18 December 2019
Everything is damp. My feet are damp. This table is damp. My laptop is damp. Our clothes are damp. The sheets are damp. So are the pillows. It’s muggy, which is an understatement as clearly it is basically 100% humidity, and we’re staying in an open-walled treehouse in the forest near Sigiriya.
We said goodbye to Diluk this morning, and moved to a different hotel in the same area. Instead of the sprawling and faded Sigiriya Village with its rows of bungalows, giant dinner buffet, and troops of Chinese tourists we have come to the boutique treetop Back Of Beyond. This is never in a million years a $125 room. It may have been ten years ago, when some designer with delusions built and opened it, but since then it has had “bare minimum” maintenance, when anywhere in the tropics that you want to keep boutique needs “replace everything, even the doors, every five years” levels of maintenance to survive. Especially if it’s a fucking tree house in a forest!
I wanna go back where the Chinese tourists are. To be fair, it’s not entirely Back of Beyond’s doing. If the weather was warm and sunny (like it’s bloody well supposed to be at this time of year!) then we’d just be doing a bit of eyeball-rolling about the price charged for this way-past-best treetop chalet. But because it’s been raining all day, making everything wet and forcing us to stay in our lodgings reading, the shabbiness is all emphasised and we sneer and snarl instead of smiling and snarking.
They might at least have updated (downgraded?) the information book in the room to stay abreast of the decline. “Every room has tea and coffee making facilities.” Does it fuck. Where? “Because the monkeys can steal things, we provide plastic boxes in your room to keep secure.” Really? I don’t see any. Also, why is the food more bland and poorly cooked than both of our previous (cheaper) accommodations? I am so going to TripAdvisor this place.
Okay, so it’s an entire blog post whinging about our accommodation. As noted, it rained all day so we haven’t done anything much except hang around here. Time to crawl into my damp sheets in anticipation of tomorrow.
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