continued… The Mayan Temple four waterslides, and two went through a shark tank.
If you look carefully, you can see the sharks in the tank. The rectangular tube on the left was an inner tube ride called The Serpent Slide, the one on the right was called Leap of Faith and did not have an inner tube. Eric and Keith wanted to do the Leap of Faith first. Christi opted not to go. It was a straight drop down into the shark tank, and they moved through the tank extremely quickly.
Tuesday, April 22, 2025 – Today we were all wearing water shoes — yesterday, we’d been in flip-flops and we realized water shoes were a better choice for the park. According to the material we’d been given at the marina office, the pools and beaches opened at 0900, but the waterslides and Rapid River didn’t open until 1000. Knowing that it would take a half-hour to get to the waterpark, at 0925, we called for a golf cart to pick us up.
When the golf cart dropped us off, we couldn’t believe how long the line was to buy tickets. We were happy to be by-passing that line! We joined a mob of people all speed walking through the long stretch between the entrance and the waterpark itself.
Now that we’d scoped out the park, we’d formulated a strategy to maximize the number of rides we went on today: start at the river entrance (stop 1), exit the river at stop 7, which was where the entrance to the Power Tower was, and take our inner tubes with us to the Tower slides. The waterslides let out near stop 6, then we could get off again at stop 7 and do that loop over and over again until we’d had our fill of those inner tube rides.
As anticipated, we reached the rides around 0955. We were surprised to see that a waterslide at the Mayan Temple was already running, and looked like it had been for a while. The river had not opened yet, though, and we were one of the first ones on it.
This time, Eric and Christi got a two-person tube, and they stuck close to Keith.
continued... Now that we were finally inside the park, we wandered around, trying to find a towel kiosk. We did eventually find one at the far end of the park.
Once we got our wristbands, we decided that we wanted to ride the Rapid River first. According to the map, there were nine stops where one could get on and off the river. We went to the stop closest to the kiosk and realized that no one was getting off their inner tubes, which meant no inner tubes were available for us to get on. We realized we needed to go to the the river’s entrance, stop one, in order to get on.
We got a little lost trying to find the entrance to the river, but eventually found it. We each grabbed individual inner tubes. Eric and Keith raced down, while Christi just let the river push her along. The first half of the river was powered by a wave machine that made gentle swells that pushed the tubes along.
continued… This was far and away the most expensive marina we’d ever been to at $270 per night. However, it was actually a bargain because the slip included four tickets to the waterpark, and park tickets were $200 per day for non-Bahamians 13 and older. One of the perks of this marina was golf cart service, which we’ve never had before. Once we were ready to go, we called for a golf cart on the radio, and a few minutes later one arrived at the boat to pick us up. Here were Eric and Keith getting off the boat.
on the golf cart drive, we noticed some large, dark jellyfish in the water. The driver told us there were a lot of jellyfish here. He dropped us off at the edge of the enormous big pinkish building. We noticed some large, dark jellyfish in the water, and the driver told us where there was a ticket counter. The driver said we could skip the ticket counter and walk through the hotel to the waterpark; that we only need to show our marina keys to get into the park. Once inside, we could get wristbands from the customer service kiosks where they hand out towels. The wristbands would get us onto the rides.
We entered into what we thought was the hotel lobby. Nope. It was a small, high end shopping mall.
On Monday, April 21, the crescent moon was still glowing brightly even after the sun had fully risen.
Saturday and Sunday were quiet days. Farther south on Meeks Island was a farm that had pigs. Many of the tour boats that had been speeding by us were on their way to/from the pig farm. On Saturday, our big outing was a dinghy ride to see the pigs. We followed the island south.
We’d anchored near the area that we’d explored a few days prior. We noticed that there was a staircase carved into the rocks at the area that looked like it had once had a structure, so even though there wasn’t a beach on the west side, it was possible to anchor a dinghy and walk over to the beach on the east side.
