The Joyous Jacaranda (Jacaranda Hotel (Nairobi))

Member Name: Tadders

Product:	Jacaranda Hotel (Nairobi)
Date:	14/11/06 (201 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Pleasant accommodation, friendly staff

Disadvantages: Potentially mangy cats !

Opened in 1964, the hotel Jacaranda is approximately a 30-45 minute drive from Nairobi Airport and although it is only 2km from the city centre, this is a peaceful place to stay surrounded by beautiful gardens.

WHAT DOES IT OFFER?

As well as 121 rooms (including 18 executive rooms), this 3 star hotel offers a huge reception lobby with ample seating, excellent conference facilities, 24-hour porter and room service, an outdoor swimming pool, coach/car parking space, a sauna, tennis facilities, car rental and laundry facilities and disabled access. There is also a gift shop off the main lobby, which offers typical Kenyan merchandise as well as bottled water and sun hats. In the reception area, you have the option to leave valuables in the safety deposit boxes behind the main desk and you can also change currency here.

Set over two floors, the hotel also boasts a pavilion style café restaurant, which is the main restaurant at the hotel. The Safari Café offers a buffet style breakfast and a choice of a buffet or a la carte menu for lunch. Candlelit dinners are served here in the evening. The Safari bar overlooks the swimming pool and food and drinks are served here daily from 11am to midnight, where there are chairs, tables and sunbeds. There is a shaded garden area, which is used for meeting and greeting guests on arrival as well as a gazebo alongside the pool (The Gazebo Banda) which can host a banquet or function for up to 400 people. At the front of the hotel is The Pizza Garden, a large restaurant which is one of Nairobi's best-kept secrets and is apparently very popular for wedding receptions!

ROOMS

Each room is equipped with satellite television, direct dial phone, radio, hairdryer and mini bar. Whether double, single, twin or triple, the rooms are tastefully furnished with fairly modern décor and the beds are large and comfortable. The rooms also have chairs and a table in them providing workspace for businessmen/women, as well as a large wardrobe and bedside lamps. There is certainly no shortage of space whether travelling on business or pleasure. Non-smoking rooms and wake up calls are available on request. The bathrooms are fairly modern and the showers are warm and powerful. Shampoo and shower gel is provided as well as hand towels and larger bath towels.

OUR EXPERIENCE

After a 9 hour night flight from Heathrow to Nairobi, we were tired enough to put up with pretty low standards. Provided we had a room with a relatively comfy bed in it and a shower, it was fine by us. We arrived in Kenya at about 6am their time (4am our time) and just wanted to sleep. However, we were first taken to the garden shaded area for coffee/ tea and some spurious looking rock cakes and doughnuts for breakfast. Although we would have killed to just crawl under some covers and sleep, food had become a replacement for sleep by that point and our body clocks were totally confused because we'd already been fed about fifteen times on the plane! The coffee was more than welcome because it was absolutely freezing at that time of day!

As soon as we arrived, we realised how courteous everyone was at the hotel. Our bags were removed from the vehicle/ mini bus and placed in the lobby and we received a warm welcome with plenty of handshakes! Kenyan people tend to enjoy shaking hands, as we would soon discover! The lady (Margaret) who led us to the shaded garden area was smiley and very welcoming. She gave us some helpful advice about the local area, places we could eat, safety in Kenyan taxis etc. and our rooms/ check-in/ safari forms were organised for us whilst she explained what was available to us. I imagine that the check-in procedure would be much quicker if you were staying there on holiday or business rather than using it as a base for safari trips, but we had to fill in our details for the safari package holiday as well as the bog standard passport information.

When the rooms were ready, Margaret told us a little bit about tipping in Kenya. It is standard procedure for you to be waited on hand and foot whilst you are there, which is a little overbearing at times, but is done purely for the sake of tips and not allowing them to do everything for you is seen as offensive. We were told that we would be expected to tip around 100 shillings (80p at the time of writing) for things such as carrying luggage to your room, serving you at dinner etc. I've never really coped very well with having my chair pulled out for me, or people carrying my bags when I feel more than capable of doing it myself, but you have to take a back seat in Kenyan hotels and then give away your cash in the process! Having said that, because we'd booked a package safari holiday, everything was pretty much paid for when we arrived, so we didn't have to spend much money on anything other than tipping!

It is worth mentioning that you should be wary of going overboard as some staff will go out of their way to do one thing for you, receive a tip and then do something else expecting more. They're cheeky and they know they are being cheeky so don't be afraid to wave them off and tell them that 100 shillings is their lot, especially when you have to fork out for two porters because they insist on clubbing up unnecessarily to carry your bags!

To be fair though, it was elsewhere that we found the staff to be pushing their luck. Everyone at the Jacaranda seemed incredibly helpful. They spoke very good English and were very pleasant. The porter who carried our bags to our room even wrote down a few Kenyan words and their English translation to help us get by during our first few days. Cynical buggers that we are, we found ourselves checking our Kenyan guidebook to make sure he hadn't taught us anything offensive for a laugh, but it turned out that he was just being helpful and was well worthy of the oversized tip we gave him. We hadn't managed to get any smaller notes by that point - something else to think about if you ever go there!

Our room was situated in quite a strange place, because you had to go inside and then outside again to get there, which we found to be quite common of Kenyan hotels. The door to our room was sheltered by a balcony style path, but was effectively outside, which seemed a bit odd on that very cold morning! As soon as you opened the door, it no longer seemed strange because the room was very homely and nicely furnished. To our immediate right was a spacious, modern bathroom with a white suite and the main bedroom looked absolutely massive. I'm not sure what I was expecting but, judging from the shanty style huts for houses we had seen en route to the hotel, I was expecting something much more basic. There was a huge double bed, which we think may have been two singles pushed together, but it was incredibly comfy nonetheless. We did have a TV with satellite channels, although it didn't work very well and the same could be said of my hairdryer in the room, although I had brought my own anyway and most hotel hairdryers are pretty rubbish, wherever you are! There were two huge armchairs and a big round table, so it felt more like a living room than a hotel bedroom. To the rear of the room were French style windows with a minute balcony off the back, although it was too small to be usable.

We were so surprised by how modern, clean and generally nice the room was that we didn't really want to just sleep in it, but we knew it was probably for the best. We had barely been in bed 5 minutes before Housekeeping staff came to clean it again, but this was probably simply because guests are coming and going all the time due to the business/safari seeking clientele the hotel attracts. To be honest, it was nice to know it was cleaned so regularly.

That evening we did not sample the hotel food because we knew we were leaving Nairobi early the next day and we wanted to try out a restaurant nearby which the locals and guide books raved about. However, the people with whom we went on safari raved about The Pizza Garden, so if we ever go back, it might be worth a try! We did however, partake of a couple of drinks in The Safari Bar by the pool as it was much warmer by then.

THE SAFARI BAR

The bar is a bamboo-sheltered area next to the pool but there is a lot of seating around it and the pool where you can sit for a drink. There is also another sheltered area with restaurant style tables so you can sample bar snacks/ meals outside rather than in the restaurant.

Here it is table service and the staff seem very friendly and eager to please. As we were planning to have a few drinks, we decided to leave the tip when we had finished, but it's worth keeping an eye out as the staff alternate according to shift patterns and it's hard to keep tabs on who is in charge of serving you. I had a glass of red wine. I had heard that Kenyan wine can be very dodgy, but I decided to try it for myself. Mr Tadders sampled some of the Kenyan beer. Having decided that Kenyan wine was indeed very dodgy, I moved onto the beer quite swiftly. The beer of choice in Kenya is called Tusker and is fairly light. There are others but this is perfectly palatable and it's easy to drink lots of it!

EVENING MEAL

We opted to eat at The Carnivore, which was much further away from the hotel than we anticipated, but was worth it for the vast array of meat it serves - definitely not one for vegetarians. They have been banned from selling game meat, but here you will be able to try camel, ostrich and crocodile as well as stuff like chicken, pork and sausage. They provide you with a baked potato, salad and place a choice of sauces/ dips on your table and then bring out the meat at intervals on massive skewers before scraping it onto your plate! It's out of this world! If you are staying at the Jacaranda, it is well worth a visit, but I'd advise booking a taxi through the reception at the hotel. Although taxis are not exactly cheap (they tend to cost the same as you'd pay in England), not many are required and so the drivers are much more reliable than those you would find in England.

Due to the fact that the restaurant was quite a way from the centre of Nairobi, the taxi driver charged a flat rate to take us there, wait for us to have our meal and then take us back to the hotel again. It seemed bizarre, but we were more than willing to agree since it seemed safer and a lot easier for us. Not only did the guy wait for about two hours whilst we ate, he also waited a further hour because we obviously hadn't booked and had to wait for a table. We can only assume that his flat rate of about £11 covered his usual nightly earnings. The restaurant is absolutely massive, but is incredibly popular. We went on a Tuesday night and you'd think it was a Saturday. Anyway, the upshot of this random little story is, book a taxi through the hotel if you go anywhere, for safety purposes as much as anything else.

We slept like logs that night and awoke to lovely warm, powerful showers and white, fluffy towels which was another bonus. The breakfast was buffet style in The Safari Café, which is large and pleasantly neutral in terms of décor. There was a lot of choice and it was one of those buffets where your eyes are bigger than your tummy. Unusually, coffee and tea are self-service in this hotel too - whereas in most Kenyan hotels we found that we were waited on hand and foot.

BREAKFAST

There are continental choices, including cold meats, bread, cheeses and those spurious sugary doughnut things we'd experienced the day before. There was a full cooked breakfast with everything you could ask for, as well as a choice of cereals, omelettes (they're big in Kenya it would seem) and toast and jam. I decided to stock up since it was early in the morning and we had a long drive ahead of us on safari. Generally, hunger is not an issue in this hotel and if you opt for a safari holiday package, you will generally find that the majority of your holiday is worked around when you can next eat!!! Unfortunately, I cannot vouch for how much the meals will cost as we had an all inclusive holiday, but it would seem that most people who stay here have opted for the same sort of deal, so I can only assume that it's the best option!

LUNCH

We were away before lunch on this occasion, but later in the holiday, we were dropped back off at the hotel whilst we were awaiting a flight to Mombasa and so we decided to sample the food in The Safari Bar to kill a bit of time. We decided to have some bar food thinking it might be a bit lighter than a meal. We were wrong! Mr Tadders had a steak and cheese baguette and I went for the cheeseburger since I was on honeymoon and could eat what I damn well liked! It did take a good twenty minutes to arrive, but was absolutely massive when it did and was made from real meat, which is always a bonus. There were so many chips, that it looked like a coronary on a plate and Mr Tadders' steak and cheese sandwich was not much better. It was very tasty though! We both thought it was a little dry even with the sauce, but in fairness, there is no false advertising here. You want bar food, you get bar food - simple as that and it was absolutely fine. Again, no fear of being underfed here. We were absolutely stuffed!

WHAT DO I THINK?

My only minor grumble about this hotel would be a comment on the amount of cats roaming around by the pool bar and it's not really a complaint. I imagine they've been fed by guests and they are little scroungers, but this does seem to be the case in many hotels in the area and I'm always a little bit wary of animals in foreign countries in case they are carrying anything!

I think this would be an ideal place for holidaymakers and business executives alike. It is a very comfortable hotel in a good location and I cannot really fault the level of smiley service and cleanliness. It has everything you could need, including conference rooms (which we did not see, but I'm assuming are more than adequate, as the hotel information I have found claims they cater for up to 70 people), a choice of restaurant, a pool and well-equipped rooms with good showers. The reception staff members are helpful and willing and the bar staff and porters are chatty and seem to really enjoy their job. I have seen far worse 3-star hotels and found myself wondering why it doesn't warrant a higher star rating. I suppose you tend to be humbled by decent accommodation when you are staying in an area which is predominantly poor. Even though Nairobi is very built up and developed, we felt extremely well looked after compared to many of the poorer residents in the area, who didn't have very much but who always seemed to be smiling and waving whenever we drove past. We don't know we're born in England!

Overall, I'd definitely recommend this place if you ever fancy going to Kenya, but make sure you find time to fit in a visit to The Carnivore restaurant if you're a meat eater. You will not be disappointed.

Summary: A great base for safari trips