We stayed in the Garden Room for 1 week from Xmas to New Years. The Garden Room is absolutely lovely. It is very private and quiet, has an indoor and outdoor seating area. The outdoor seating area is next to a tall leafy fence. The room has DSTV, aircon, a small safe (no plug and sadly not big enough for a 15 inch laptop), a hairdryer, a mosquito killer, a shower and toilet and basin in a separate room, a kitchenette with basin, microwave, bar fridge, mini kettle, coffee maker, hot plate, tea, coffee, little long life milk sachets and biscuits etc.
The room was serviced daily, there were separate towels for the pool, the shower water pressure was good with plenty of hot water, the linen was clean and of good quality, the supplied toiletries were really nice (expect, oddly, for the conditioner) the king sized bed was nicely firm. The hosts were friendly and very accommodating of a late checkout. There were little friendly dogs on the property. We were able to book off-road parking in a tandem parking spot behind an electric gate.
Unfortunately the wireless internet was frustrating, both via cellphone data, and wifi. Unless the wifi situation is dealt with adequately, we will sadly not be able to stay there again for as long a stay.
Wifi access was spotty at best. We received 1-2 bars of signal from the GardenRoom repeater but this would drop out completely from time to time. This could be due to movement of people elsewhere on the property between the repeater and our laptop. Requesting a reboot temporarily improved the situation, but not for long.
For those interested in a detailed explanation of the issues : On the property are 3 SSIDs, "GardenRoom", "AcornRoom", and "Oakvale". Looking at a wifi analyser and speaking to the owner, Oakvale is connected to their decent internet connection but the other 2 are signal boosters or repeaters that operate on the same wifi channel or frequency. This means that for someone in Garden room to reach the internet their laptop/device must talk to the GardenRoom repeater which then repeats the message to the Oakvale accesspoint which then sends it to the internet. When a response comes back from the internet it follows the same path Oakvale to GardenRoom to laptop, but since its all happening over wifi and on the same channel, each hop must happen in sequence one after the other. The correct way to manage this would be to place an access point in each room and use cable to supply internet to each of them. This way the access points would be placed close to the users/guests and they are supplied with the full speed of the internet connection via a secure, wired connection that is not interfered with by walls, electrical interference or the movement of people. Hopefully this gets sorted soon.
Cellphone signal inside the room was rather low to non-existent on MTN and Rain unless the phone was put on the window sill. This may be due to the solar panels on the roof, which in all fairness, the owners can't do _much_ about. Cellphone signal outside the room was fine.
If you don't need 100% reliable internet like we do, then I can strongly recommend this lovely property.
