Hawkes Bay NZ Water trail

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Weirdest lunch stop ever

After visiting Abydos we faced another 90-minute drive back to Dendara, and its Ptolemaic temple to Hathor. Not knowing if the return would be equally slow, we decided to find a quick lunch stop. Abydos is pretty much deserted, so choice of venue was limited to some dim hole in the wall cafes/sheesha (hookah) smoking venues. We'd passed The Tree of Life Hotel, a massage spa resort then newly finished, according to my Lonely Planet guide, printed in 2015.
Seems that the place spectacularly missed whatever tourism surge had been predicted, as one half of the place was "wind whistling through the hallways" unfinished, and already falling down. We went into a side building and worked out lunch with the desk manager. The hotel kitchen isn't operating, so they somehow sent out for the mezze we ordered, using the photos of previous meals saved on our phones. 35 minutes later we ate baba ganoush, falafel, vegetable tagen and vermicelli flecked rice in a large empty dining room. Here's the view from inside of a ghostly Moroccan style resort around an unused pool. It was an odd experience.

No comments:

Post a Comment