訪訪客In all my travels, this was a first: a ZOMBIE HOTEL (I'm going to coin the phrase). Originally a Sheraton, and, word has it, one of the first hotels built on the island (in the 1960s or 1970s, one assumes), Mr and Mrs Sheraton have long since taken down their signage and vamoosed; I like to think leaving the big bunch of keys as a parting gift to a dozen plucky locals who try their best to continue the tradition. Make no mistake, this hotel is technically dead. It probably died in a zombie apocalypse a few decades ago. Today, ghosts and zombies roam the grounds. Tumble**** blows around the property with unraked leaves and stray dogs. The wind whistles. The huge Balkan Reception area gives off an un-airconditioned ”gulag chic”, like, perhaps, a hotel in downtown Chernobyl. You expect a startled deer or elk to suddenly bolt from behind the piano and crash through a plate glass window at the sight of customers. And the woman (I think maybe a zombie) at reception robotically tells us our room isn't ready yet and won't be ready till 3pm. It's now midday. You can visit the restaurant, she suggests. We visit the restaurant, and spook the living daylights out of a skittish deer*, which upturns a metal serving trough and crashes through a plate glass window to freedom. There is no one in the restaurant. Why would there be?... this is a dead hotel. We return to the sneering receptionist. There's nobody in this hotel, we plead...how can our room not be ready? Can we see the room that isn't ready? She says 3pm check in is hotel policy. And that our room needs to be ”finessed”, whatever that means. And so we wait in the huge echoey, hot, lobby staring at a massive model Malaysian Airlines A380 at centrepiece. Eventually, she relents and we get shown to our room via a pish-smelling bockety lift and a dimly lit hallway that brings to mind a Victorian, now-shuttered English prison. As we clump, we advance-shudder at what the room is going to be like. To be fair, it's not too bad. Spacious, overly-hot water and overly-cold aircon, a bathroom that's seen better days but mercifully there's a bolt on the door to keep the zombies out and a balcony overlooking the one weird and very-much-still-alive bit of this hotel: for some reason, the pool continues to function and has been kept relatively clean. It's 50 meters and almost as wide as it is long. It's so incongruous. Like an oasis. A mirage. A huge duck pond. It infinities to the dirty beach and infected sea beyond. Crappy, rusty, dusty, iron loungers lounge and it abuts a skanky gym where most of the equipment either sighs or is out of order. Do not believe any of the ”romantic” pics or claptrap reviews. We got suckered for a hundred bucks a night. It's not worth twenty. This is a dead hotel that is somehow undead. The vibe is positively spooky. All that said, anyone reading this who's location-hunting for any class of a horror movie, should definitely check it out. *Officially there are no dee
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