Fawlty Towers with a Twist

Think Fawlty Towers, with a Chinese man playing a pleasant Basil Fawlty. He met us at the door and led us through a narrow, not very clean hall that was lined with power leads disappearing into the nether regions and a multitude of plugs adorning the skirting board, some piggy backing others. We ended up in a grubby kitchen, sitting at a table covered in crumbs, filling in 'paperwork'. This comprised of an example of a form they'd 'run out of' and a blank piece of paper for us to fill in.

We were then invited to follow 'Basil' to our room, which turned out to be in the annexe. Now, an annexe in my view is a building attached to the main building, so imagine our surprise when we were led out through the little car park, around the corner and across the road to an entirely different building. We followed him in (at least it was clean in there) and up a short flight of stairs. He indicated the kitchen, a piece of paper with the wifi details sticky-taped to the door. To our further horror, he led us up another flight of stairs, showing us the 'shared' bathroom (a tiny shower and a toilet), then up even more stairs. We were not happy when we finally arrived at our door, the room number (like all the others we'd passed) written in pencil on a piece of paper sticky-taped to the door. Room numbers in this place were obviously interchangeable.

He left us then, and we collapsed in laughter. The room was small, and a bit crowded with a desk, a cupboard for clothes, a fridge, a double bed, and a single (we'd asked for 2 singles), but the beds were comfortable, and the room was clean. Each bed had a bedside table with nice lamps and covers, but we discovered that these were for show only. Lindy lifted her lamp to find that the cord led nowhere - there was no visible power outlet. My lamp leant drunkenly to one side and threatened to topple when I tried to switch it on. The view from the window was the best feature of the room, showing the street lined with quaint shops, a small pub, chimney tops and so on - all obviously not Australian - but the glass was streaky, it was raining, and the window wouldn't open, so photos were not possible.

We decided a shower was necessary first, so Lindy braved the shared bathroom. She arrived back feeling fresh and much more human but warned me not to use the grab rail. She had tried, only to discover that it was another 'for show only' piece of equipment when it came off the wall in her hand!

After my shower, we tried to connect to the wifi so we could let everyone know that we had arrived, but the password didn't work. I phoned 'Basil' who tried to tell me that it was my computer. I soon put him straight, and he came over from the main house. He finally agreed that it wasn't our iPads and did as I suggested - he rebooted the router, which was perched, surrounded by more plugs and leads, on a narrow shelf up near the ceiling on the landing under our room. That worked, and I thanked him (I am polite even when a bit miffed) and turned to open the door to our room. He was part way down the stairs but popped his head back up, to point out that my room was up one flight! I apologised to the two startled girls in the room I'd tried to enter and fled up the stairs, to collapse laughing on the bed.

Our email done, feeling a bit tired by this time (9 p.m.) and not at all hungry, we tucked ourselves in and went to sleep to the sound of very soft rain on the roof above us.