I pricked up my ears at a conversation between a young couple in the hotel bar this morning: "So," the girl was saying, "Will you have to get a new heart?"

"Naw" her companion replied, "This one ain't so bad. Should last a bit longer."

There was an awkward silence before the girl spoke again: "Well it's up to you, obviously, Scott - but if I had a hole that size in my heart I'd want to get a new one pretty quick."

Two or three other British tourists were taking an interest by now - After all, this isn't the sort of thing you normally hear over drinks and friendly conversation in a bar. The girl spoke again: "Well, Scott, don't come running to me if you get sunstroke!"

There followed a slight delay while my brain untangled this new information, and then I had an almost uncontrollable urge to swivel my chair around and scream at them: "HAT, You drongo, he's got a hole in his HAT, for Christ's sake!

But of course I didn't, because I'm British and we like to maintain our stiff upper lip. So instead I ordered a Martini - shaken not stirred - balanced the enormous floppy hat back on my head and headed out to develop a melanoma on the beach.

This afternoon, I took a trip out to the local Wet N' Wild waterpark on the hotel's courtesy bus and spent the day riding the usual assortment of water-rides and flumes and generally relaxing as is the norm on the Gold Coast. I had been looking forward to this for a while - Warner Bros. Have been running a series of advertisements back home in our local cinema for Wet N' Wild and Movie World for some time, which has always struck me as a massive waste of time as I can't imagine too many British folks dashing out of a cinema in London at the end of Psycho Killer Mutant Chainsaw XIV to book the family on a plane to the other side of the planet just so they can ride down the crazy river in an inner tube.

First of all, the hard facts. Lets be honest, if you've seen one Wet N' Wild you've seen them all. Florida, Vegas, California, Tenerife, the Gold Coast - they're all more or less the same but on slightly different scales. The biggest and best in my humble opinion, and the one to head for if you really do feel the sudden urge to get extremely wet thousands of miles from home, is Florida. The selection of rides here on the Gold Coast is, however, more than enough to keep you occupied for the entire day and give parents a chance to bake in the sun while the kids go off and play in the kids area. The main problem is that the weather leaves little energy to do anything, and by the time I had picked up an inner-tube and climbed the hundred steps up the side of a fake mountain, I was too exhausted to truly enjoy the experience of throwing myself down a blue, green or black tube to a certain death. Luckily there is a ride called the lazy river which is more of a slow flowing circle of water which weaves around the park and on which you can drift along on your inner-tube until your energy has returned enough that you want to throw yourself off something again. The lazy river really is a great idea for breaking up an otherwise hectic day of trying to kill yourself, although I have to say it would be somewhat better if it weren't for the obligatory teenagers who seem to find it amusing to swim around against the current, without inner-tubes, splashing everyone and suddenly appearing from below to push you out of your tube and scare the life out of you!

Inner-tubes can be hired for the day from the entrance, or you can often just grab one that has been discarded. The park is dominated by a huge wave pool in which you can settle back for a relaxing float before, after fifteen minutes, somebody turns the wave machine on and you find ten foot waves crashing down all around you. I have to confess to absolutely loving the wave pool, even if there is an irresistible urge to swim against the current to the far end of the pool which you are absolutely not permitted to do for safety reasons and which results in irate lifeguards gesticulating madly at you. The wave pool also has an interesting feature which you won't find in Florida - Dive In Movies! That's right - come here on selected evenings and you can bob about in the deep end trying not to drown laughing at Mr Bean on a huge screen towering over you. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - only in Australia.

The rides change regularly of course, so there's no point in listing them all here as they will no doubt have changed in the time it takes you to book your flight, but there really is something for everyone - everything from pools for the kids to splash in to hair raising, death defying drops on practically vertical slides into what seems like two feet of water. There are lockers to stash your stuff for the day, a shop from which to buy anything swimming related which you might have left at home, and a wide range of eating places ranging from poolside burger bars to sit down cafes. I think I could safely say that, if I lived anywhere within a fifty mile radius of Wet N' Wild, I'd be here every weekend.

I enjoyed Wet N' Wild so much that I spent the entire day there before returning in a somewhat wrinkled state to the hotel in the evening to discover an interesting phenomenon. Due to an inability to see out of the back of my head, I had inadvertently missed out small portions of my back while slapping on the sun lotion earlier in the day and I now have a sunburned patch on my back that looks uneasily like the Sure Deodorant Tick-Mark. In fact, I'm not altogether convinced that one of those teenagers didn't come along while I was sleeping by the wave pool and wipe off a tick shape just to make me look silly. I wonder if I can finance the rest of this trip by selling the advertising space on my back.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.