The Hotel Gardens

Our plane landed at Mombasa at around 5:00am after what was possibly the smoothest flight in the history of aviation. After collecting our luggage and receiving a stamp on just about every page of our passport we were pointed in the direction of a coach to take us to our hotel. A 'porter' very kindly offered (gave us no choice) to take our bags to the coach, for a very small tip of course.

On the coach we met Paul, our rep from Thomson. He gave us a wristband each, which we had to wear for the duration of our stay, it let all the staff at the Hotel know we were entitled to as much free beer as we wanted, so no complaints. The drive to the hotel was sobering, driving through the shanti towns disturbed us somewhat, but the people living in them seemed happy and didn't appear to want for much. Different cultures, and ours was shocked.

After about 40 minutes we arrived at the hotel. We were rather pleased to see that it wasn't built of mud or corrugated iron like so many of the houses we had passed en route, but was in fact rather luxurious even by first world standards. We had arrived at the hotel just after 7:00am and our room wasn't ready, so we headed off to the restaurant to grab some breakfast. We were rather surprised to find that we were sharing the dining room with some Verat Monkeys which were duly chased off by the staff whenever they got too close.

The view from our room

After another couple of hours of sweating in the heat, we were given our room. After showering and changing we went off in search of a sun-lounger where we awaited Pauls return to give us a welcome talk. Paul told us about the area and how to stay safe and healthy (Don't walk down any dark allies, stay out the sun etc) and then sold us a couple of Dhow trips and a visit to Fort Jesus in Mombasa old town.

After lunch we were accosted by a Monkey in our room who was after the fruit on our dressing table. About the fruit: After the welcome chat we arrived back to our room and noticed that we had flowers decorating the door frame. Inside the room someone had left us fruit and a bottle of red wine. We later found out that we had been mistaken for a honeymoon couple and these gifts had been left for us. We gave the fruit to the monkeys, and we drank the wine (he he!). The flowers were taken down from our door a couple of days later.

Afternoon we went for a dip in one of the pools, we then had dinner at the main restaurant and finaly off to bed at about 9:30pm after being awake for about 40 hours!