Wild Wadi

Wednesday was planned for us to take a trip to a waterpark and luckily, the weather didn't let us down. It was possibly our hottest day so far, so a great one to be in and out of the water.

The water park was "Wild Wadi" and is a 12-acre tropical paradise with waterfalls, rapids, waves, rides and attractions. The main ride is the "Jumeirah Sceirah" and is the tallest and fastest speed slide outside North America hitting speeds of over 80kph and a drop of 27m. It was an absolutely awesome experience, slightly scary too but it all adds to the fun! Most of the rest of the rides at the park are connected and are ridden in big inflatable tyres. You don't even have to climb any steps as part of the ride is getting shot up by powerful jets, just to slide down again! The height of laziness!! This was a nice day out in a really nice setting, overlooked by the Jumeirah Beach Hotel (looks like a wave) and the Burj-al-Arab (looks like a sail). If you haven't heard of these, look them up on the net and get a picture, they really are extravagant hotels!

Thursday began with beautiful plans involving getting a bus into town, linking up with a river cruise then wandering around the Old Souk before meeting Louise and Marc that evening. Unfortunately our best laid plans were ruined when the bus didn't turn up (so we had to get the more expensive taxi) then the river cruise was cancelled due to high wind (giving us an extra 2 hours to kill) and then the Old Souk was a lot smaller than expected and only took about 5 minutes to walk round! So for all our planning we just wandered around town for a bit and then went to another of the many malls in the city. It was nice but not quite what we were hoping for from our day.

Friday, on the other hand, went exactly to plan. We went along to what is apparently a bit of an institution over here. We went to a Friday brunch. These start at about 11.30-12ish and go on until about 4pm and are just massive buffets with everything you can imagine on offer. The price of 179AED (about 27 pounds) includes as much food as you can eat and all drinks including beer, wine and spirits. A very good price and we all certainly made the most of it before heading to another bar for a few more and then home for even more! We finished the evening with drunken karaoke on "SingStar", a PlayStation game. Fun, but I think it only highlighted the fact that I really shouldn't sing!!

As you may imagine from the description of Friday, today was a slightly subdued day, what with the fuzzy heads, furry mouths and funny tummies!!