The story of the coaster today located at Vallejo, California's Six Flags Marine World as Zonga began back in 1986 when coaster design legend Anton Schwarzkopf erected Thriller for the first time: a masterpiece of steep dives, multiple swooping vertical loops and loopscrews, and the most powerful g-forces of any ride in the world - 6.5 g's. Thriller soon came to be known as the king of portable steel coasters, and traveled throughout Germany touring fairs for the next decade. In the mid-1990s, Six Flags AstroWorld, already the home of several Schwarzkopf-designed coaster tracks, offered to purchase the thrill ride. So Thriller was packed up and sent across the ocean to the Houston, Texas Six Flags location where it opened as Taz's Texas Tornado (later simplified to Texas Tornado). But after several seasons of operation, the Texas climate had taken its toll on the ride's steel composition and components, the Tornado being taken out of operation as a result and sitting idle for the next two seasons. The once king of traveling coasters would not meets its end, fortunately, and the track and support sections got back on the road one more time, heading northwest to the more favorable weather of Vallejo, California to become the eighth coaster installed at Six Flags Marine World. Receiving track modifications and shortened trains to tone down overly-intense areas and a fresh coat of paint, the multi-looper is about to re-debut just about as good as new with the new name Zonga - derived from an African Swahili word for the loop shape, and appropriately enough. And today, Schwarzkopf's brainchild is ready to thrill a whole new generation with its 115-foot heights, 62-mile per hour speeds, and 3,675 feet of fully-twisted classic steel coaster meyhem.

Thrill seekers are seated two-abreast fashion in the station, pulling down over-the-shoulder restraints before the ride on Zonga gets rolling. The train slides onto the curved lift hill and is towed around an upwards U-turn to the right. After the curve, it's straight to the top, riders being taken up above the maze of looping, twisting, multi-colored Schwarzkopf track just off to the right. One hundred and fifteen feet above the California turf, the train starts heading down into a small valley and pulls up the other side to near the initial plunge. The blue rails head steeply downwards in the coaster's first twisting plunge sending thrillseekers screaming towards the ground at a 70-degree angle. Bottoming out, Zonga presses on as it presses riders down into their seats with appreciative g-forces of over five times the weight of gravity as they're whisked up through the first circular bright yellow vertical loop of 92 feet, then dives straight into the second high-g vertical inversion of lime green track reaching 82 feet into the air. After the completion of the first two consecutive inversions, the track climbs up to enter a blocking section paralleling the lift. Diving off the brakes with a heavily banked sweep heading leftwards, passengers are flown back under the lift and around the first drop, then dive down through the red third inversion of 48 feet and up into a second run of block brakes. Plunging around another U-dive inside of the curved lift, Zonga sends riders through the final inversion around the purple track of the loopscrew and back around to encircle the first two loops. Up and out of one more block section, passengers are lead around inside of the layout with another left-hand U-turn and final rightwards bank into the brakes, two more curves leading around the exterior of the layout and back to the beginning.

From beginning to end, Zonga is one heck of a seriously twisted coaster classic!