Aqua Club Dolphin - don't forget the Lonely Planet book

Before you are concerned let me say that we deliberately went on a day when the Dolphin section was closed. We wouldn't condone enclosed dolphins performing tricks for human entertainment. Overall the rest of the park is great and basically a large water park.

If you are planning on going be aware. It is hard to get there unless you are happy to pay heaps on taxis or understand how the Turkish buses work. We tried unsuccessfully. The entry price is cheap and our family entered for just 53Lira but all food and water was confiscated and the prices inside are a little high and the menu limited. It is virtually impossible to get info online as it is only in Turkish. Most long rides are restricted to 10 years or older. They always ask but it is easy to lie a little.

The park is located about 40Km west of the old city so we ventured out early at about 8am. We caught the metro and headed along the coast for about 15 stops until we reached its end at Halkali. It was marked as a train station but was more of a train yard. It was difficult to work out how pedestrians get out of there. Eventually we made it out onto a main road with cars zipping by. Luckily a taxi saw us and hooted for our attention.

I had read about Taxis in Istanbul the night before. They either pretend the meter does not work, or drive the long way or not give you your bags unless you give them a tip. We must have been very lucky as both of ours took us directly without hassle, or at least tried. The first one was so good that when he took the wrong road he reversed up an off ramp the wrong way. At least the taxi was facing in the right direction.

The park itself was awesome. There were five main swimming pools including a large kids pool with various slides. Unfortunately it was also the coldest pool but Holly did not seem to care. She spent most of the day there.

I keep harking on about it but it is part of our experience to watch different people interacting with Holly. She was given a chocolate bar and a chocolate egg today. There were two life guards on at the kids pool, one at the top of the slide and one at the bottom. The girl at the bottom would blow her whistle and point for kids to move away from the bottom of the slide. As I had been sitting and watching, Holly had been going down the slide for some time. She started to move away toward the smaller slides on the other side of the pool. When she was about 15 meters away the girl blew her

whistle and pointed for Holly to come back to her. She came over and went up again to the joy of the young man (life guard) who always made a fuss of her as she went back on the slide. Its like every body recognises her as something special and we just can't see it. But when you see photos like the one below maybe they are all right.

Anyway Sophs, Julia and I went on most of the big sides. Julia couldn't do them all as you had to be 10. My favourite was a very high ramp. You start at the top on a donut and fly down and up like on a half pipe skateboard ramp. Sophs didn't do this one.

As we were leaving and moving down through the various pools we came across what you could only call a pool disco. With loud music and dancing on a stage foam was being sprayed out as a DJ hyped up the crowd. Sophia and Julia joined in. It was quite cool and not really what I expected to find in a majority Islamic country.



We had made one major error on this day in not bringing our guide book. I didn't know the name of the last metro stop and it could not be seen from the road side. We were supposed to get a taxi back there. We decided to try the buses instead. We were given rough directions for the bus stop from the park people and headed out. On the way we found a taxi stand and tried to ask them. It was hopeless. We carried on to the bus stop and asked where the bus went. They said Taksim which I should have known but could not remember under the pressure. Still it was about 10km from where we were staying. After a great deal of confused conversation we wondered back to the taxi stand. I drew a bad map of Istanbul with the airport, Blue Mosque and where the metro started. The four guys had no idea. I even got Sophia to draw a train. Anyway it was decided that he would drive and I would give him directions, yeah that's a winner!!!

It was all going well until he said "motorway", I said "no" but eventually changed my mind. By the time we got off we were miles out of the way. We stopped aimlessly to ask for directions. The meter was running and things were going bad. There was another metro running from the airport so I went with this more obvious location. It was a more expensive second option but far better than paying him well over a hundred lira to run us into the old city. The metro was crowded again but people here are very tolerant. Our moods improved rapidly when as we were walking to our apartment an old man offered Holly a chocolate bar out of no where. The trip home took 2hrs but its all part of the adventure. It was nice sitting on the tram watching endless buses and cars going no where in bumper to bumper traffic as we cruised by.