Archive for June, 2009

It’s the 18th of June now, which means I’ve been sick (list of symptoms included: high fever, chills, sore throat, blocked nose, nausea, and a severe headache which is still ongoing) for a grand total of 4 freakin’ days n counting!

My mum asked me why I paid to go be tortured, and I can only say it’s because of our flawed judgement when we chose Redang Reef Resort for our trip last week. With my previous great experience at Laguna Redang, I thought,

How bad could it be?

Answer: Very.

The Room

Oh god, THE ROOM. There are so many things wrong with it I don’t even know where to start.

The lights. They flicker wildly for a minute before stabilizing, and when they do, they buzz.

The smell. It smells like a pile of dust, old furniture, more dust with a funky unidentifiable scent, possibly dead insects?

The toilet sink. It clogs.

For contrast, please look at the room I stayed in at Laguna on my previous trip:

In case you were wondering, the price is only about RM 50 – 100 more. Versus falling sick and getting rashes (read below), I would say pay for it (and be glad to).

Hygiene (or the lack of it)

The mattress/bedsheets. Nevermind that it has dolphins on it. Nevermind that the sheets are so rough I could get abrasions from getting off the bed too fast. What I REALLY mind is that is so horrendously FILTHY that I had rashes all over once I slept in it.

The filthiness of the rest of the room. Right before we left, I found a cute baby cockroach happily resting on our bed. Which means there are other baby cockroaches around and their mummy should be somewhere near too. It also means that they have been with us for the past 2 nights. Sweet.

We obviously tried to stay out as much as possible but we still had to sleep at night in the room, and apparently, 2 nights were enough for the room to work its dusty magic on me.

The Food (or what it was meant to be)

I think they tried. Obviously not very hard, but I’m going to give them some points for possible effort.

The rice was in lumps and dry, and they made us (or maybe just me) feel like we were getting rations cos they dumped the food onto our plate as we walked down the buffet line.

I was googling for photos of prison food and it looks like this wtf:

What did that make us?

Again, for contrast, please take a look at the food I had at Laguna Redang:

This photo was just for the dessert part of our meal. ……Sigh.

In an attempt to be as fair as possible, lemme try to balance this scathing review with some better points about the resort (which other resorts can match beat… so…)

The exterior (which tricked us)

Looks pretty and all, doesn’t it? I’m guessing it’s the only thing that compels guests to choose their resort (for their first and probably last time), because the building actually looks decent on their website.

The snorkelling

This isn’t actually a good point about the resort per se, but I guess they didn’t run anyone over with their boat or leave anyone behind. Does this even count as a good point?

In short, proceed at your own risk. I wouldn’t ever stay there again even if they paid me to.