After leaving the lunch with our new Berber friends, we drove about 90 minutes to our hotel for the next two nights, the Olinto. This is a new-ish hotel in the middle of nowhere, renovated and re-opened under this name by a new owner just one year ago. This was not our first choice (1) – the original plan was for us to spend two nights at the Kasbah Tamador, which is owned by Richard Branson of Virgin Everything fame. Unfortunately, the Tamador was damaged in the earthquake and won’t reopen until the spring. The Olinto, like the Tamador, was designed to offer us two nights – one full day – of nothing but relaxation.
When we got to the hotel, we were greeted by yet another lovely hotel staff. Thus far, each of the hotels’ staff have been extremely nice. At the Olinto, they added very quiet. To a person, we had to strain to hear what they were saying.
The excitement started when we were escorted to our room, one of nine villas at the hotel. Rather than use numbers, each had a name. Ours was named Lavender. Sally has some floral allergies, and lavender is one of them. We had made this clear to our travel agent, who made it clear to the master tour planner she was using, who made it clear to the booking agency for Morocco, who made it clear to the hotel. So we asked the reception person if it was simply a name, or if there was some reason for the name, and if there was any actual lavender in the room.
It turns out the situation was both better and worse and better than we feared. No, there was no lavender in the room, either flowers or in the toiletries. Yes, there was lavender all around the villa – dozens of lavender plants, surrounding the patio and the pool. In fact, the entire hotel was planted with hundreds and hundreds of lavender plants. Fortunately, being November, none of the plants were in bloom – which made us hopeful that there would be no affect on Sally, as there didn’t seem to be any good way to fix the problem.
We did decide to find out why, since everyone in our booking chain seems to have notified the next level about the allergy, why nobody raised the issue with us. To make a long story short, the hotel’s assistant manager claimed to have texted the booking agent that made our reservation to alert them, but never heard back. Apparently, he notified the wrong booking agent, who proceeded to ignore the text. This took us almost 24 hours (out of our 40 hour stay) to find out, meaning that we were upset for much of that time.
So let’s put that all aside for the moment and talk about the Olinto and our stay there.
The grounds, public areas and our villa were all quite nice. We had a suite with a spacious bedroom, a living room with big TV, and a patio, a roof terrace and a heated pool. We never managed to use the pool, as the weather was just a bit too cool to warrant it.
The staff and food service were nice. Although as I said earlier, we had to work to hear them talk. We had two breakfasts and only one dinner; we were too full from the Berber family lunch when we arrived to have dinner that first night.
The second annoyance came with the telephone in the room. Our phone didn’t work – if I made a call, they couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t hear them. Same if they called me. So I walked over to reception (2) to both report the problem, and take care of whatever it was I had been calling about. They promised to get it fixed.
Around 11:00pm, while preparing for bed, I jostled the phone and it made a call. I immediately hung up. A minute later, it rang; I answered but heard nothing. This happened twice; I assume the desk saw the call, and called back to see what we wanted. Then I got into bed. A few minutes later, there’s a knock on the door; the desk guy assumed something was very wrong and ran down to see what was going on. I was not pleased; if they had fixed the damn phone, none of this would have happened. They didn’t get someone over to fix it until the middle of the next day, after we complained again.
In the afternoon, having nothing to do at the hotel (3), we asked at reception if it was possible to go for a walk outside the hotel. After all, we know nothing of the area and had no idea if there were any safety concerns. The desk clerk seemed shocked: “You want to go out alone? Without a guide?” This is the same response I got from the front desk back in Fes to the same question. It seems like it’s somehow inappropriate for rich tourists to do anything without a guide. Anyway, she agreed that it was safe and suggested we turn right outside the front gate, and escorted us to the front gate (about 50 feet from the desk) to ensure we didn’t get lost and turn left, or something.
We walked along the road for about an hour. It was a quiet, dusty country road, with houses and orchards, a mosque, and a very small block with a couple of stores. I’m happy to report were weren’t kidnapped or robbed.
We spent both evenings doing what we never do while on vacation: we watched TV, using our Amazon Prime account to catch up on one of our favorite shows.
Friday morning we ordered room service for breakfast, as we planned to meet our guide and driver at 9:30am for the long trip to our next stop.
(1) “Choice” is a strange word to use here, as our travel agent chose all of the hotels for us. And chose this replacement hotel. Our contribution was to say OK.
(2) We seem to always get the rooms as far away from reception as is possible. This was the case at the Amanjena as well as here.
(3) Of course, the plan for this stop was alway more or less doing nothing but relaxing at the hotel.
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