Month: October 2009

We managed to get some ‘day nurse’ tablets from the pharmacy and I started taking them and began to feel a bit better. In the afternoon, I was lying on the settee watching the Chelsea game only to be told on the screen that the satellite signal had been lost. Great, the Man U game was due to follow. Mal tried all the usual things to get it back and then he looked on the bulletin board to discover that it was everyone’s Digiturk signal. Thankfully, the signal was reinstated just as the Man U match was due to begin! Yes, they won. Another wet stormy day. I received a photo of Scarlet and Jack from their other ‘Nanny’, they look so happy.

A miserable day with me feeling ill and spending all day in bed. It was also raining and storms.

I was in the full flow of my cold, runny eyes, nose etc. We collected Rosie and she was so pleased to see us. By the afternoon I felt so rough I went to bed. It didn’t help Mal telling me I looked awful! Mal took over the cooking, dog walking duties and I slept.

It rained!! Mal took some pictures of the rain heading towards us.

So, Mal had a cold and now he had given it to me! I felt rough and could have just stayed in bed, not packing and getting ready to leave. We had breakfast, packed, went to the beach bar until it was time to leave out cases in the ‘unsecured’ room by reception. We didn’t bother filling in their questionnaire as there was only about half inch of space for comments, apart from ‘rubbish’ what could we put? Mal will put his thoughts on ‘Trip Advisor’. Kervansaray, Lara, Antalya……give it a miss.

I think our summing up of the hotel is that it is soul less, the lay out is such that there is no central socialising area. It is also shabby, all the varnish peeling off the balconies of both the rooms we have had, cracked glass everywhere, even in the lifts, none of it seemed as though it was being replaced. It’s a good thing it is dim lighting at night, it gives the impression of being smarter than it is. Some staff were very nice and others just couldn’t care less including one of the Managers. I felt this was because they had tip boxes rather than guests tipping individually, so they had no reason to be attentive. Cleaning was shoddy, we watched a cleaner using pool water with nothing else added to clean the pool surround and then swept it back in the pool.

I failed to mention that there was only a bottom sheet on beds, no top sheet, just something like a baby honeycomb blanket which if you laid on the bed for a siesta without removing this first; you woke up looking like a Shreddie! The skin just doesn’t ping back like it used to!

We ate lunch and then sat drinking coffee until our lift arrived to take us to Antalya airport. We arrived back at Ercan and it had been raining. In fact we were to find out later that they had hail stones the size of golf balls while we were away. We should be thankful we missed all that!

We were very glad to be home.

The weather was dull when we woke up but we decided to go for a walk, to walk off some of the previous night’s dinner. We bought a few things in the shops and chatted to some of the Turkish, one in particular who made it very plain his dislike for Turkish Cypriots and how much Turkey was paying over to them all the time.

We ate lunch in the beach bar and on the way back I managed to lose one of my new ear rings….four days old. We did go back and search for it, to no avail.

We went back to our room at about 5, it was already dark, thunder and lightning started and then very heavy rain. Of course along with this, the temperature dropped and Mal suggested perhaps we should have stayed in our original room! Oh funny!

Our evening meal was more ‘stew’ type food and then we went to the Agat bar, hoping it to be good for our last night, it was lacking in atmosphere and Mal’s beer was flat! Back downstairs and we sat playing cards. A great last night!

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It was our wedding anniversary, we exchanged cards, had a cup of tea in bed, then down to breakfast and a day on the beach. We found sun beds on the end of the jetty, the best place to be. Midday it started getting dark and so we went to the beach bar for a drink. About 10 minutes later there was a mass exodus from the beach as the rain started. We came back into the main building to have lunch and a couple of drinks and then the storm started. To be honest in weather like this there was little to do indoors, so we played cards and read books. I think the majority of guests were German but we did hear mutterings from a few Brits saying they may as well get a plane home!

Mal wasn’t feeling too well and so we went back to the room and he just zonked out until there was a knock on the door and a waiter was standing there with a trolley, saying ‘for your wedding’ and then pointed to his finger. I think the anniversary word had escaped him. He wheeled in a bottle of wine, two glasses and a huge wrapped plate of fruit and a card ‘with the compliments of Kervansaray’. I felt so guilty when we had complained! Mal had a glass of wine and a banana and then fell back to sleep again. It is so unusual for him to have a headache and he also had blocked sinuses.

In the evening we booked to go into the a la carte restaurant, Opal, which was the Mexican. Now I can honestly say that this was a 5 star restaurant. They had also decorated only our table with flowers as it was our anniversary. FIVE courses and the food was excellent and well presented and the staff in there were also very attentive. Perhaps we should have eaten in there every night. Mal was beginning to say that the food in the main restaurant all seemed like some sort of stew every mealtime! We took a couple of drinks back to the room and Mal was asleep before I knew it. Poor thing.

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We were lucky that we remembered to change our clocks back an hour because no one in the hotel bothered to tell us or put up notices. We had our breakfast outside and then decided to just get out of the hotel so we went for a long walk. We went as far as Kervansaray Kundu, another of their hotels, as we had the Kervansarsay card with us, we went in and had a coffee and then walked all the way back again. We had a quick lunch and then packed all our things and waited for the ‘man’ who was going to come and take us to our new room. By 2.30, Mal had enough again and went to reception and demanded the new key card and told them we could manage to move our own things. He was met by an extremely sarcastic Manager. Do they really ever want customers to return? I think not. Another two hours of our holiday wasted. I can honestly say this is not the sort of holiday we expected, even though we tried to make the most of it and had to laugh. At one stage Mal actually wanted to just get on a plane and go home to Cyprus! So, day 5 of our holiday we actually had a room with air con!!

The nights entertainment didn’t appeal to us so following dinner and a drink in the soul less bar, we collected a tray of drinks took them back to our room and sat on our balcony playing cards until well after midnight. This room was much cooler and we both managed to get a good night’s sleep, the first since we had been here.

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