Day 33: Kos Lido Water Park

Thursday 21st July 2022

A Day Out of Kos Town

To break up our week, we decided to escape Kos Town for the day and visit a water park. There are three parks on the island, but the best is Lido Water Park, located on the western coastline north of Mastihari. It’s accessible using the local transport services by taking the Mastihari bus which stops along the main road just past the water park entrance.

After breakfast, we packed our swim stuff and walked to the central bus station which is located in the Old Town, about 10-minutes southeast of the hotel. We arrived early aiming to get the 10 am bus, but it was already pretty crowded so I wasn’t sure if we would get on board or not. When the first bus arrived, we initially managed to get on board but it was also a service that stopped at the airport and with lots of people waiting who wanted the airport, we were asked to get off again and wait for the next bus which would be along a few minutes later. Hoping the driver was right, we disembarked and sure enough, another bus did turn up shortly afterwards. We managed to get seats both times which was lucky as neither of us travels particularly well on buses.

Lido Water Park

We arrived at the water park after about 30-minutes on the bus. A few others got off as well, but not as many as I’d expected. The upside was that we didn’t have to queue to get in and the park itself wasn’t all that packed either. We paid for a locker, got lotioned up and stored our things before heading out to explore the park. There are lots of rides and we didn’t have to queue for long so it was a pretty fun time.

In addition to all the slides, there are two pools at the park: one is a wave pool that activates every 15-minutes (or so), and another that’s just a rectangular swimming pool. We visited the pool to have a break from the slides:

Lunch Delays

Around 12:30, we had a break from the water to try and get some lunch. Unfortunately, there’s only a single canteen for hot food with fairly limited outdoor seating given the size of the park. You can’t order food without being sat down at a table, so despite hanging around for 20-25 minutes, we were unable to get seated so we gave up and figured we would come back later. We found some sunbeds and had a bit of relaxation time reading our Kindles, then returned to the canteen at 2 pm and managed to get seated straight away.

The food options were a bit limited too, so we both chose the pork gyros which turned up a few minutes later. It was okay, but the meat was quite fatty compared to others we’ve had, so it wasn’t the best but filled us up anyway.

More Slides and Bus Back

Once our food had digested, we did another loop of the park visiting all the rides we’d enjoyed earlier, then packed up and got ready to leave. We planned to get the 15:50 bus back to Kos Town, so we left the park just before 15:45 and walked back to the bus stop where we’d been dropped off earlier in the morning. Surprisingly, the bus was dead on time and the journey back seemed quicker too, so we made it back to our hotel by 16:30 in time for a pre-dinner nap!

Dinner

Wanting to try somewhere new for dinner, I had a scout around on Google Maps and spotted an Italian restaurant not far from Hotel Sonia called Vinylio. We hadn’t booked, but it wasn’t that busy when we arrived just before 19:30. I ordered risotto with orange and parmesan while my girlfriend chose the carbonara. The food was good and I would go back again, but it wasn’t as tasty as MamaRosa.

Once again, we returned to XL Cafe bar for another cheap cocktail, then to Hans & Gretel (again) so that my girlfriend could get yet another huge stick of candyfloss!