10000 leagues under the sea...or just our hotel!

---

Today we decided to stay at the Atlantis and make use of all the facilities that we were paying loads for! There is a water park at one end of the resort which we spent the morning in. Aquaventure was the main reason we stayed at The Atlantis. Among other things, it has a kid’s water playground, waterslides, river rides and a beach. The adult tube water slides send you down, even up and sometimes into pitch black tunnels before spitting you out onto the beach. The scariest one, called the Leap of Faith, catapults you down an almost vertical slide, into a transparent tunnel through a shark-filled lagoon. It’s all very exhilarating but by the time you get to the shark tank, you’re going so fast and there is so much water spray that you can’t see a thing anyway. It’s more interesting watching it from above or from the window below! I had to go on it a second time though, just to pick up my stomach and bikini that got left at the top.

We were sure that Mykenzie would love the kid’s water playground, but all she wanted to go on were the river rides. Unlike Adminaustralia, we were allowed to take the kids in the double tubes with us, so we floated around the ‘rivers’ and through the white water rapids. Edyn wasn’t so sure about the rapids, but this was all Mykenzie wanted to go on. In the afternoon, we asked her what her favourite part was and she kept saying the “bunnies”. It took all our powers of deduction to work out what she meant and it wasn’t until we started thinking like a 3 year old that we realised the “bunnies” were actually “rabbits” which is what we had being going down all afternoon. When we said rapids, our gorgeous 3 year old had heard rabbits!

We also wandered around the Lost Chambers, an amazing aquarium telling the story of the lost city of Atlantis. The girls loved to watch the fish and every time we got out of the lift we would be face to face with this gigantic fish tank and it always took about 15 minutes to get past. Needless to say, we were never in a hurry to go anywhere.

This evening Belinda and Simon met us at Atlantis and we had dinner in house. We had happy hour drinks, all-you-can-eat buffet and then ended up back at Nasimi Beach. It turns out this bar is one of the ones that the locals go to. It’s relaxing, funky and you can get shishas there. As the local, Simon knew what to order and we ended up smoking apple tobacco. Actually, I took one puff and solidified my staunch non-smoking position! But still it was a great night hanging out with old friends in this very unusual city!

---