July 09: Aqualand Frejus opens at 10am, so we arrived in the car park at 09:35 and quickly joined the turnstile queue, which didn't look too long. However, the ticketing and entry process was painfully slow and it took an hour to actually get into Aqualand. Then we were faced with another 20 minute queue to deposit bags in the 'manned' locker facility. Now it was 11am and my two boys, aged 9 & 10 years, raced off to enjoy the water slides.
What a disappointment Straight away I could see what the day was going to be like, and consequently I kept an eye on the time. Sure enough, having a go on each of the major slides entailed queuing for between 30 and 45minutes for each! The only 'attractions' that didn't have long queues were the pools, baby slides and elephants squirting water from their trunks.
Descending a major slide took approximately 30 seconds. Each of my boys did 6 of those slides, and thereby enjoyed 'thrills' totalling no more than 3 minutes. For this small pleasure they each had to endure between 3 and 4 hours' of tedious waiting. Suffice to say, my two lively, fun loving kids left Aqualand with decidedly muted enthusiasm. We didn't even have to 'tear them away'.
Understandably, my wife couldn't be bothered to queue at all and she spent the entire time reading a book. I did three slides and then sought refuge in my holiday reading too.
At 85 Euros for a family of 4, this represented the poorest value, most boring activity of our three week holiday in France. As for the children well they found jumping off rocks into the rivers Ardeche and Chassezac to be far more thrilling and fulfilling, and doing that, and swimming with the fish, cost nothing.
Incidentally, you can buy Aqualand tickets online in advance, and save a bit of money by doing so. However, their antiquated system requires that you actually print paper tickets on a computer printer not always possible when you've taken your laptop or PDA abroad simply to use in wifi zones (who takes their inkjet on holiday with them?).
Positives: It was clean enough; there were places where you could sit in the shade; the walking surfaces were nicely designed for bare feet.
However, Aqualand never again. read more