Duinrell Theme Park
Situated only 10 miles from The Flying Pig Beach Hostel on the edge of the small town of Wassenaar, The Duinrell theme Park is a great day out for everyone, and… it’s open all year round!
The park is home to all the standard rides and attractions that you expect at any decent amusement park. Visitors can ride the Ship Ahoy; a large pirate ship that pirouettes on its axis – shifting one way and then the other, rising up to ridiculous angles, and then hammering downward at breathtaking speed. Another frenzied ride is the Mad Mill; visitors are strapped down to the edge of a big spinning circle, before the thing rolls around like a giant airborne pancake. Madness.
If your nerve endings are slightly raw after all that high-octane spinning and twisting then why not hide away in the Fairy Tale Wonderland, or get out of town quick aboard the Locomotive train, or just mooch around inside Rick’s Fun Factory. Indeed.
Once you’ve gotten your balls back you might fancy a 16 metres high scramble up the climbing wall, before flying down the high-speed toboggan runs at speeds of up to 50 km per hour after being winched 40 metres up into the surrounding sand dunes.
www.duinrell.com/attractiepark/informatie/
Tiki Pool
Located next door to the Duinrell Amusement Park, the Tiki Pool is much more than just a tropical swimming pool; it is, in fact, the largest covered waterslide paradise in Europe with ten unique slides!
All the slides have vicious names - you can’t help enjoying riding down slides like the Typhoon, the Cannon ball, the Cyclone, and a crazy freefall slide known as the Pelican Dive. Once you have tackled all those fiendishly fun tubes you can always kick back and take a deserved rest on the Lazy River. Excellent.
Non-swimmers can take refuge in the restaurant that overlooks the pool and contemplate the reasons why they never learnt to swim. When the weather is pleasant visitors can sit out on the roof terrace and gobble lashings of ice cream and chomp cheese burgers and fries.
The Duinrell Amusement Park and the Tiki Pool are one business - they offer a variety of different ticket combinations, in fact far too many for me to understand. However, if you expect to pay around €15 for a full day ticket then you won’t go far wrong.
www.duinrell.com/tikibad/informatie/
Rotterdam Zoo (Diergaarde Blijdorp)
Blijdorp Zoo is one of the most famous attractions in the Netherlands, and attracts more than 1.5 million visitors through its turnstiles each year - and since the Oceanium opened in 2001, the zoo has almost doubled in size! The Blijdorp is the oldest zoo in the Netherlands, at 150 years old. Parts of the original structure were destroyed during WWII, before being rebuilt and opened again to the public in 1940.
The layout of the zoo mimics the continents of the world; Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, each habitat housing Lions, Leopards, Wolves, Alligators, and Crocodiles in conditions somewhat similar to those found in the wild.
Inside the Oceanium visitors pass through huge underwater tunnels that twist along an imitation ocean floor, past coastal regions, meeting oceanic and coastal inhabitants like sharks, sea-otters, puffins, snakes, and even king penguins!
And yet despite this mass of exotic animals it seems the only sane reason to pay a visit to Rotterdam Zoo is to inspect Europe’s most famous gorilla… namely, Bokito! In 2007 Bokito jumped a moat, and climbed the high stone wall surrounding his enclosure and ran amok inside the zoo, terrorising families, smashing restaurant tables, and in general behaving like an escaped gorilla will behave when he gets a whiff of freedom. Children cowered in their parents’ arms as the gorilla loped around; the zoo was evacuated, before Bokito finally collapsed inside the ‘Oranje Restaurant’. The 400 pound beast fell amongst discarded plates of pasta and tins of cola after a top zoo-marksman leapt from behind a microwave and unloaded several darts filled with potent sedative liquid into Bokito’s rear-end.
Four people were injured, including a woman who was dragged through the park and bitten more than 100 times… but that isn’t the full story… no, apparently the women had been terrorising Bokito in the weeks leading up to the escape. The women had been visiting the gorilla enclosure four times a week, smiling at Bokito and making funny faces. She told concerned friends that she had developed a special bond with the gorilla, and when she laughed or smiled, Bokito replicated her gestures. But evidently she misunderstood the situation down at the primate enclosure, because apes are likely to interpret human smiles as a direct display of aggression, not friendship… In fact it is more likely that Bokito expected the women to make a run on his enclosure… and he simply chose to make his move first.
The woman had been warned by zoo keepers to back down, not to look Bokito in the eye, to hold her distance, but she didn’t listen, and eventually Bokito stomped her with his big hairy forearms. However, a few weeks later, from her hospital bed, the women told shocked journalists that Bokito remained her favourite monkey… and it seems she isn’t alone, because the zoo has become even more popular after this debacle!
The Zoo is open all year, from 9am – 6pm, and a day pass costs €17.50.
www.diergaardeblijdorp.nl/
