A Five Star Hotel in the Algarve
I am back briefly in the Algarve, and coming back was clearly a big
mistake. Here we are in April and the temperatures are down where they
usually are in January. It’s freezing cold, very windy, and at
the moment the rain is coming down in stair-rods. Or, as the
Portuguese say, tipping out of urns. (This was written the first week
in April.)
I have been living in the poor country of Nicaragua, where everything
seems to work very nicely. I am now back in Portugal with
no internet, no phone and no electricity. Ah yes, I remember it well.
This is the second time the electrics have gone down today. The
internet has been dodgy for the past week. And
my neighbour complains that she has
no tv when the rains come, which is pretty well every day at the moment.
Hmm… when do I leave again?
But I digress. This article was meant to be about a rather nice day
out. Being a day out in Portugal means that things didn’t go quite to
plan.
The Conrad hotel down in Val de Lobo, or whatever district that
particular clump of trees comes under, was hosting a wine tasting with
a special meal. It was called Wining Around the World. The idea was
rather neat: set up a dish, and taste two wines with it to see how they
fare. There were six dishes, and therefore twelve wines to taste, plus
a finishing digestive. After which the sensible folk did not drive
home, but crashed out upstairs.
Things did not get off to a good start. It was chucking down with rain
as I left home to pick up my friend, but we put on a brave face,
colourful clothes, and pretended the sun was shining.
I’m not very au fait with the back roads of the Golden Triangle. I used
to live up the poor end of the Algarve, however, after a couple of
false moves, we made it to the pompous entrance of the Conrad Algarve
hotel. It’s rather large, and largely empty. There seemed to be as many
members of staff as there were guests, which no doubt explains the
price of the rooms. Luckily the Footsie index was in a benign mood the
friday before so a neat purchase and a suitably nimble exit from the
market managed to pay for the jaunt.
I had ordered a room with twin beds, and was told check-in was any time
after 2.00 p.m. We arrived at about 2.20, and the first problem
manifested itself as soon as we had said ‘hello’. Apparently our room
was not ready, and would we wait half an hour? At a five star hotel,
the correct answer to that request is ‘No’. However, we waited twenty
minutes before I complained. “It will be ready in five minutes,” I was
told. I waited five minutes and complained. “It will be ready in five
minutes,” I was told again. After five more minutes I asked for my
money back, and was shown to my room. It had a single bed.
For heaven sake, if you are showing two people to a room, surely the
penny should drop before you get there that they need more than one
bed. We were asked to wait, which we did for ten minutes. At that stage
I politely lost my temper.
I admit they upgraded us to a much nicer room with a much nicer view,
but this is the first time it has taken me one hour and twenty minutes
between walking through the front door of a hotel to being installed in
my room.
My partner told me that we were not alone. Apparently a coach load of
elderly people arrived and were told their rooms weren’t ready either,
and the staff suggested they go outside and look around the area.
Remember, it was raining.
If that is the way the Conrad runs its affairs they will shortly go
broke, or someone will get really angry.
Let’s carry on a bit further with this journey into the guts of the
hotel. First, let me say that whoever designed it needs his head
banging. Whatever you need happens to be several miles away. (Yes, I
know, I exaggerate.) But a bus service would help. The gym is miles
over to one side of the hotel. The swimming pool is on the other side.
To get from one side to the other you have to change lifts. I dread to
think how the poor folks who check in to the floating arms of the hotel
situated along the access road get on. Maybe they use golf buggies to
get around.
There is a message in the gym and in the pool area asking users to
report to reception before using the facility. That meant I had another
trek across the empire. When you get back to reception you are told
that it isn’t necessary to register. Not to worry, I need the exercise,
so back to the gym. I look around but can’t see the showers or the
changing rooms. Apparently they are over the other side of the hotel
next to the swimming pool. Don’t you just love this?
One gent, already using the gym, said he changed in the loo. I suppose
I could have sat on the can to change into plimsoles, but decided to
use the top of the stairs instead, as the loo didn’t give one much
elbow room. Then I realised my tightly fitting trousers wouldn’t come
off over the plimsoles. After a smile and a choice remark or two, I
decided to do a full-scale change at the top of the stairs.
You can take it I then spent a profitable half hour in the gym.
Next I visited the indoor pool. I’m not sure how the word ‘indoor’
translates into Portuguese. I suspect not very well. I have already had
experience of this concept. Let me explain.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this little vignette of life in the
Algarve, we have problems with the services. They don’t work very well.
For those of you who are a little unsure about the definition of a
third world country, I can give you one. I’ve visited rather a lot. The
deciding factor is, a country where the infrastructure either doesn’t
work, doesn’t exist, or only reaches from the presidential palace to
the airport. In Portugal, it doesn’t work.
Some time back when I was living here, we had an electrical spike in
power which blew all my equipment, including the AC units, and the
control systems outside. I was not covered for contents. Excuse me but
I always thought contents went into something. House contents should be
inside the house. However, the insurance company claimed the outside
equipment was contents. As I say, I don’t think the word for ‘inside’
is quite what we mean in the UK by ‘inside’.
This analysis was borne out by my inspection of the indoor pool at the
Conrad. It was enclosed by two walls, not the required four, and the
wind and the rain howled through, giving an impression of some
industrial wind tunnel. To say it was bracing would be an
under-statement. Since I was already cold enough I decided not to
venture into the water, but spent a pleasant ten minutes in the sauna
instead.
I now ventured back to our room. I have stayed in far more hotels than
I care to count, so I am prepared for oddities. I have laid myself to
rest inside a tent in Central Africa, which claimed to be a hotel. I
have stayed in something akin to a public lavatory in Turkey. I have
been in several hotels in the USA where you have to tread with great
care in case by switching the wrong switch, or pressing the wrong
button, you blow up the the kitchen or the generator room below, or
fuse the lights, or inadvertently summon the fire brigade.
On one particular visit to some five star emporium about forty stories
high I once heard a lot of running in the corridor outside my room, and
a furious hammering on the door. I was quite expecting the Mafia to
bust in, but outside were six firemen, who rushed past me into the
room, and, thirty seconds later, demanded to know where the fire was.
It turned out I had automatically called the fire service when I pulled
a chord which I’d hoped might switch on some power in the bathroom.
But I digress.
Apparently we had a master switch for the electrics. No problem. Two
minutes of button pushing sussed that. We were somewhat non-plussed to
find no door to the ablutions section. If we’d invited a few folks back
to our room for drinks on the verandah, and one of them needed to go
for a pee, we would have had a grandstand view. I had no idea that
pissing in public was a quaint old Portuguese habit. I must have missed
it during the years I lived here.
The real problem for Julie was that she could not suss out how to use
the shower unit in the bath. It was stuck into a hole at the side. She
pressed buttons, turned levers, and stuck her head down, but it all
seemed a little odd. Unfortunately she was trying to redirect the spray
when she pulled it from its hole and squirted the whole of the bathroom
area. When she’d finished she couldn’t get it back in the hole so left
it lying along the shelf at the back of the bath.
I decided it might be safer to have a shower. Unfortunately I saw the
shower unit in front of me, and switched on the water, to be deluged
from above. A quick reverse, and a telephone call to reception was all
that was required to get my clothes placed in the company tumble drier.
For a second attempt I made sure I was wearing nothing. Oddly, the two
taps, which were square in shape, didn’t seem to have much logic to
them. Neither switched on the little hand-held shower head, so I
ignored it. Twisting and turning one tap only seemed to affect the rate
of gush. The other didn’t affect anything until I realised that the
only way to get it to work was to twist it and hold it in the required
position, which meant it was impossible to wash oneself.
It’s fine just standing under a shower with one hand on the control,
but someone needs to inform the idiots who design these things that the
whole object of a shower is that folks would like to get clean, and
ideally one does need both hands.
When finished (using only cold water, as I couldn’t stand there hanging
on to the tap), I turned the water off. This gave me quite a shock, as
this instantly forced the hand-held unit into action, and it shot a
great stream of cold water straight into my face, and I quickly moved
into reverse, too quickly as it happened, as I tripped over, ending up
on the floor, with water showing over me.
The bathroom floor was now under about half an inch of water. I managed
to turn off the raging jet. I’m not sure how. I just twisted everything
in sight until the water stopped. By now the flood was encroaching on
the bedroom and I dropped half a dozen towels down to mop up the mess,
and tried to get ready for the evening meal.
It was only about ten minutes later when I noticed the water was almost
up to the bed that I realised something was radically wrong. It took
some time to realise that the shower unit connected to the bath was
leaking onto the back panel, and the water was still pouring down the
side, and threatening to leave us stranded at the wrong end of the room.
Time for another call to reception for them to send up the lifeboats.
I’d just replaced the receiver when we received a call from the
restaurant department. “Are you coming for the meal? We are serving
aperitifs now.”
“Ah yes, I’ll be down just as soon as I can find my wellingtons,” I
said. The lady on the other end of the line clearly thought the English
have a strange turn of phrase.
However, Julie decided that she needed another five minutes, (or was
that ten minutes?) to get herself into a go situation, so we arrived
downstairs for our meal a trifle late. Actually, I got fed up with
waiting for her and left for the lift. I found one a couple of hundred
yards away, then got lost, and finally made it to the designated area
after two false turns, and a spot of assistance from the staff. The
first person I bumped into in the restaurant was Julie.
Apparently she had left our room about one minute after me, and gone
the other way. She got into a lift which had taken her into the
basement, where she’d found a set of stairs that came up into an empty
room, and so she had shouted for help.
I’m not quite sure this is the kind of experience I was expecting from
a visit to a five star hotel. It was certainly what you might call
interesting. But it is certainly the first time the two of us have
arrived at a restaurant from different directions.
I’d meant to write about the meal. Perhaps I’d better leave that till
next week.
john
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