Yesterday, a foot-long spanner was thrown into the works of our roadtrip: our passports are at the Indian embassy awaiting visa processing. The snag is, here in the UAE tourists must–by law–present their passports upon check-in to a hotel or hostel. Obviously this stopped the show for us yesterday, so we returned to the safe haven of my sister’s apartment to have a rethink. We’ve got this hire car for a week, but won’t have our passport for a few more days.

Naturally, when faced with such a difficult backpacker travel situation, we did the only thing that we could: we drove up to Dubai and paid nearly £100 on a day out at the new Atlantis hotel Aquaventure waterpark — wayhey! We feared big, marauding crowds. Not so, being the middle of the week the park was really quite quiet. In fact, only once did we have to queue for more than fifteen minutes to get on a ride. Our favourites included: the thirty metre near-vertical drop into the shark tank from the top of the ziggurat; the not-so-lazy river, with rapids and floating entrances to rides (why walk up stairs lugging your ‘tube’ with you, when you can remain in your tube and be whisked up on a travellator; and, our big favourite, the tube ride where you go up more than you go down (helped by some really powerful water-jets).

The only real downside is the cost. It’s not cheap. The entrance fee is 220Dhs (£35), the optional locker is a non-refundable 50Dhs (£8) and a sandwich, drink and crisps comes in at 49Dhs (a shade off £8). Our advice to fellow tourists wanting to go here? Definitely go on a weekday (the working week is Sunday to Thursday here, remember?). It’s amazing, if a little unfinished; there was nowhere except the floor of the changing rooms to put your stuff — no hooks, benches, etc. We were told that you cannot take food and drink into the park. While it might not be allowed, there were no bag checks and it would have been no trouble to enter the site with cheaper foodstuffs. We shared one locker between us and in fact only really needed a locker because I was carrying my cameras. If you only take towels, flip-flops and suncream, you’d likely be OK just leaving it on a sun bed for the duration — although obviously management do not take responsibility for personal items, etc.

A great day out, and probably the best thing we’ve done in Dubai.

Finally a note to the managers at Atlantis: Please, please, please release the whale shark that you “rescued” (read: captured). It’s really not on. We would not have visited you had we had known about this beforehand.

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