Тихий, очень комфортный отель с отличным сервисом Quiet, very comfortable hotel with excellent service

I will try to share my impressions of the stay. . . I was with my wife and two children (9 years old) for the New Year. First, about the hotel itself. All as in the photos). We took the Garden suite - two levels with a balcony on the first floor and a terrace and access from it to the lawn to the pool. In my opinion, this is the best accommodation option with two children, whom we settled on the ground floor, taking one extra bed for $ 15 / day, because for one of the children, according to the terms of the voucher, there was a so-called. sharing (child shares a bed with parents). It was necessary to take sharing for two children and already at the hotel to take two beds for an additional fee - the savings would be about $ 300-400. The room itself is very spacious and comfortable. It can be seen that it is not new, but everything is functioning properly and it seems that this will be the case for the next ten years - everything is done very high quality and soundly. The layout itself allows you to achieve the feeling of a half-empty hotel, despite the fact that there was not a single free room. The people spread evenly throughout the territory (the staff will drag sun loungers to any place on the lawn or on the beach) and the people closest to you can be at a distance of 30-50 meters, which achieves the effect of almost complete privacy. The service is slow, but this is rather a feature of the temperament of the locals. They understand English well at the reception and a couple of senior waiters. The choice of food, as for me, is quite sufficient. Everything is very well prepared. On New Year's Eve they especially tried - the total length of the tables with the food offered was 150 meters. The cost of dishes on the menu is much higher than in restaurants in the city. Alcohol is also not cheap, but no one bothers you to buy, for example, a gin in a store and order only tonic and ice to your balcony, terrace or sun lounger. If you are a hookah lover (like me), then you will have to bring it with you, as well as tobacco, coal and accessories for lighting it. For the locals, it's exotic. When I first went to the reception with a request to light the coal - they fell into a stupor and called the hotel manager. Explaining to him that lighting coconut charcoal and transporting it in a specially designed small iron ladle to the smoking area on the terrace of the room would not be a violation of fire safety rules and drawing his attention to the fact that in our bathroom there are small drops on the floor very similar for dried blood and this is not a problem for us and we do not require a change of number - I got his permission for the daily ignition procedure. At the same time, I listened to his story that it was not blood, but furniture polish, which negligent staff spilled during cleaning, and since the floor is made of natural light stone, which is porous in its structure and absorbs liquids very strongly, there is no way to wipe off stains , and they simply did not have time to change the tiles. In turn, I tried to reassure him that I often smoke a hookah in my house and that my house has never burned down from this, I also tried to dispel his stereotype that hookah smoking and marijuana are somehow connected. In general, believing in mutual stories (or pretending to), we parted, being quite pleased with each other. The English manager is worthy of all praise - literary with a London accent. Regarding holidays with children. Upon arrival, I immediately asked at the reception that the security would rule out any possibility of exfiltration of children outside the hotel and their access to the beach without our accompaniment. It was done verbatim. The guard moved away from them only if we appeared in his field of vision. The picture is amusing - children swimming in the pool and a guard standing five meters from them, often wet to the waist from the spray they produce. There is no animation in the hotel, but for children it was not an inconvenience. Having cooperated with the Balts about their own age, they had a great time without animators. Of the available entertainment for children, there are: a swimming pool, an ocean, catching very agile crabs on the beach, food, soft drinks, feeding palm squirrels (fruits and rice), feeding crows (I haven’t seen such yet - they come very close and ask for food, it was experimentally it was determined that they most willingly eat scrambled eggs and chicken without spices, although they do not refuse bread and fruits), looking at geckos living on the balcony and terrace. In general, everything suited the children. Meals at the hotel are washed away to take breakfast and dinner, because it takes 7 minutes to go to the nearest restaurant by tuk-tuk (600 rupees, about $ 5). This cost includes waiting for the end of your meal and delivery back to the hotel). This service is provided by beach fights. Chief in their criminal community Madu. He is trying to learn Russian, and in a mixture of Russian and English, one can explain himself quite tolerably. We went on three trips with him. The first is a safari in Yalla. I'll tell you more. Yall is approximately 200 km from the hotel. We left at 3 am. At the reception, having learned that we needed to be woken up for an excursion, they offered to take breakfast with a dry ration, which we took advantage of. With Madu, we agreed on the cost of shipping the four of us to Yalla and back at $200. To my surprise, he went with us - honestly and conscientiously acting as a guide. We drove a new eight-seater Hiache. The minibus is new, absolutely clean and without any foreign smells (including from the driver), which favorably distinguished it from the cattle trucks kindly provided by the travel agency for transfer from the airport and back. When planning movements around the island, one must take into account that due to narrow, winding roads and their high congestion, the average speed at night and early in the morning will not exceed 60 km / h, and in the afternoon and evening 35-40 km / h. Additionally, we paid $50 to rent an antique open Len Rover with a local driver to move around the park and about $70 for entrance tickets for four. . Driving around the park in an open pickup truck on broken primers for four hours is quite tiring after the first two, and a ballistic mask and shemakh would be very useful - the dust from the car freely falls on all surfaces. If you are traveling with two or three people, it is better to rent a pickup truck with benches on the sides - a better view and more space. If there are more people, then take a pickup truck with valuable seats in the back - it will be more comfortable. For three hours of moving around the park, we saw many different animals, which had previously been seen only in zoos, after that we were frankly tired and decided to return to civilization. After lunch at a very good restaurant, which Madu recommended to us, we went back to the hotel on the way, stopping in Halle to see the Dutch fort. The tour turned out for the whole day - we returned to the hotel at 22-00, just in time for the end of dinner. Pretty boring, but definitely worth a look. . The next day we went to a Buddhist temple in Kandy (on the way we stopped at a tea factory (the initial prices for tea are quite high - bargain, the normal price is 1300-1500 rupees / kg of orange pekoe), a tea plantation, an elephant nursery, a spice plantation (the cost of oils is frankly high - buy at the pharmacy), pineapple plantation and somewhere else). The cost of this excursion was $100, of which $50 was paid by a young couple from Ukraine who were not embarrassed by the presence of children in the bus. About $20 more was paid for the children to ride on elephants in the nursery. We returned to the hotel around 22:00. The third excursion was bought for a river safari on the Bentota River (about 50 km from the hotel on a paid high-speed autobahn). The cost is $50 for two families, plus $70 per person and $35 per child for renting a boat for 2.5 hours. After pickup in Yalla, the boat seemed very comfortable). This tour is definitely worth buying - quickly and comfortably. On the way, we stopped at a turtle farm and a coastal fishing village to see how the locals fish (with a five-kilometer net, which is brought in boats into the sea in the morning and then using the entire able-bodied population of the village (50 people), they manually pull it ashore all day and in the evening, finally pulling it out , they also sell a catch on the beach (five tons visually. We stopped first in the morning, and then in the evening, on the way back - to see what we caught. This is a must see. There was no more time to go on excursions, unfortunately. Summarizing the above, I I came to the conclusion that you can and should buy excursions from locals, but you need to immediately find out how much additional costs will be for entrance tickets and transport rental directly at the place of the excursion in order to understand for yourself the final cost of the event. Also, ask what else you can see along the way , but at the same time it was possible to have time to return to the hotel before 22-30 (in order to have time to feed the children with dinner). ate with Madu, he never tried to deceive us in anything or show his displeasure or disagreement in anything. As well as we have never tried to cheat or deceive in any of the places that we visited with him. His attempt (in sophistication at the level of a pre-pubescent schoolboy) to earn extra money on us, which consisted in the fact that he asked to take him on a boat with him on a river safari for an additional $ 50 payment to the boatman, because he had never seen it - I I do not take into account. Painfully artless and naive it looked). In return, I promised him to give him a phone (black and white Nokia), which I used for local calls with a local SIM card when I left, because he broke his and constantly took calls from the driver, which he was absolutely sincerely happy about. The discount that I managed to bargain with him for the cost of the transfer to the place of the excursion, I left as a tip. Anyway, you need to bargain in Sri Lanka everywhere and with everyone. The exception is alcohol stores - there prices are fixed and written on bottles. But before you go shopping for tea and oils, go to the pharmacy and supermarket to get an idea of ​ ​ the real prices. . In general, I can recommend Mada as a guide from the best side. It can provide a more varied and better quality level of service than the host travel agency. He tried to fulfill any of our questions and any wishes (for your information, hard-working local peasants in remote mountainous areas grow coca, khat and hemp - suddenly this information will be useful to someone))). In many ways, his merit is that we had an unforgettable experience from our stay in Sri Lanka. I'll try to summarize. This is one of the best hotels I have ever been to. And it's not about the number of stars, the quality of room repair, food or service. On the second day of your stay, you begin to get the impression that you are living here, and not relaxing for money in good conditions. This, in my opinion, is the main advantage of this hotel. Definitely recommend to everyone for a relaxing family holiday.