Eco Tones

We had planned a stay there during the Diwali holidays, but had to cancel it due to personal inconvenience. While they refused to refund the amount paid, they had agreed to postpone the date to a period convenient to us. So, we chose Saturday, November 12, 2022. We were two couples. The place was a huge disappointment. We thought there would be basic facilities like a TV, intercom, good towels, a wardrobe, dry / wet area bathrooms, running hot water, bottled mineral water etc. These are the standard features in any hotel / resort, but we never knew that ‘Ecotones’ meant that we would be going back to nature in a near raw form. The location itself is somewhere in the back of beyond with absolutely no scenery typical of the Munnar / Idukki hills. The surroundings were covered with thick wild foliage and undergrowth, which would make one hesitate to step out for a walk / trek; totally unkempt to say the least. Even the path leading to the rooms were not fully paved such that we had to walk through / sidestep slush with mud sticking to our footwear. If this is called eco-tourism, then I may be wrong. Rooms do not have numbers, instead they are named after birds which is hard to recall. They had no intercom facility to contact the reception / restaurant. So, we had to use our mobiles to contact them, that too in a place where the voice network is feeble and mobile data unavailable. We had reached there around 6:00PM after having soaked ourselves wet in Rajamalai and being held up in the traffic jam for more than 2 hours. Our first priority, therefore, was to take a bath and keep ourselves warm. The hot water in the bathroom was here only for a minute or so, which we suppose was because it was an instant water heater and not a storage one. So we had to hurriedly finish our bath in a hot and cold shower and then when we tried to pat ourselves dry with the towel they had supplied, it didn’t seem to absorb water. Usually hotels supply clean white Turkish towels of different sizes, but here there was just one, that too purple in colour. When we thought of helping ourselves with coffee, we found that there were just two sachets of it and the water supplied was in flasks which we suppose may have been from a common filtration unit. There was no bottled water. No box of tissues either, instead just four pieces of it! While we were on our way to the resort, they had called us asking whether we wanted dinner and if it was required we were supposed to place the order then and also tell them at what time we would like to have it. They had Whatsapped a small menu out of which we selected a few and told them to serve one of the meat dishes in the room before we finally have the main course at their restaurant. They were quite reluctant to do that, but they agreed to that because we wanted to have it ***** with our booze. Dinner was served in the restaurant, where we found that we were the only ones there except a cat which we had to shoo away as it was tryi