Aqualand, Corfu

And so to the last full day of the holiday, and it was with some surprise that we awoke to gentle rain (still about 28 degrees though) having had glorious sunshine all week, however, luckily we had booked up a trip to the biggest water park on the island (and rain is no problem if you are planning to be getting wet anyway!)...we were the first pick up, the coach was as on time as usual, but we were quite used to that by this stage. The driver (who looked a bit like Sawyer from LOST) was extremely friendly, but his grasp of English was cursory at best, this didn't deter him from nattering away for about the first 20 minutes of the journey, during which time I *think* we got the following bits of information from him -

1. He is married, and his wife is pregnant (that was indicated mostly by miming)
2. They are moving to England shortly as you can earn much more money being a coach driver in the UK, plus UK coach drivers are reluctant to work the 12 hour shifts that really bring in the cash (he is more than happy to)
3. He doesn't mind the cold, as long as his pockets are full of money
4. Aqualand (during peak season) can have as many as 5000 visitors a day, from 10 resort towns over the island and queues for the slides can take as long as two hours(!)
5. Roads in Corfu are extremely dangerous in the wet

- we stopped at a couple of other places to pick up a small number of further brave souls, and barring one quick stop along the way for a young German lad to go for a pee (the coach driver told him to just find a bush "All Corfu is toilet, it's natural! Where dog go, you go!"), we finally pulled into the completely empty car park at Aqualand...we basically had the entire place to ourselves...!

So, after paying for a "Family sized" locker for the day (it was barely big enough for 2 rucksacks, let alone all the crap a family would be carrying around for a day out!), we got changed and then headed to the nearest slides (absolutely no queues at all anywhere in the entire park!) -

- goodness only knows why, but the first slides we went for were the ones right at the top of the tallest tower, were also the narrowest pipes, and the one that I went for turned out to be a "Black Hole", and the rail you normally use to get some speed up was missing...I did have second thoughts as I was staring into the darkness, and even looked back, a little concerned that there was no life guard on duty, but threw myself in (as best I could) none-the-less...and just as I had passed the first bend (so I was in *total* blackness) I came to a complete halt...

I'm a bit claustrophobic, and this was the stuff of absolute nightmares, no-one above me to stop anyone else diving in and hitting me, total blackness, the muffled sound crashing water and feeling it building up behind me, hands slipping on the plastic, scratching desperately in order to shift myself down and what seemed like an eternity later I managed to drag myself to the next slope, where suddenly things got very steep indeed followed by 90 seconds of bedlam and then, thank goodness, daylight...where Flyingpops was standing wondering what on earth had happened to me (we should have learned by this to stay away from the tubes where you can't see what's going on...but more of that later) -

- it quickly became obvious that by far the best rides were the ones where you were allowed to use a two person "inflatable family raft" (as the rides went *much* *much* quicker with the weight of two plus gravity), but we had a go on everything, I suppose the place must have had about 25 different tube rides of various sizes and speeds from the insane vertical drop rides (that just *hurt*) all the way to the "Crazy River" (complete with 3 crash pools on the way down that tend to end up turning you backwards!) -

- confidence regained (despite difficulties with some extremely "Slippery Sarfaces"), and after Flyingpops had tried the much larger inflatable-only "Black Hole" with a single ring and come out saying it was completely tame, we thought we would try it on a two seater...big mistake...we were going so fast by the time we got to the last turn that Flyingpops lived up to her name and completely flew off the raft as we almost past horizontal on the side, smashing down into the tube (a fall of about 1.5 meters) head first, but also banging her hip, and after this, the raft and I basically ran her over and ended up driving her out of the tube and pushing her right under the surface into the landing pool-

-suffice it to say we decided enough was enough (having done about 40 rides in the space of an hour) we were knackered and Flyingpops was a bit dazed, so we hopped into the "Lazy River" for about 20 minutes to ride back to the other side of the park and then spent a similar amount of time in the wave pool (the third biggest wave pool in the world!), and it really did make some incredibly large waves (way over two meters), people were being thrown from their rubber rings!-

- After this we had a little wander around, to see what else there was around the place, and one of the most amazing things was the kids "Pirate Adventure", every 90 seconds or so -

- a massive container filled with water and tipped over absolutely covering everything, I have *no* doubt at all that if it hit a small child then they would be knocked completely off their feet by the force of the wave...did look like a lot of fun though... -

- there were three "Adventure pools" with stepping stones, slides -

- and even a giant jacuzzi, but by this stage we had started to feel a little hungry -

- Hmmm, yes, looks like something out of "Theme park world" doesn't it... ;)-

- the food though was superb (as long as you avoided the "burger and chips" or "pizza" options), my rotisserie plate was packed with tender meat in a fresh pitta, and accompanied by an excellent salad (not quite sure why it took them 15 minutes to prepare it though, not exactly "fast" food) -

- anyway, once we had let the food go down we repeated a few of the rides, then got changed (nursing our pruned hands) and back to the resort to enjoy our last night... ;)