Amazon Quest boatride at River Safari Singapore

*SPOILER ALERT* Don't read if you'd rather be surprised. 

One fine Monday morning, we decided to go to River Safari seeing as the weather was bright and sunny. We decided to also get the family annual membership which is a good value. You just need to go at least 3 times within the year to break even. And the great thing now is they have different memberships like 2 Adults and 1 Child, or 2 Adults and 3 Kids, etc. So it's more 'fair'. And with the annual membership you also get free parking, so everytime you go there you save $7 on parking! The thing about River Safari is most of the attractions and walkways are sheltered, so even if it rains it's still ok to go there, unlike the Zoo. 

The big draw of course is the new boat ride called Amazon River Quest since it has just opened. We were a little bit nervous when we entered the turnstile and saw a sign that said wait time for the ride was 2 hours! The park attendant told us it's actually just about an hour. Ok, we hoped she was right. If you want to go to the boat ride straight away, after the turnstile go to the right side so you'll be walking against the flow of the park.  If you went the other way, it's no big deal, but you just need to cross the long bridge across the lake. 

When we got to the ride, we were told the wait time was only about 40mins, phew, that's not so bad. And actually it didn't feel like 40 minutes at all. 

This is the boarding area after you've queued up. They'll divide you according to rows, each row can take up to 3 people, it only has 3 seatbelts. Having the seatbelts there makes you think the ride will have some kind of high drop, but I realise that maybe the seatbelts are more there to stop people from standing up during the ride. There's a height restriction of 106cm, so it's too bad the younger kids can't enjoy the ride too because I think they'd really enjoy it. 

 Once you board the boat, you go towards the elevator.

 And then it lifts you up! Rather quickly too. So this is where you'll meet the first drop. The drop isn't too steep and you don't get wet on it at all....except for a few droplets. Along the ride there are a couple more drops, can't remember whether it was one more or two more.

The boats returning after their journey. We waited here for quite a while and it got really hot. 

This is the first animal enclosure you see. The 'river' the boats travel on is quite narrow, narrower than any other water ride I've ever been on. The boats travelled slightly too fast, would be good for it to go a bit slower so we could look at the animals properly. As it was, all we were trying to do was spot the animals as fast as we could before the boat passed by the enclosure. And some of them were really hard to spot too! Just see the elusive Jaguar below. We also couldn't spot the giant anteaters.....too bad.

Can you spot the spots?

Flamingos you get a good look at, but the enclosure smelled a bit......

Iguana

So I guess the ride really requires you to go on it more than once in order to properly see all the animals. It sure beats the silly Madagascar ride at Universal Studios Singapore (I still don't get why there was never any drop on that boat ride!! I guess they were going for It's a Small World kind of ride)...At least everytime you go on this boat ride you'll see something different.

As it's a new attraction I can imagine how crowded it will get on the weekends.