Jun 202011
 

This hotel is located in the southwestern part of the city, but still just a 15 minute walk to the central area.

The hotel is a compound, with a very large main building up front, behind which is a handful of other buildings. These other buildings include a central dining area and conference room of sorts, a building with their standard grade room with one large bed, a building with their standard grade room with double beds, two buildings with two each of their next level of room with a king bed, and another building with what I think is their top-end suite.

When you first see the place from the roadway, it’s a bit like, “What the he’ll have I gotten myself into?”. But once you get into the main building, which has reception on the first floor, it gets a bit nicer. Head back even farther to the accomodations and associated grounds, and you stet breathing easy again.

We stayed in an upper-end room. It had it’s own bathroom with tub/shower, air conditioning, fridge, king bed, and outside sitting area.  It was clean and well-done. For this, the going-in rate was $65 US a night, which they reduced by ten percent on request.  That’s a bit pricey, and as expensive as the most-expensive place we stayed in Thailand.

Also pricey is its laundry service. We paid $12 US for what we could have gotten done at any nearby laundry service for $2.50 US. So, if you stay here, just walk your laundry down the road a couple hundred meters and save a few buck; or do what we did the next day, and hand wash it yourself in the tub.

But the hotel is nice, and the staff is friendly, so it’s a decent place to stay.

Next door to the place is a monastery, and the monks get going early – as is announced by the clanging of a bell at 4:00am each morning.  You can also hear the young monks going about their business during the day.  Not exciting; and other than the early-morning bell clanging, not so noisy as to be an issue.

One thing we noted while here is that, even outside at night, we were not harrassed by any bugs. That’s a first, and I am not sure how they achieved that miracle.

Breakfast is included, which consisted of coffee, fruit, juice, and a choice of some Western staples (omelet, pancakes, two eggs, etc.).  It wasn’t great, but it didn’t completely suck.

A quirk about the place is that staff sleep on the grounds, including someone who stayed in a pup tent.  Not the norm in the US, but here I like the idea of staff being around all hours of the day to keep an eye on things.  (Although that really isn’t much of a quirk, given that owners and staff had resided at many of the places we have stayed. Maybe it’s just the tent that’s a bit quirky.)

 Posted by at 12:43 am