real snow and it can get a little chilly. Good job I have a fur coat.

For the more nervous bears, and their younger assistants, you can ride the Shamu Express , the Orca-shaped roller coaster. It's not huge, but it's a great introduction to coasters.

Walking anti-clockwise around the park, you'll come to the Shark Encounter. You can get some great photos from above in the outdoor pools, but head inside and a glass tunnel leads you beneath the water for an underwater view of some familiar and sometimes scary-looking sharks and barracuda amongst the rays and cuter (really?) leopard sharks.

TGTips A day pass to SeaWorld gets you in for two days, a Discovery Cove dolphin swim can also get you fourteen days at SeaWorld, an annual pass gives you great discounts (currently 10%) on most merchandise and food plus free parking that saves you $12/day! Alternatively, you can get a FunPass which gets you in for the rest of the calendar year.

Further round and you can take in the Clyde and Seamore Take Pirate Island show at the Sea Lion and Otter Stadium. This is definitely one for the kids! It's a light-hearted and punny pirate show where human pirates team up with sea lions, a walrus and an otter to find a treasure map and get off an island. The animals are so much better at acting than the humans!

After the over-acting of Clyde and Seamore (well, the humans anyway) you can see California sea lions and harbour seals in the more realistic setting of Pacific Point Preserve.

A few dollars will buy you some fish if you'd like to feed them, but be careful of those pesky birds. You'll need a good throwing arm to make sure your fish hits the target.

The Kraken ride is a twisty coaster based on the monster of the deep that struck terror in sailors for years. This coaster is missing the floor, with feet dangling - probably a way for the park to collect flip-flops to sell in the shops! Unfortunately, they won't let bears on this one and the adjoining lockers were NOT comfortable! They didn't even have a window! This ride is not for the faint-hearted (they tell me).

If you like penguins, and I do, then the Penguin Encounter gets you up close and personal with a variety of birds. With a glass wall, you can see above and below the water line to see these waddling birds gain grace as they appear to fly through the water. The Rockhopper penguins are really cute. There are puffins here too.Photographs don't tend to come out that well as it's a little dark and the moving walkway doesn't give you chance to stop and focus. Just a little further back you can take a static walkway, but even then the light isn't that great, and flash reflects off the glass wall. That's my excuse why this photo is blurry, anyway. That and the snow...

After the penguins, we headed for a bear-sized ride in Journey to Atlantis . This is a log flume ride where you head to the mysterious lost city of Atlantis. There are some nice effects in this one with some of it in the dark. Anyway, they don't mind bears riding this one. The more riders the wetter you get on this one, which is a shame as we had a full boat second time around - bleagghhh!!! Ah well, you soon dry out in Orlando! We headed straight to here first thing on our second visit and managed to get on twice without standing in line at all. Brilliant.

At Manatee Rescue you can take a look at these gentle giants. These mammals are very much at risk and those on show in this exhibit have been rescued. Once healthy they will be re-homed in the wild waters of Florida. There's another underwater exhibit here so you can get real perspective of the scale of these quiet creatures.

Past the alligators exhibit you can head next to Dolphin Cove . Again, you can see these beautiful animals both on the surface and underwater. It's fascinating to watch individuals and groups hang out together and with the Orlando sun shining through the water it's possible to get photographs both in and out of the water.

Above the water line, you can pay extra for some fish and spend a few minutes feeding the bottlenose dolphins, and even tickle a dolphin chin or two. You can see from the photo there are enough dolphins for everyone. This is about as close as you'll get without heading over to Discovery Cove. If you don't want to spend the extra, there is a little cove-side access area where a dolphin might come and take a look at you. These are beautiful animals and to get so close to them is amazing. Even for a well-travelled bear like myself!

Alongside the dolphins is Stingray Lagoon . Another chance to buy some more fish (if you have any money left!) but there's nothing fishy about this exhibit, well, aside from the fish. Here you can get paws-on, leaning in and touching the rays as they swim past. They are surprisingly very soft and velvety to the touch.

Just a few steps away from is the Whale and Dolphin Theater. The Blue Horizons drops a Ted down to four Teds for the addition of some weird feathered humans on the trapeze. I'm guessing it's padding between the bottlenose dolphins (don't want to wear them out!) but to me the combination jars. That said, the humans mostly don't get in the way of the leaping dolphins. For a little extra colour, a few macaws fly very close over our heads, but this show is mostly about the dolphins. You can put up with any amount of humans to see the dolphins.

And finally, well this time anyway, was the innovative coaster Manta . Well, to be fair, this is another one of those rides they wouldn't let me on. I couldn't get lifts in my shoes big enough to make me tall enough to fit in the seat belts! While standing in line, you get underwater windows into the aquarium, so you have something cool to look at while you stand in line.

It's just as well I didn't ride - once you are in the seat, they tip you forwards through 90 degrees, and - my assistant, Di, tells me - they just dangle you there. Unlike any other coaster she's been on, Di says you ride this entire ride, including corkscrews and loops, in that horizontal -hands and knees' position. It's a comfortable ride (sort of), but a freaky - and great - experience. It's nice to find a ride that has something new to offer.

If you want to get even closer to these animals, SeaWorld offers a number of different interactions with their animals - from the whales and dolphins, to penguins and even an underwater shark encounter. There's also a variety of dining opportunities amongst the animals, but in my two visits this time, I didn't have time for any of this! Maybe next time - and there will be a next time.



So, should you visit SeaWorld? Definitely! Not only can you see a variety of sealife, hands-on and up close, but there are enough cool rides for the wildest coaster enthusiasts. The sheer volume of, er, well, stuffed, if you must know, animals that are available, from very large to small, there's something for everyone - who'd've thought a stuffed stingray or shark could be cute?

I got Rocky, a Rockhopper penguin, who is sooo cool, but don't tell him, or he'll be wanting his own website. Who ever heard of a stuffed penguin having his own website?

TourGuideTed