Wild Wadi Waterpark Dubai Dubai United Arab Emirates

Wild Wadi opened in 1999 on the Jumeirah beachfront, with the Burj Al Arab standing directly behind it. That backdrop is half the reason people come. It is the older of the city's two large waterparks.

How the park is built

The theme is Juha, a trickster from Arabic folk stories, and the layout follows one idea. Water jets push riders uphill between slides, so the rides chain into a circuit. You climb almost no stairs.

• Jumeirah Sceirah. Two parallel free-fall slides with trapdoor starts, over thirty metres of drop at around eighty kilometres an hour.
• Wave pool and surf machine. The wave pool is the gathering point; the standing wave beside it is where people fall over in public.
• The lazy river. Long, shaded in stretches, and the one place in the park where nothing happens to you.
• The shallow end. A large low-water area built for children too small for the towers.

Against the bigger one

You can walk from one side of Wild Wadi to the other in ten minutes. That is the argument for it. With small children the smaller park is the easier day, and the queues outside weekends are shorter.

Guests of the Jumeirah hotels next door come in on their room key. That changes the crowd through the week. Both things sold here are the same day with a car: entry plus a transfer, one shared and one private.

Practical

• When. The comfortable stretch runs November into March. By June only the first and last hours of the day are worth the ticket.
• Wristband. The park is cashless. You are handed a band tied to a card and pay with that.
• Swimwear. An ordinary swimming costume is fine inside, but you need a cover-up to walk out.
• Sceirah. The trapdoor pair carries a height minimum and its own queue, which moves faster than it looks.
• Arriving. Jumeirah Road at the beach end, a short taxi from Mall of the Emirates, with no metro stop close by.