The not so good hotel in Punta Gorda

Punta Gorda Cacao Fest 2011

Well boys and girls, like I promised from the start of this here blog, I’ll give ya the naked truth.  All of it – the good bad and ugly – and not try to sell you on some paradise.  So this is the report on the PG Cacao fest in May 2011.

I'll break this into four reports: The hotel; The Cacao Fest activities; Singing and dancing in the streets; and food.

Unfortunatly I'll start on the bad with the hotel, But trust me, the Friday night Wine & Chocolate Party was freaking awsome.  I'll be back soon with pics and notes on that.

The Bad

I really hate to rate the Charlton's Inn under the bad catagorie.  But I must tell the truth as I see it.  Upon arraivle to PG we checked in to our reserved room.  The room is nice, clean and big for a hotel.  It has good air conditioning (which really needed this time of year), a full kitchen sans microwave, TV, and is a convientient location to the Village Center.

Views from the balconony are not great due to all the other structures around, but not bad either considering the location and the price.

I also will give props to the price.  I feel it is a decent price at $40US a night considering I find a LOT of hotels in Belize to be largely over-priced.

Unfortunately there were too many problems that interfered with having a good stay at this hotel in my opinion.  The absolute biggest fator was that after the first night we got up and began to shower, I had to shit and shave, and then the water stopped.  So now I have no way to get cleaned and can’t continue my shower, and have a toilet full of shit.

A little investagtion showed me water was fine up to the 2^rd floor but of on the 3^rd where I was at.  The staff first told me they had turned off the pump and would put it back on.  After a couple hours and still no water they told me they have water pressure problem throughout the town, but with pumps you don’t get water the a 2^nd floor and not the 3^rd.  it seemed obvious to me that while doing some of the construction here someone had turned off a water valve, but the staff didn’t seem to care enough to correct this issue.

So we went to the festivals half cleaned and with shit in the toilet.  They had it cleaned and the water back on by the time we returned around midnight.

Another very irritating problem is that the hotel offers WiFi connection.  But it was only available at most about one hour during my stay 2 day stay here.  Even though I mentioned to the staff early in my stay that it wasn’t on, I was just told it was on and they really didn’t look into the issue.  I have a state-of-the-art laptop and connect to wireless all around Belize.  I can tell when I have a good signal, low signal, or no signal.  I this case once in a while I would get a good strong signal from the hotel.  Then it would just disappear as if being turned of. 

Dogs barking.  Damn dogs about two doors down left tied up underneath the poarch barked all flipping night long.  Pissed me off.  I mean like what’s wrong with those people.  Now that is obviously not the hotel’s fault, but it made sleeping very difficult.