Our Hotel

We have, or I should say I have, had an altercation with the management and as a result we are leaving on Saturday to go somewhere else, as of yet unknown.

It is not a bad hotel.  It has 12 rooms set around a courtyard with lot of lush and well-established plants and a very, very large satellite dish.  Washing lines are strung across the courtyard and there are a few plastic chairs brought out when there is space.  It also serves as a car park and we have often found at least four UN 4 x 4s carefully arranged when we come home from school making it difficult to navigate to our room.  Running around the courtyard is a porch about 3 feet deep with a roof.  This provides protection against the sun and the heavy rains and a useful place for the guard to sleep. 

The guard at our hotel is a little old man and sleeps outside the end room next door to us, except when it is really raining hard and then he moves along to ours to get out of the rain that still manages to find its way over the barbed wire wall surrounding the compound.  His job is to open the gates to let vehicles in and out and to be on night duty, presumably to alert younger members of staff against intruders and let in any weary travellers who turn up past closing time.  I am not sure when closing time is as the bar goes on fairly loudly till at least three o’clock and the UN vehicle move out at five thirty with no consideration for anyone else, with loud bangs whistles beeps and conversations.  This seems to be the place to stay for the UN drivers whilst the driven stay at the plusher hotels on the main road.  We know our place! And luckily we are deep sleepers.

Where the guard sleeps

The room itself in a little run down but adequate.  The king-size bed is comfortable and fills the larger part of the L-shaped room along with a bedside cabinet , a small TV, a low bamboo table and a bamboo chair.  There is no wardrobe.  The bathroom fills the gap in the ‘L’ and is ok.  A western toilet; a shower tray and a sink.  We have an immersion heater for hot water but the socket is ill-fitted and there is a gap between it and the wall revealing taped up wires.  Unfortunately, the shower is positioned directly above it and the water runs over it.  I can’t remember when I stopped being terrified that I was going to be electrocuted.  The problem with the design is that the shower tray is in front of the toilet and so when you are sitting on the loo your feet are in the shower tray.  Staggering into the loo in the middle of the night can be a little disconcerting when you unexpectedly step down into the tray just when you think you are in reach of your goal and are making the turn to sit! It gets me every time!   There is plenty of hot and high-pressured water though, which is lovely.

The main problem is that we have nowhere to put our stuff.  It is a ‘Martin Challenge’ i.e. a packing stroke arranging stuff challenge of which Martin has three masters and a Phd.  You have to remember that we have a lot of baggage.  We came with five suitcases and two small cases as hand-luggage plus 2 laptops and a handbag! We are after all going to the Sudan and therefore not all is being used in Ethiopia. So there was yet another sort out, moving stuff that definitely wasn’t coming out to the suitcases at the bottom of the pile, the stuff that was coming out in the near future to the middle and our everyday stuff to the top.  Then on top of this we pile the clothes we have taken off, what has come back from the wash and anything else we just put on there.  Overall it is a bit of a mess but it kind of works. Except for when Martin hides things.

The room is cleaned every day and we are given a new piece of soap and some toilet paper.  Not a whole roll mind but a piece.  It is reeled off the roll and rewound into a neat pile for our use.  However it is not enough and is used on the first go.  Sometimes we are given soap and no paper.  We have a lovely pile of soap building up which will see us through the year in Sudan but it doesn’t compensate for the lack of paper.  At first we supplemented our meagre ration with our own roll of paper we had brought from England.  Then we (or rather I) had to ask the maid when we came back from school as there was urgent business to attend to and no paper in sight!  First of all she didn’t understand what toilet paper was and then directed me to the manager who also didn’t understand and I had to take him into the toilet and repeatedly say “paper, paper”.  Eventually he understood “soft paper?” A breakthrough!  I didn’t know if it was right but I was taking it anyway as my situation became increasingly desperate,  We weren’t there yet though, as the maid now had to be dug out of another room and sent to the place where the lone toilet roll could be removed from the locked cupboard where it could be preserved.  I watched as she started to unroll he sheets of paper and like Oliver, I shouted “More! More!” when she stopped.  “Martin has an upset stomach! I say with accompanying gestures. (How low was I going to sink here?) However, I was rewarded for my petulance and given another healthy supply.  Honestly I felt like I had brought home a prize stag from the hunt!   We weren’t given any extras after that and was back to the normal ration of five feet a day, two and a half feet each.

A new hotel had opened on the corner, a few compounds along from our hotel and the owner was often outside as we passed.  “Come and have a look at my rooms, tell me what you think” By any account that is an attempt to lure us to his hotel.  Well in England that would be thz case.  We went and had a look and for just 200 ETB (£7.20) per room we were currently paying 130 ETB – the hotel had just put the price up from 120 ETB and we suspected a fleecing was occurring) we would have had a newly furbished large room, with a TV that could get loads of channels and also a very large wardrobe.  The big one was that he said he was getting internet next month, I told him then and there that we could pay up front for a month’s room if he would get the internet now!   That threw him into a tizz and he said he would find out how soon he could get it installed.

In the meantime, the Aussie visitors were being installed in this hotel (it wasn’t finished when we arrived or we would have been there) and so we were trying to find out what was happening with the internet.  We had decided we would move there anyway because of the price hike in our hotel which broke our contract essentially, but we were turned down.  Apparently, the owner was really just asking for our opinion on the rooms and wasn’t trying to lure us to his establishment and was horrified that we wanted to take a room.  It didn’t matter that we wanted to go, the issue was that he would still be there after we left and he did not want to fall out with the owner, he didn’t want us!  Bummer!  But the Aussies gave us a toilet roll from the hotel when they left, so there was some compensation!

Anyhow, I digress.  At first, the manager asked us for payment every day and so we ended up paying a week in advance on the Saturday.  However he got used to us after a bit and then we ended up paying on the Monday or Tuesday, partly in arrears and partly in advance.  This week however Martin went to pay on the Wednesday and was informed that yet again the price had risen and was now 140 ETB.  What’s more the price was backdated to the Saturday.  Martin thought it was a bit rich but still paid it and I was pretty cross when he came back and told me.  We went to bed and I was laying there getting more and more angry about it. We had had an agreement.  We were staying for 6 weeks.  When it went up to 130 ETB we paid that amount from the day we were told about it.  This was really taking the biscuit, paying extra for the previous nights without being told about it!  And then refusing to void the receipt so we had to stay for an extra two nights!

So we moved to the hotel on the corner, the one who was scared of the owner.  He was still really frightened and he insisted that Dawit cleared it with the owner first.  But here we are and It is much nicer. The TV shows all channels and it is nice enough to stay in the room and watch TV, PC, or work on stuff for school etc.  Very nice!