Positives
Vishwa was an excellent tour guide, he looked after us, gave great advice, was always punctual and took great pride in the tour car. He knew the best spots to stand when visiting sites and always managed to secure good spots in restaurants with the best views. He ironed out any problems and was a pleasure to be with.
Vishwa gave us a very detailed itinerary on day one, so we knew exactly what we would be doing and when
The accommodation we stayed in, overall was very good. With the exception of the deer park where we had fleas in the bed and a rat in the room.
The food was excellent both at the hotels and the places we went to en-route
The trips were great, with the exception of the elephant orphanage. The guides on the trips were really good and very informative. Especially at the tea plantation and lion rock
Negatives
We arrived at the first hotel at about 10.00am. As I knew we'd arrive early after a 16 hours of travel I arranged through On the Go for an early check in at 10.30. Unfortunately the hotel had no record of this and only let us check in at 13.30. - Very dissapointing start.
The Deer park hotel wasn't great, as mentioned above
Elephant orphanage - We went down to the river to see the elephants. The whole exercise seemed to be more about getting tourists to pay to feed/have their photo taken with the elephants rather than the welfare of the elephants. The elephants were clearly afraid of the handlers, and moved away when they came near. We saw the handlers jab the elephants quite a few times with sharp pointy sticks - we found this behaviour quite distressing.
There was more driving than we originally anticipated. A couple of the days seemed a bit over ambitious in terms of all we had to fit in in the time available. Mainly due to all of the driving involved.
On our final day our itineray stated that we would be picked up by 4.00pm, no-one had arrived by 4.20, so we called African adventures. They said a car would be there in 5 mins. No-one arrived so we called again, there seemed to be some confusion over where we were and why we hadn't been picked up, several different reasons were given. There were several more phone calls backwards and forwards to try to sort out and they evenually said they were going to hire somone locally to pick us up. We were eventually picked up 70 mins late. This unfortunately made the end to the trip quite stressful.
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