All Aboard the Rainforest Cafe River Adventure Ride in Galveston

The only Rainforest Cafe with a ride can be found in Galveston, Texas. Like the city itself, the ride is haunted, not by the ghost of the Great Storm of 1900, but by the ghosts of a misguided effort to create a Disney-level ride in the world’s most expensive Chuck E. Cheese wannabe. The Rainforest River Adventure is an anomaly, a theme park ride without a theme park, and although I’d recommend it to anybody who enjoys dark rides like The Jungle Cruise or Pirates of the Caribbean, the reason for its existence remains unknowable. It’s both less than it should be, yet more than any Rainforest Cafe deserves, and that incongruity makes it one of the most baffling rides I’ve ever been on.

The confusion of its continued existence was evident during a visit last year. It was summer in Galveston, peak travel season, and although the restaurant itself was humming with a packed dining room, nobody was riding River Adventure. Nobody except me, that is. The ride’s entrance isn’t hidden or hard to find; it’s in the gift shop that makes up the restaurant’s lobby, right across from the dining room and the bar. After buying a $7 ticket at the gift shop counter, I quickly walked through an empty and mostly roped off queue to find a single bored teenager working the loading station, where I boarded one of the ride’s six-seater raft-style vehicles. 

Its boats look like smaller, more compact versions of what you’ll find at river rapids rides, but don’t worry: you won’t really get wet. Your craft slowly spins through a lazy river surrounded by lush vegetation and animal animatronics that aren’t quite Disney quality but better than you’d typically find in a small regional attraction like this. You’ll pass temple ruins and an indigenous war party that’s as poor in taste as the characters Disney removed from The Jungle Cruise a few years ago. Elephants flap their ears, crocodiles chomp menacingly, and after eight or so minutes I was stepping off the boat and out to catch an Uber. No, I didn’t eat there.

Yes, the Rainforest River Adventure is fun, and if I was a local I would probably ride it often in between visits to theme parks in Florida and California. The most notable thing about it is that it exists, though. It borrows some of the language and design ethos of Disney and Universal attractions, but doesn’t try to create a fully themed and immersive environment; the ruins and animals aren’t always the right scale, the ceiling is a criss-cross of exposed pipes that makes no effort to look like the sky, and the flat painted walls give no sense of depth. You’ll always be acutely aware that you’re in a chain restaurant in Texas and not an exotic jungle river—or even a theme park.

The Rainforest River Adventure opened in 2003, almost a decade after the chain’s creation, and it remains a one-off. If the Rainforest Cafe ever had plans to clone this ride at other locations, or come up with unique attractions in different cities, they never came to pass. So the Rainforest River Adventure stands as a unique, rather unloved vision of what this themed restaurant could have been. Instead of a slightly more immersive Chuck E. Cheese with more robots and better food, the Rainforest Cafe could have brought relatively high-end dark rides to cities that aren’t particularly close to theme parks. As somebody who keeps an annual pass to Six Flags over Georgia pretty much just so I can ride Monster Mansion whenever I get that dark ride itch, having something like the River Adventure nearby would be an even more affordable way to get my theme park fix, even if it’s not some world class, state-of-the-art attraction.

Like so many non-Disney and non-Universal theme park rides, the Rainforest Cafe’s attraction lies in this awkward no-man’s-land between competence and excellence. Its Jungle Cruise inspiration is a little too obvious, and that reinforces all the ways in which it doesn’t match Disney’s level of quality; the minimalist animatronics and lack of a human skipper (and, honestly, any signs of real people at all—I didn’t see a single person between boarding and disembarking that little raft) undermine whatever semblance of life it strives to create. Sometimes being the only person on a ride can be weirdly exciting, adding to the thrills and making the story feel truly personal; in Galveston, though, it just made the Rainforest River Adventure feel more artificial than it already was.

Still, it’s great that it exists, and has continued to operate for over 20 years. A ride this unpopular wouldn’t have lasted this long at a Disney theme park, and even a popular ride at Universal isn’t necessarily going to make it 20 years before it’s replaced with something newer. Other theme parks never would’ve built a ride like this in the first place, at least not in the last 30 years; at some point dark rides almost fully disappeared from parks that aren’t Disney and Universal, which remains a shame. The Rainforest River Adventure could be improved greatly in many ways, but that doesn’t mean it’s not good enough to exist as it is, even if you’ll wonder how it still exists the whole time you’re riding it. So not only does the Rainforest Cafe in Galveston have the only theme park ride in a Rainforest Cafe, it also has a kind of theme park ride that’s hard to find in an actual theme park these days. May this ghost linger inside the weird jungle restaurant for years to come.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.