An ‘African’ Adventure by Mary Donaldson-Evans

“You’re inviting us?”

We were touched. Our granddaughter’s last dance competition of the year was scheduled for an African-themed water park and convention center in the mountains—let’s call it Zambezi—and we were invited to join the fun and to cheer on our dear Chloe. How does one refuse such an invitation? We were all the more excited about this opportunity in that we love to swim, and when we weren’t watching Chloe leap and pirouette her way across the stage, we expected to get a few laps in, for surely such a resort would have a pool suitable for lap swimming, right?

Wrong.

This water park is a heaven for the under-twelve set. For their grandparents, not so much.  Unless they imbibe, of course, in which case they can plunk their fannies down at a bar set in one of the three-foot-deep pools and enjoy a piña colada while keeping a distracted eye on their grandkids who are splashing and screaming all around them.

That wasn’t our scene. We explored the outside water park first. It was clearly meant for toddlers and very young children, with bright plastic slides and short tunnels wide enough to accommodate inflatable plastic donuts. The children sit in the donuts and position themselves at the mouth of the tunnel, shove off, and descend on swirling water, emerging with a splash into a 2-foot-deep pool. Perfect for the water-wings set. In addition, there were a couple of large pools, shallow enough that even the small swimmers could stand with water only to their waist. There were plenty of adults standing around in these pools, supervising their kids, but nobody was attempting to actually swim. Nor did I see any of the adults actually putting a face into the water.

To get to the indoor water park, you had to pass through an arcade. Loud, piped-in pop music, combined with the pings and buzzes and pops of the arcade games, made a sound track suitable for the 24-hour torture inflicted by the CIA upon imprisoned terrorists. The atmosphere, exciting no doubt to such younger patrons as our ten-year-old grandson but infernal to the geriatric generation, was enhanced by flashing neon and the whoops and shreaks of gamers. “Fast Gunman,” “Super Star,” “X-treme,” “Monopoly, “Laser Tag,” and dozens of other games competed for their attention. The noise, the flashing lights, the warm, oppressively muggy air –it was all too much for us. The only thing missing was mosquitoes. We couldn’t get out fast enough.

Ah, but the best was yet to come: the indoor water park. Here, brightly colored plastic tunnels—much longer than those outside—twisted and turned as they descended through the space, and a whole network of stairs led up to their entrance. Below, a “lazy river” was carrying children and some adults along in plastic donuts, and noises that passed for music were blaring through speakers. Every once in a while, an incomprehensible message was broadcast through the PA system. We could only hope that they weren’t demanding an immediate evacuation. How the sound carried at all through air so humid you had to “swim” through it (that was our only opportunity to swim!), I don’t know. Nor do I understand how the employees of the fast-food concessions lining the room managed to stay cheerful (and dry) in this chlorine-soaked atmosphere.

Zambezi’s on-line site had advertised “18,000 feet of wet, wild fun” and invited potential guests to “be prepared to dive into the action.” Given the fact that there was no pool of water deep enough to dive into, the choice of this verb seemed a little misleading, not to say cruel, unless of course one opted to go down the slides headfirst.

I thought back to our arrival a few hours earlier. As we walked from the parking lot to the park’s main entrance, we looked up to see a giant concrete baobab tree with, at its base, a quotation that read “Africa is, without exception, the Earth’s most beautiful continent.” Besides the deceptive implication that within the walls of this African-themed resort, visitors would experience the undeniable beauty of Africa without having to leave the USA, this quotation struck me as somewhat hyperbolic. Having marveled over the stunning dimensions of the Grand Canyon, gazed in wonder at the Jungfrau summit in Switzerland’s Alps, thrilled to the fjords of Norway and the utter perfection of Sydney’s harbor, I was taken aback by the brazen exaggeration, but I was willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt. After all, I’d been to Africa twice, had slept in a tent in the Sahara, crossed the water-slicked pedestrian bridge that spans Victoria Falls, and had photographed sleeping lions from the relative safety of a safari jeep. It was only when I got inside this behemoth of a water park and convention center that I realized how unlike the world’s second largest continent this place was.

Nevertheless, the decorators had made an effort. Had we walked them alone, the long, long corridors between the main lobby and the convention center would perhaps have reminded us of our own adventures in Morocco, Zambia, South Africa, and Botswana. Lined with African artifacts, photos and paintings of desert scenes, finely wrought wooden benches, chairs upholstered in African-print fabric, giant sculpted elephants, tigers, lions, chimpanzees, impalas and other African fauna, the carpeted hallways seemed to offer an escape from the madding crowds. There was just one problem: because the convention center was hosting a dance competition, dozens of costumed young dancers were giggling in groups along our path, and on more than one occasion, we were nearly knocked off our feet by highly made-up little girls in gauzy tutus doing handsprings and cartwheels in front of us.

Never mind! We were here to see dancing, and we thrilled to the performances of our talented young granddaughter, persuaded that of all the dancers we saw on stage and off, she was the best, her dance studio the most professional, the choreography the most creative, the timing the most impeccable. We considered ourselves completely objective.

Yes, we did see dancing. Lots of dancing. So much dancing that the sight of all those young, agile children, all those healthy knees and hips, all those leaps and head rolls ended up making us more aware than ever of the weight of our years. More importantly, it made us reflect on the irony of the whole situation. Here, in the Zambezi water park, these dancers wearing costumes expensive enough to feed an entire African village for a week, were moving gracefully across the stage like lions and leaping like gazelles, while in some countries of the real Africa, emaciated children, their eyes wide and empty, were dying of malnutrition. In this fictional Africa, water flowed, erupted and gushed, food was plentiful, and consumerism was on full display in the souvenir shops and fast-food concessions of the central atrium.

To be fair, we were given an opportunity to contribute to a fund intended to supply clean drinking water to a million people in Africa when we purchased our t-shirts and granola bars at the Capetown Market. Nevertheless, we couldn’t help but reflect that the money we’d spent on two nights’ accommodation, directed to the appropriate non-profit, would have gone a lot farther in relieving the misery of, say, the population of Sudan. We returned to our room, somewhat despondent. The harsh fluorescent down-lighting and the wonky toilet seat did nothing to improve our mood, and the thin stream of droplets from our body wash container was scarcely sufficient to wash off the (metaphorical) mud of this Zambezi River.

There was only one thing to do. We headed back out to the atrium, elbowed our way through the milling crowd of overfed bikini-clad patrons waiting in line at the ice cream concession and undertook the long trek back towards the convention center to “What’s Your Beef?” a steak house we had noticed earlier. In the restaurant’s unexpectedly elegant atmosphere, we relaxed, sharing misty-eyed superlatives about the quality of our granddaughter’s talent and our grandson’s fearless mastery of the water slides and marveling at the presence of this oasis of calm and civility in a water resort teeming with screaming children. We sheepishly acknowledged our elitist attitude with regard to the water park and its patrons, and I’m ashamed to say that our lofty condemnation of the disparity between rich and poor countries was put on hold while we enjoyed our medium rare, prime dry-aged ribeye and a glass of silky Merlot.

The next day, after checking out, we spied a gentleman of our vintage, whooping and laughing as he descended one of the water slides. Maybe we should have joined the fun after all?