Wet'n'Wild Sunday

Early Sunday morning. Hot and sunny. Bikini, thongs and towel quickly find their way to our beach bags. 'Cause it's a Wet'n'Wild day. Grant is coming to pick us up at 9:30 and as usual he's right on time. 'Out the front when you are ready' says an sms at 9:30:23 and off we go to get wet'n'wild altogether at the Gold Coast's #1 waterpark.

It's a great day. It's a long day. With short rides, long rides, slow rides, fast rides, individual rides.. 2, 3, 4, .. person rides, and a lazy rubber tube hang on the beach. Our attraction hunt begins with Mammoth Falls, 4.5 metre wide troughs winding over more than 200 metres of white water rapids, ridden in giant 6-person tubes. Too easy. Let's get the pulses racing. There's a whole new Extreme H2O Zone now open with Tornado, Blackhole and Mach 5. That's where we go next. Other 200 metres of twists and turns in open air flumes, ridden in a 3-man tube. Perfect for me, Ann and Grant :) Blackhole as the name suggests features two enclosed slides that catapult you into pitch black spirals of darkness. You don't know which way you're turning next, and you don't see a thing until you hit the final splashdown. Tornado offers a wild journey on the unique super-slide from a 15-metre high platform, where you blast down a 40-metre long tunnel into the middle of a storm, spin around the Tornado's funnel in a 2-person clover-leaf tube splashing back and forth through the swirling water. And we made it! Me and Ann, the two adrenaline addicts.

What's next? A little stroll pass the Buccaneer Bay, the ultimate kids' zone full of colour and cool interactive elements. Ahoy, little maties! :) Maybe next time. We head to the other side of the park where we split. Ann decides to try Aqua Racing, 86 metre long slide reaching speeds of up to 40 km/h. Änn da fäst wumän :) Me and Grant jump on the Speedcoaster, a tandem tube slide with a zero-gravity finish. Down in one piece, we meet up again and climb to the top of Whitewater Mountain to find the entrance to the four Whitewater Flumes: Cascade, Bombora, Ripcurl and Pipeline, where each of us rides its own slide over 150 metres to the splashdown zone. Splashhh!! That's enough. No more climbing, no more riding. We lie back and relax on the soft tubes at Calypso Beach and let the slow-flowing river take us through lush sub-tropical gardens, a Caribbean shanty town and the remains of a pirate castle. Go with the flow...