Dirty Bananas, you rock my world
But more on them later. When I left you last it was 4am and I was staring at the ceiling, which seems to be my default position come the first few days of any trip whether it be east, west, north or south. Id actually had trouble sleeping for a few weeks building up to this trip and had been waking up in the early hours almost every day, so wasnt sure if it was that or not, but Mrs Lem was awake too so seemed not. It had not been a good nights sleep the insects were so loud and so constant that I was absolutely certain it was an alarm going off somewhere. All night. But that wasnt even the most annoying thing, oh no, that was a ridiculous design flaw in our room.
We all know that glass lets light through right? So, why, if there is a full height window from the bedroom, through the shower and into the bathroom, would you put a frosted glass door on the toilet facing the other way? Thus anyone getting up in the night to go to the loo, closes the toilet door, switches the light on and then floods the bedroom with light! Good plan Sandals! Not sure if this affected rooms in the Italian or South Seas villages, but everyone we spoke to in the Pink Gin one had the same problem.
But there we were, awake. We dragged ourselves out of bed eventually and headed out at around 6am to have a look around, where there was hardly a soul around a few staff plus the people on our flight also suffering from jet lag. As the resort was nearly deserted, it was a great time to get some shots. Camera ones, not alcohol I hadnt even had breakfast!
Looking back over the resort
The 'Living Room' where most of the evening entertainment happened
The Italian Village with South Seas off in the background
The quiet pool - fire pit in the middle
Towards reception with South Seas and the noisy pool on the other side
The Italian Village with the enormous, exceptionally expensive rooms
The noisy pool and swim-up bar
Being up that early, we also got to see sun lounger politics in full flow. If you have a butler, they come round at about 7am and put towels on the sun loungers or cabanas, depending on where the people theyre looking after have requested them. However, theyre not allowed to move any that are already there one benefit of being up early was being able to pick a plum spot. There were signs up saying that every 90 minutes after 10am, any unused loungers would be cleared, but we never saw that in practice.
The only issue with being out at 6am was hunger we were both starving, but nowhere actually starts serving food until 7.30am. Ah.
For our first full day, we chose the quiet pool, slathered on the factor 15 and set to some serious lazing about doing nothing. It was marvellous. It was also bloody hot. The sun was so strong that the factor 15, which is usually the strongest we ever have to use, was about as effective as sitting there saying shoooo! to the suns rays. Of course I didnt actually notice this until later in the day where I looked something like this:
Ouch.
This necessitated a trip to the resort shop and the purchase of some very overpriced factor 50 and 30. I was unaware that sun cream went that high
It also meant a particularly poor nights sleep as moving hurt quite a lot
But our second full day was our wedding anniversary and we were up and out early, with our plan for maximum relaxation with a few drinks at the pool and a nice dinner at one of the evening attire required places all we intended to do.
Like so many other things about this trip, it never happened. What actually happened was that we met another couple, who we got on really well with, and were introduced to the Dirty Banana. I should have read the signs Mimosas with breakfast at 7.30am. How else was this day ever going to go
Drinking all day is not big and its not clever, but my was it fun. Its hard to say where the day went we met this other couple about lunchtime, then we were all talking to people that arrived on the BA flight, and then it was dark and they wanted to close the pool to clean it (nothing to do with us).
While we did make it out for dinner, we skipped the formal attire place and went elsewhere. It was pretty good, but given that Im liable to eat a donner kebab after a day on the beer, Im not sure what that actually says.
Slept well that night (funnily enough )
Coming up in the next part the downside of fun
Back sooner than it took me to do this bit
