Early morning view from room.

This was our first day of “planned chill-time” and we took complete advantage of it. We both still awoke before dawn but today we just rolled over and went back to sleep. Later, we explored our resort and mostly just relaxed by the pool. All-in-all, a very sedate Canada Day.

As we were chillin’ out we started to make some observations about the resort and the characters that populate it. After many Caribbean vacations and five weeks in Africa, you would think the quirks of “Island Time” (or whatever it’s called in specific locations) would have been old hat to us. However, this resort and its denizens have a particularly skewed take on it.

Before we get into the details, let’s first go back to the African version of Island Time: This Is Africa or “TIA”. In the past weeks, everywhere we went inefficiencies, shortages, lapses in judgement, and simple requests for service in general have been met with an apologetic, “TIA”. While this was cute in the beginning, after weeks of it, the concept starts to wear a little thin. In fact, Roger began to say that “TIA gives you TIA’s”, in reference to Transient Ischemic Attacks (or “mini-strokes”). Now that we have been ensconced on the Indian Ocean, the staff at the resort has introduced a new (at least to us) coastal variant to TIA. “Pole pole”; Swahili for slowly, slowly. This is like TIA on Quaaludes… dude. Now, when we can’t get something it’s, “TIA… pole, pole.”

Okay, back to the resort. This place is much like being parachuted into episodes of the BBC series “Fawlty Towers” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawlty_Towers) but with the scripts being authored by Kafka. On the surface, this place is fabulous; spectacular location, beautiful beach, well-kept grounds, multiple restaurants, good staff-to-guest ratio, etc. However, when we looked closer, the resort really is a, “2.5 dressed up as a 4” (stars that is). While it looks beautiful, there are things that are not quite right in this place.

Most of the guest services staff, simply put, hasn’t a clue as to how to do their jobs effectively or efficiently. While there are notable exceptions, but they are few and far between. Most of these staff we interacted with could be best described as high-school work-experience students who were dropped off at a place of business, were given minimum instructions on their roles, and then told that they were now working there and the regular workers were not available. So, the guest services staff (including local management) mostly goes about the day stumbling from one situation to the next. A major problem is that these people are rewarded for their incompetence; all the hotel charges included an automatic 10% gratuity… whether you actually got any service or not.

Oddly enough, the behind-the-scenes personnel such as the gardeners and the maintenance people were somehow not afflicted by the same job-performance problems of their colleagues. These people kept the place running.

Before you think we are being too demanding or we’re entirely negative about the resort, we’re not. Despite what we’ve noted, we actually enjoyed our time in the resort and except for a couple of individuals, most of the guest services staff were simply poorly trained and supervised rather than “actively lazy”. In fact, we would always hope that they “had a bad day” the last time and would be able to pull it off this time. We’d see the staff trying to accommodate a request and we would literally cheer them on. But almost inevitably it would be, “BAM!” And that’s not, BAM!, the good way like with Emeril Lagasse’s expression. That’s the, BAM!, I just shot myself in the foot while cleaning my gun kinda way.

So, over the course of this and the next eight posts, we will try to give you snippets of what we liked about this resort and of what drove us bonkers…

At breakfast: we were seated by the hostess who asked if we would like coffee. We both asked for coffee with milk (hot milk, the African way). We served ourselves at the buffet, ate our food… still no coffee… BAM!

At the pool: the pool deck was deserted… good for us as we had our choice of loungers.

At the pool: we met the pool-boy (actually a guy in his mid-forties). He is one of those, “actively lazy”, people. He would get a mattress and towel for the guests (the bare minimum job) but that was it, you would not have any contact with him again unless you went to him. So, instead of pro-actively checking on his guests and possibly earning tips, he’d rather lean against the poolside bar all day long… BAM!

Poolside bar – Coconut Willy’s: the bartender stands behind the bar and talks to the pool-boy all day long. He could make periodic rounds of the guests at the pool, offer refreshments, earn income for the resort, and receive tips but he just stands behind the bar all day long… BAM!

Lunch on pool deck: even though the bartender and the pool-boy have no interest in checking on their guests, a waiter from the restaurant adjacent to the pool deck approaches us and asks if we would like lunch menus. When asked if we could have lunch on the pool deck, he responded, “Hakuna Matata” – no problem. He served us our meal and drinks on the pool deck… and received a tip for his initiative.

Grounds: on the way back to our room, we asked a gardener about the name of a particular flower in bloom on the grounds. He didn’t know but asked our room number and said he would try to find out and let us know. Mohammed (the gardener) knocked on our door a little while later. He didn’t know the name of the flower but had brought a freshly cut bouquet of Tuber Roses and a vase for our room… and received a tip for his initiative.

Grounds: found that the grounds harbour a huge number of African Millipedes. These things are about 12.5 cm (5 in) long, are shiny black, have orange antennae, move on over two hundred pairs of orange feet, and are just plain creepy. Not exactly a, BAM! It’s just that they’re so creepy… like, alien-creepy.

Big “alien” Millipede.