Yesterday we travelled to the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere to visit a water park lost in the midsts of time, nothing has changed since last visit save for the lucrative feature of the park; the petting zoo, where the mule has disappeared as well as the rabbits to be replaced with some caged dogs and a peacock.

The park was largely empty compared to last time 3 years ago, might be 200 people there, maybe a little more, but the Turkish economy is in freefall so there’s probably not as much dosh sloshing around, the taxi drivers were thankful of the journeys, life is tough these days.

But down to the important reportage concerning the slides, the tower up to the slides could still be shaken and the broken steps were still repaired with wood and increasingly slimy carpet, which you try to avoid but more often than not don’t, your foot squelching in everyone else’s verrucas. However Mr T (me) and Master T (my son) continue to push the boundaries of water sliding to the limits, him with dangerous but show stopping runs down the slide only to hurl himself forwards and complete the slide in a chaotic but speedy splashy mess at the bottom. Myself; i’m built for speed, with super teflon coated rash vest, notches in my shoulder blades to minimise friction and the ability to skate across the water at the bottom reaching the boundary ropes, like a smooth multicoloured skimming stone, but fatter and sentient, Some one mentioned my weight being relevant to the equation but I think the weight to streamline ratio is just about perfect for such things, definitely hitting the sweet spot.

Theres a U shaped slide where the life guard who seems to creep everywhere moistens the ring, not a euphemism, invites the rider to sit in the ring, legs and arms out, bum in and asks if you want to spin as you go down, then ignores you and spins you anyway as you plummet downwards over a near vertical drop to shoot up the other side coming to a stop in the middle like a ball bearing in a U bend.That is Health and Safety the No name Waterpark way.

Every hour the Creeping Life guard blows his whistle and another shuts the gate at the bottom of the climbing tower, the water stops flowing down the slides and the water slides close for an hour, which gives us enough time to grab some lunch surrounded by a swarm of wasps and soundtracked by the fornicating ducks, petting zoo see, literally petting in their own lazy river which runs through and surrounds the dining area. There are other life guards hiding in the shadows and blowing whistles but the issue of not knowing where the are and so who they’re blowing at renders them pretty useless, maybe they cant swim.

The penny drop slide, blue and white striped, and enclosed tube with a bowl at the end into which the slider is sent like a slingshot and whirls around and around lower and lower to be unceremoniously dropped out of a hole in the centre into the pool below. Theres no real monitoring here either, and so sometimes collisions and backlogs occur. I went down in tandem with Mrs T, making efforts to speed up as fast as possible, see earlier paragraph, built for speed, me. And how surprising was it to find all of our group’s 6 kids and a turkish lad clustered at the top of the penny drop bowl clinging to the slippery sides, needless to say we couldn’t stop and wiped about 4 of them out and all of us got dumped in a tangled mess of arms and legs down the plug hole into the pool! When the Creeper whistled time as mentioned earlier, the slides are closed at the top but it doesn’t stop folk climbing up from the bottom, you cant get to the top, they’re too steep, but so begins a coordinated assault on the penny drop, to try and ascend into the drop bowl. Its a complicated and uncoordinated affair involving the taller ones ducking under the water, and the shorter ones getting on the submerged shoulders to ascend like Neptune when the submerged titans rise upwards, well something like that. Various folk managed to get up and secure themselves in the bowl, dragging up others, shorts falling down, bums being slapped by strangers, those sort of embarrassing  wounds heal pretty painlessly in an eruption of laughter that trancends languages and cultures, Bum slapping in that situation is an accepted symptom of the operation. Anyway the Creeper was sat in the bar at the other end of the pool blowing his whistle furiously in between drags on his cigarette, his lunch hour ruined by a mass of Turks and English children launching an assault on the Penny Drop. And ultimately he had to go and sort it out, there must have been 15 or 20 people in that bowl banging and clapping to the rhythm of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” with him banging on the outside of the bowl, then suddenly the bowl vomited out bodies into the pool and they scattered like smoke particles under the microscope, Brownian motion, unable to reprimand anyone due to the complete dearth of life guards either ogling girls or smoking somewhere away from the pool. 

Its a funny place, and we will return, and everything will remain the same, i’m hoping more people visit, it would be a shame for it to close down.