Splish-Splashing at Aquaventure at Atlantis The Palm

We’ve wanted to visit Dubai since 2000 when we watched a show on the building of Palm Island. So when we were invited to spend the day at Atlantis Aquaventure at Atlantis Dubai, we were super excited! Our flight landed at 7am and we could think of no better way to spend our first day in Dubai than relaxing at Middle East’s largest water park.

As a kid, I always started my visit to the water park with a ride down the lazy river. Naturally, that’s where we started at Atlantis Aquaventure too. We grabbed a double tube and started lazily drifting down the river; a few minutes later the river became rapids and we laughed as we were tossed about through caverns and around twists and turns.

The Ziggurat is the central temple where all the water slides start from. We started with a water slide called The Surge, an inner tube slide that almost immediately plunged us into total darkness as it twisted and turned before shooting us out into a pool of water.

My favorite was The Plunge, one of the water-coasters. We dragged our inner tube onto the platform and climbed in. With the push of a button, we plunged down a drop before being shot back uphill and into total darkness. As our tube swished back and forth up the sides of the enclosed tube, I thought we were going to flip!

The Shark Attack also twisted and turned through dark tunnels before lazily dropping us into a glass enclosed tunnel that glides through the shark lagoon which contains five different species of sharks: guitar sharks, bow mouth sharks, white tip, black tip and grey reef sharks.

The Leap of Faith drops nearly straight down 27.5 meters from the very top of the Ziggurat and again catapults into a glass tunnel in the shark lagoon, as if the thrill of the drop wasn’t exciting enough!

There is more to Aquaventure than just water slide and river rides. We met with one of the caregivers and waded waist high into the water of the shark tank we had shot through on the Shark Attack. With a bucket of shrimp, we hand fed cownose rays. The rays use two modified fins on their front side which produce suction, drawing the food into their mouths. We laughed as the rays flapped around us, knowing it was feeding time, and gave our belly buttons a good cleaning while they sucked looking for food. After all the shrimp was gone, we held out our arms and occasionally rays would swim right up onto them giving us hugs.

Know Before You Go

• Aquaventure is open daily 10am to sunset and day visitor passes are available.
• Towel and locker rental are available.
• Ray feeding and other animal encounters are available.
• Children can participate in the ray feeding, but must be a minimum of 6 years old and 1.2 meters tall. All children under 12 years old must be accompanied by an adult.

Thank you to Atlantis Dubai for hosting us for the day at Atlantis Aquaventure and arranging a private ray feeding for us. As always all opinions, and decisions to climb into tanks with five species of sharks, are entirely our own.