Designing a water park should be child's play. To the uninitiated, all it seems to involve is drawing some squiggly lines on a piece of paper, putting a beach next to them and surrounding it all with palm trees. However, as the designer of the latest expansion to Abu Dhabi's Yas Waterworld explains, it takes more than the wave of a magic wand to get water parks to flow smoothly.
A consistent theme is difficult to realise in most water parks, made up of slide tubes jutting out of the tops of towers made from plain steel scaffolding. Not so at Yas Waterworld. When the sprawling park opened on Yas Island in 2013, it told a visual story, previously seen at the likes of Disney and Universal Studios.
Based on the local tradition of pearl diving, Yas Waterworld tells the story of a giant gem that was washed on to a mountain in a storm. This soaring white sphere is balanced on a rocky outcrop high above the park and just below it is an oversized falcon's nest with slides flowing from it. The tubes of others slink down a custom-built mountainside with exits shaped like snakeheads. So the story goes, the reptiles are hunting through the desert for the pearl while the falcon keeps tabs on them from above.
In keeping with this theme, the park is replete with full-sized wooden dhow boats, traditional Arabian lanterns and signs hanging on rugs. It is awash with every kind of slide you can imagine. One group looks like a tangle of multicoloured spaghetti and allows riders to race alongside each other. The ones with snakeheads at the end are all enclosed tubes, each with different music or lighting effects within.
There’s a lazy river, actual pearl diving, a wave pool in the centre of the park and a family raft ride, which is propelled faster uphill than down thanks to some high-tech wizardry. Magnets underneath the raft repel against ones with opposite poles on the floor of the tube whilst high-powered water jets give it an added boost.
“In the Middle East, family groups tend to be larger than the global average, so it was important to prioritise attractions that could accommodate multiple riders at once and be enjoyed together,” explains Mike Rigby, general manager and regional vice president at WhiteWater, the Canadian experts who developed the Yas Waterworld expansion. “The choice of slides was driven by the need to create a balanced ride mix that works for a range of guests.”
The diversity doesn't just extend to slides. Unlike almost every other water park, Yas Waterworld is also home to theme park rides. There's a 3D theatre, which floods up to your knees as waterfalls pour in and the seats sway in time with the story on screen. Bigger thrills are found on the suspended roller coaster, which weaves between the craggy stone columns supporting the slides.
This diverse mix set a high bar for Yas Waterworld to beat but, faced with increasing competition from even bigger local parks, it took on the challenge. Last summer, the first part of the park's expansion opened, bringing with it 20 new attractions.
Known as Bandit's Village, the area is filled with stone urns, wooden carts and traditional treasure chests packed with coins. The slides are hidden in faux forts, complete with battlements at the top and cannons poking through slats. The walls don't just look weathered with age; you can actually see the artificial bricks where the surface is meant to have cracked. No stone has been left unturned as the struts supporting the slides even look like logs and the coins in the treasure chests have dhows and falcons etched on to them.
No corners were cut on the rides, either. The expansion added 3.3km of slides, including children's versions of the park's most thrilling attractions. The highlight is Bahamut Rage, a family-friendly log flume, usually found in theme parks, which emerges from a huge cartoony fish-head. The cannonballs and dynamite kegs lining the queue give riders a clue as to what they are in for as the slide culminates in a 15-metre drop, which is meant to represent them being fired out of the fish. It is the world's largest water park splash from a log flume, which is an attraction in itself.
This ride seats 20 people at a time, which is much more than any slide, so it helps to ease congestion in the other queues. As Rigby explains, capacity and repeatability were key considerations in deciding what to include in the expansion. As were interactivity and the desire to “introduce first-of-its-kind attractions to give the expansion a clear point of difference”.
These driving forces are all on display in the second part of the expansion, which opened on April 4 and brought 11 new attractions. They include Matamir Drop, which stands as the UAE’s tallest slide at more than 40 metres; Matamir Lights, with immersive lighting effects; and Matamir Splash, a side-by-side mat racer.
“The ride selection was about creating variety while ensuring the park works as a complete experience. By combining family-friendly attractions, high-thrill slides and something to keep younger guests occupied, the expansion delivers something for different demographics.”
WhiteWater's approach has been honed over more than four decades and it has grown to include 100 in-house engineers. The team have worked on many of the GCC's leading aquatic attractions, including Meryal Waterpark in Doha and Aquaventure at Atlantis, The Palm, Dubai, the world's largest water park.
Rigby explains WhiteWater follows “a multistage process starting with concept design to determine the ride mix, visualise how guests would move through the space, consider the experience from the points of view of active and passive guests and, when working on an expansion, ensuring how the new areas connect to the park”.
He adds that the Yas Waterworld expansion then moved into “schematic design, where ideas were developed through computer-aided design layouts and 3D models. These visual tools helped the team test how attractions would fit together, how sightlines would work and how to integrate large new elements into the existing park. Storytelling also became more visible at this stage.
“We finish off with design development, where the team work on the details needed for construction and operations. This included safety, capacity, maintenance access and structural requirements.”
The final stage of the process involved producing detailed designs, which formed the foundation of the blueprints for construction. It wasn't a walk in the park.
“The area is tight and the ambitions were big,” Rigby explains. “In this particular project, we had to maximise every square metre, factor in that the existing park would still be in operation during construction, work with a very defined space and, with a challenge unique to Yas, even factor in the flight path restrictions due to the proximity to Abu Dhabi airport.”
What guests experience as carefree fun is, in reality, the product of careful engineering, detailed storytelling and relentless precision – a product that keeps Abu Dhabi on the crest of the wave.
