Land of plenty

Flamingo Land, the theme park and zoo set deep in rural North Yorkshire, boasts all the ingredients for a fantastic day out. There are the frightening white-knuckle rides for those who crave an adrenaline rush and want to experience surging G-forces familiar to budding astronauts from NASA's training camp.

There are the more sedate rides, such as the traditional carousel, and there are the entertaining antics of the exotic animals that live in the zoo.

It all adds up to a cracking day out for all the family.

There is so much to see and do in the 375-acre site at Kirby Misperton that you will have to make at least one return visit to pack everything in. In fact, there are so many attractions that many people decide to holiday there at a purpose-built village.

And Flamingo Land does not rest on its laurels. Such is the competitive nature of the leisure business that the theme park is always adding new rides to whet the appetite of the great British public.

Its major new attraction for this year is the Little Monsters' Den Of Mischief, which is a £1.5 million home to a cartoonesque monstrous trio - Little Mummy, Little Frankenstein and Little Dracula.

A great deal of thought and imagination has gone into devising this ride in order to create a magical experience for adults and children alike. The witty visual jokes work a treat.

With the arrival last season of the Wall's Magnum Force - a terrifying triple-looping rollercoaster - Flamingo Land boasts eight rollercoaster rides, including the Bullet and the Wild Mouse with its petrifying zig-zags.

And living up to its name is the Terrorise, a white-knuckle ride that resembles an instrument of torture devised by the most deviant mind in the Spanish Inquisition.

Those brave souls seduced by its masochistic charms seemed to enjoy it - judging by their screams of exhilaration, or were they screams of terror?

Flamingo Land takes its name from its zoo, which is home to more than 1,000 animals, including a polar bear, tigers, zebras, camels, monkeys, reptiles, penguins and, of course, the famous pink flamingos.

This year's disastrous foot and mouth epidemic has forced the closure of some areas of the zoo to the general public, but you can still get close to many exotic animals. The funky gibbons, for example, were a delight with their high-pitched hollering combined with their swinging acrobatics.

New zoo animals for 2001 include Brazilian tapir, South American alpaca and scimitar-horned Oryx (African antelope).

To emphasis the fact that many of the zoo exhibits belong to endangered species, Flamingo Land is offering visitors the chance to adopt an animal.

My children - Sophie, Daniel and Rachel - were well impressed with the show put on by the zoo's gifted sealions Benson and Bella.

The many hours of training and rehearsal paid off as the sealions performed a variety of tricks to an appreciative audience of about 600 people. Benson, the large male sealion, is a seasoned trouper with real star quality. He obviously enjoys performing.

Sealions are naturally inquisitive and very playful. Foraging for food in the wild keeps sealions mentally alert and physically agile. Their counterparts in an oceanarium do not have to hunt for food and they would soon get bored unless they were taught to perform tricks such as balancing a ball on their nose, catching hoops and jumping out of the water.

Litter has a short "floor life" thanks to the vigilance of the theme park's staff. Within 30 seconds of me putting down a sealion booklet on the ground to make both my hands free so I could take a photograph, a man was picking it up with a "litter stick" to put in his refuse sack.

Fact file:

Flamingo Land is just off the A169 Malton-Pickering road. Follow the brown tourist signs.

Admission: £13 for children and adults: family ticket (any four people) £46.

Call 01653 669021 or 668287 for details of the animal adoption scheme.

For details of the Flamingo Land Holiday Village call 01653 668585.