Category: Visiting Emirates

I think that the only other place in the world that could compete with Emirates for the kids’ paradise award is Orlando. But the latter would fail on the sea and dunes criteria. There are so many attractions for kids in Dubai and beyond (Abu Dhabi and other Emirates are doing a great job too) that one could be visiting them for a month without going to the same place twice (but needs sheikh’s budget for that). Therefore it was a tough choice to decide what places we will be visiting and even more tough to resist not visiting the rest.

Already before the trip we have agreed with the kids that we will visit two amusement parks, one being Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi, and one water park. After comparing the prices, the height restrictions and the reviews we chose to go to Legoland water park. With the online ticket we got to visit two parks of ‘Dubai Parks and Resorts’ in a day. So we went to a Lego water park for the morning heat and to Motiongate for the afternoon. These parks are very new and are located quite outside Dubai, plus we went on Monday, so they were almost empty. There were no queues at all! Thus doing two parks in a day was perfectly manageable.

Lego water park is excellent for the kids like Tilius and Elin as the maximum height limit for the rides was 107cm so Elin could join us on all the rides and they were neither too childish nor too thrilling. Just perfect!

Then it was time for Motiongate. It is an amusement park with the same concept as Disneyland just based on different cartoon characters – Smurfs, Hotel Transylvania, Kung-fu panda, Madagascar, Shrek, just to name few. The park is great with one problem – it is only partly open because its construction has not finished yet. We knew of this before going from various reviews so it was not a surprise, but still rather upsetting, because even some finished rides were not open. The good side is that there were almost no people so we did not have to queue for any of the rides (that were open) and could go round and round. The shows were also nice and we met some characters. So overall it was an exciting day and the number of rides open still made it worth the visit.

We did not plan to go to any other water park but looking to buy tickets to Ferrari world I’ve noticed that the price difference for going just to Ferrari and to go to it together with its sister waterpark is only 5 euros so of course we bought a combined ticket for both. The number of people we met in Yas Waterworld is incomparable to Lego park. There were long queues for every slide, but the slides, admittedly, were much more fun. Well, it is a big water park for the whole family with older kids. Elin was upset as she was not allowed to go on most of the slides.

What can be said about Ferrari world? It is a park for the Ferrari and for thrill lovers. While our boys (especially the big one) were very excited to go there, Tilius finally concluded that he needs to come back after few years, once he will reach the required height limit (which is either 130cm or 150cm). But there were still some rides that our explorers could join, mostly 3D or 5D motion rides, and overall they loved the place.

Besides these amusement parks we also spent a very nice morning in Sharjah (city neighbouring Dubai) Discovery centre. It is a big educational playground divided in several thematic areas, such as construction site with cranes and soft bricks, human body with optical and sound experiments, sport zone to play football or try wheelchair basketball, driving school, etc. It was a great fun for our little explorers! And unlike other parks, it was really very cheap. Plus it was quite empty – there were no more than other three more families besides us.

The list of the places that we did not go but would have loved to is much longer than the text above. So we do not exclude visiting UAE again, even if we try to go every time to a different country because there so many new places to discover. But there are still many places to discover in Dubai too.

I am a type of person that likes planning things and of course when the plans work out. But travelling with kids may never follow a strict plan. So over time I learned, no, not to live without a plan, but at least to plan the ‘unplanned’. My ability to accommodate plan failure was recently tested during our trip to UAE.

At a first glance two weeks in Dubai seemed as too long to fill the days but only until I started looking at what can be done there with kids. It appeared that there are more activities than the days we have, moreover that we also wanted to visit other cities. So we had to do some filtering and finally we came up with one attraction /activity /visit a day, sometimes taking up the whole day, sometimes just few hours (the rest being the planned ‘unplanned’ time). The guides and internet were telling that April is a good month for visiting Emirates as it is not yet too hot so quite some activities involved outdoors exploration (and we never considered Dubai as beach destination).

However the first day we left the hotel to explore heritage area of Dubai we realised that the weather forecast apps were not lying and that 38 degrees are indeed hot. As the heat is dry and seemed manageable in the shadow, we still made it to Dubai museum on foot (some 1,5 km) but looking at the faces of my kids I realised that any further stay outside during lunch hours would make us slowly roasted tourists in own juices. So there and then I had to admit that our exploration holidays have to be transformed into beach/pool holidays with occasional evening sightseeing. Luckily parts of the initial plan could be saved by the fact that in the afternoons, around 5pm, the temperatures become acceptably warm but any sightseeing had to be squeezed in two hours as by 7pm the sun was definitely down. It was also interesting to see how the place is adapted to the heat – the bus stops have air conditioned cubicles, quite some of the attractions are located inside mega shopping malls, even the zoo in Sharjah is set the way that the visitors watch the animals from air conditioned premises. On the other hand we learned that Emirates have great beaches too (like Mamzar beach park in the photo), something we probably would have missed under the original plan!