M

The beach is white sand and the sea is azure blue....

The beach is white sand and the sea is azure blue. It really is most gorgeous. We stayed in a beach bungalow which was very spacious and had free WiFi. You have your own sunbeds allocated to the room. Finding a spare one on another bit of beach is a problem though. Our room was 50m from the waters edge and the beach is well shaded with palms.

Avoid rooms 170-243 as the beach is not good here, also rooms 140-169 as you will have the constant noise of the generator here. The rooms on stilts look nice but are quite a lot dearer.

The snorkelling is superb right from the beaches and they do trips to another island for $43 per head. You don't see much more!

There is squash, tennis, billiards and table tennis.

Now I come to the problems...but don't let it detract from the beauty of the sea and beach.
We were All Inclusive but if you are used to AI in the caribbean or elsewhere this is not run on quite the same lines.
They charge $12 a day for snorkel and flippers. I am used to it being included.
Similarly they charge a fair wack for water sports. Yes motorised ones are usually are charged for but here all are charged for.
When you order a drink in the bar or restaurant you have to sign a bill each time. It is $0 as All Inclusive but why? It is seriously annoying and time consuming waiting for a bill to be delivered. What is the point of the wrist band I ask?
The restaurant has a good choice of at least 6 curries every day and varied rice dishes but only one western meal choice. Why? 50% of the visitors are western!!! The food is often luke warm at best.
They serve odd choices of food. Of course curry is available for every meal, no thank you. But they had steak medallions in pepper sauce, nice, but for breakfast?
They don't keep the cheese in chilled cabinets so it gets rather sweaty.
There is beef bacon, chicken bacon but no pork bacon. Well it is a Muslim country....But you can get ham as a pizza topping if you order one. How odd.
There are other restaurants to the main buffet though I have to wonder at their pricing structure. We are All Inclusive but have the "opportunity" to try other restaurants at a supplement of $150. Oh, less 15% as we are not using the buffet. This seems a bit high to me as it does to most others as the restaurants rarely have more than 2 people in them, but the buffet is busy. I can't help but think that if prices were a bit lower more people would use them and a bigger margin would be achieved.
They allow smoking around the pool and real glass glasses.
The bar needs a serious shake up. There are plenty of waiters but they don't seem to have territories so we might place an order with one and in the 15-20 minute wait for a drink be asked another 3 times by different waiters if we wanted a drink. The people pouring the drinks can't keep up and it was not even busy. Again the wait and signing of the bills was annoying.
There is only one bar in the evening so if you want a quiet drink once the music starts forget it...

Comments:

No comments