Opinione dettagliata di koshkha
koshkha(46)
Northampton, Regno Unito92%
It was Christmas Day 1995 and my first trip to India. I woke up with an overwhelming sense of well-being and an absolute buzz of excitement that I was really somewhere different. I was at Sariska Palace Hotel, a giant pinky-white wedding cake of a building next to a wildlife park and I was absolutely loving it. It was the beginning of my long and expensive love affair with India.
My first experience of an Indian hotel was pretty lousy - a run down giant of a hotel in Delhi that smelled so badly of damp that my clothes picked up the smell and held on to it for a week or so after. But Sariska was something different: an old palace where the great and the good (but mostly the rich) would have gathered to go out and kill the very animals that we were there to look for. My trip was a three week tour called 'Tigers and Ganges' and Sariska National Park was our first potential tiger-spotting place.
The day before we had arrived in the morning and gone on our first game drives which had been organised by the hotel. It soon became apparent that the chance of seeing any tiger in Sariska that wasn't stuffed and mounted in the hotel lobby was about as high as seeing one in your local park. No tiger was going to hang around in such a noisy congested place but there seemed to be an astonishing assortment of deer species and birds. I got the impression that even the local bus service drove through the park, honking and hooting its horns as it passed. But the lack of big cats wasn't an issue - Sariska was a third rate park but the hotel had enough character to make up for it. Hence on the morning of Christmas Day we took a sensible decision to skip the morning game drive and sleep late, having a lazy breakfast instead of rushing around a dusty park in the cold.
My room mate and I had a room with high ceilings, big wooden beds and lots of character. The facilities were really rather basic but we didn't care - this was an adventure and you can't really have an adventure with 24 hour hot and cold running water and satellite TV. I don't think there was ANY TV, let alone anything fancy. Looking directly at the palace, we were on the wing on the left side of the building and had a nice covered colonnaded terrace outside our front door from which we could look out across the lawns and the slightly scruffy gardens.
The hotel had a time-warp restaurant that must have once been grand but was now just big and draughty. The food on offer was always some kind of buffet and the prices were higher than they should have been due to the lack of any alternative place to eat. Drinks were overpriced and the waiters never had change and were conveniently forgetful about bringing any - a tried and tested technique for extracting unintended tips. There really wasn't a lot to do other than driving round the park.
Despite the basic facilities, the uninspiring and over-priced food and the general air of faded glory, I loved the Sariska Palace. Checking their website it looks as if some things have changed since I was there the standard rooms are perhaps no longer even IN the main palace building but shunted out to more modern blocks. They claim a swimming pool and tennis court that I don't recall, but even if they had been there, they wouldn't have been very tempting in December. I've read that there are actually now tigers in the park so I can only imagine that someone's sorted out the problems that were keeping them away when we visited. It's still not on a par with Ranthambore or Bhandavgarh for tigers but maybe it's better than it was.
What Sariska lacks in facilities, it makes up for in historic grandeur and the opportunity to play at 'Days of the Raj' and imagine yourself in a long dress playing tennis on the lawn whilst your men-folk went out to 'bag' a few tigers before heading back to drink far too much rum in the bar. It's a hotel for dreamers and romantics rather than people who want round the clock hot water and wi-fi.
Sariska Palace Sariska7
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