By Ron Laytner Copyright 2008 Edit International For thousands of years man has searched in vain for the legendary ruins of Atlantis, the lost continent that sank beneath the sea.
South African billionaire Sol Kersner woke up the sleepy Bahamas by spending eight hundred million dollars to create his vacation fantasyland using the lost continent as its theme.
Now Atlantis has risen again and it may well be the greatest resort destination on earth.
Atlantis is soothed by balmy Caribbean trade winds and ringed by pure white sand and beautiful sunbathers. Swimmers and divers mix with schools of bright fish in the crystal clear blue waters of the Bahamas.
The once lost continent can be found on Paradise Island in the Bahamas and it’s visited by 4,000 tourists every day – from England to Egypt - including world celebrities.
The resort is made up of five luxury hotels with 2,328 rooms and suites costing from $200 to $26,000 per night, 23 gourmet restaurants and a massive entertainment complex.
Atlantis is now easy to reach but it’s hard to get into unless you’re a fish - and it’s very expensive. The resort is 98 percent booked and reservations must be made months in advance.
There are six lagoons, three lake size swimming pools, 40 waterfalls and a thrilling shark-infested water slide park.
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Grandest of the hotels is the Royal Towers where on any given day you can see movie stars and famous athletes walking its marbled halls. Guests have included Whitney Houston, Denzil Washington, Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford. The great hotel was designed so that it appears to rise out of the sea with the morning sun. The afternoon sun sets between its bridged towers. The bridge, itself, is the flagship suite at Atlantis. Though it costs $26,000 per night, the bridge suite is always booked by movie stars and famed sports athletes such as Michael Jordan. Jaded tourists who have seen it all walk about in open mouthed wonder staring at its opulence.
You’d think Atlantis is confined to high rollers and wealthy swingers but hundreds of young children visit with their parents who can leave them at Camp Paradise, a fully-staffed baby-sitting complex. If you manage to get in make sure to bring lots of money. Because next to gambling and shopping, the biggest expense is food. Meals alone can cost $200 a day per person. But experienced return visitors buy daily meal plans from $50 to $75 which cover all meals for the day. Guests to Atlantis must pay these high prices to support the main residents of both the new Atlantis and the old fish.
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Among the pomp and castle-like marble walkways, arches and towering domes, and the high stakes casino are more than fifty thousand living sea creatures.
Trains of lobsters scuttle in long lines across the ‘ocean bed’ of the dig trying to avoid the vicious eels hiding in dark places.
For Atlantis is the largest salt-water aquarium in the world. Its many lagoons hold 200 species of marine life, most supplied by Atlantis’ own ever-prowling collection ship.
Highly trained experts guide guests through the marvels of underwater life, allowing visitors to touch and feed stingrays, star fish and study translucent jellyfish.
Visitors walk through underwater tunnels and marvel at what they see through the world’s longest and thickest underwater windows
Visitors become mini experts and learn marine life legends such as: a whale didn’t grab Jonah, a big grouper swallowed him and spit him out; hence the name ‘Jewfish’.
Most impressive is an area in the Royal Towers called the Dig. Huge glass walls allow visitors to gaze into the sunken kingdom inside a 2.7 million-gallon fish tank.
These sights are marveled at while strolling through a mock museum of lost Atlantean artifacts or dining on fine seafood at the Café Restaurant walled by the glass windows of the huge aquarium.
Among these ruins swim schools of thousands of fish, predatory sharks, graceful manta rays, sleek barracuda and a giant 800-pound friendly grouper named Earl who approaches the glass to watch visitors watching him.
Children stand at the edge of the thick glass walls until their parents run over in alarm when large sharks swim by inches away.
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Outside, in the Predator Lagoon, visitors walk through long underwater glass tunnels and experience the thrill of scuba diving without getting wet. Sharks and barracuda swim peacefully above and around them and never attack the thousands of good eating fish they swim with. Why?
healthy enough to be released to the general aquarium population. Thirty one million gallons of seawater are renewed every three hours. Waters of the aquarium lagoons are checked twice a day for anything that could harm the fish.
“We’ve gotten our predators used to eating frozen fish and they leave living fish alone,” says Steven Kaiser, Director of Water Features.
Millions were spent to supply open flow filtration systems, which suck in ocean water, purify it with ozone gas and feed a constant fresh water supply to Atlantis’ giant tanks.
“Atlantis is the only place on earth where visitors can see divers feed hundreds of aquatic predators by hand, directly into their gaping jaws.”
Want to take an even closer look at the fish? How about a dive into a shark-filled tank? Almost everyone does it including small children and the elderly.
It takes thirty fish specialists, ranging from hunter collectors to marine biologists working 24 hours a day behind the scenes to keep Atlantis’ 200 species of sea life healthy.
Atlantis has a high Mayan Temple draped in water slides that pass through glass tunnels inside shark tanks. The slides range from a family-style inner tube ride to a heart -stopping high vertical drop into a clear tube running through the shark tank.
There is even an underground fish hospital where new arrivals are placed in quarantine and species such as vicious piranha are studied for future exhibits. Babies of all species are incubated and held until they are big and
Atlantis may seem like fun and games to its international vacationers but it’s serious business to Bahamians. Five thousand of them work for Atlantis and everyone in the
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Bahamas is benefiting from the great surge of foreign income. A bitter Bahamian taxi driver, earning more than than ever before by taking guests in and out of Atlantis over the two high level bridges connecting it to old Nassau town, complained it was terrible that a black nation was so dependent on a White South African. He was shocked to learn, however, that Sol Kersner was a principle force in the ending of apartheid in South Africa. Kersner built Sun City in a former black homeland as a place where whites and blacks could meet and socialize and is indeed, a friend of Nelson Mandela who is almost a saint in the Bahamas. No matter how anyone feels about Sol Kerner, Atlantis is here in the Bahamas to stay. The millions of dollars coming in every single day ensure that the new Atlantis, unlike the old, will never go under. THE END By Ron Laytner Edit International
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