Cape Verde 2022

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23 Ocak 2022
Cape Verde 2022 Gezgin
1. First Time Flyer
22 Ocak 2022, İngiltere ⋅ ⛅ 4 °C
It’s an early morning start for us. 4:10 Becky’s alarm goes off. It’s another 20 before I set mine. For once I have to agree with her - we’re a bit pushed for time. We’re still out the door by five and the roads are clear. We make it to Gatwick with next to no problems (there’s the occasional mad early Saturday morning driver, but we managed to keep our distance).

We’re a touch late and so just about miss our shuttle bus from the car park to the airport. We have to wait in the cold for about 20 minutes for the next one. Not ideal. The bus drops us off at a sign that says “5 minute walk to North Terminal” before proceeding along the road that drives past North Terminal.

Once in the airport we have to queue to check in our own luggage. The line is longer than the physical check in - it’s got to a point now where online check in is sadly no longer beneficial. Fortunately we get special treatment as parents to an infant and get ushered to a much quieter security station and we manage to get through in a matter of minutes.

We make a couple of pit stops at Starbucks and Boots to collect hot drinks and milk for baby respectively. And then our gate is announced and we are on the move again.

Getting on the plane with Lily is fine. Settling down into our seats is not. It’s chaos trying to find everything we need and getting in the way of other people. Fortunately a kind air steward takes pity and moves us into some spare seats where we can spread out. I don’t know if we’ll get the same treatment on our return.

The flight itself isn’t as bad as it could have been. Lily fell asleep on take off and managed to drink a bottle on landing. In between was touch and go, but she never got to fever pitch.

It’s warm here in Cape Verde - about 24 degrees. But people weren’t lying when they said it was windy. It certainly takes the heat out of the air.

It’s a 15 minute bus ride through volcanic desert to the resort and it looks huge. A rose cream complex topped with detailed parapets, towers, and surrounded by palm trees. Inside is just as vast and spacious. As nice as it all looks though, you can’t help but feel like this is a bit like Disney’s version of Africa. It’s very camera friendly. But might not exactly be an authentic experience.

After getting set up with a prep machine and steriliser in the room, we reserved our seats for three of the more exclusive restaurants and we headed out to the poolside restaurant for a snack, not truly realising that it was coming up to dinner. I scoffed down a burger and then we went for a wander around the resort.

It’s one of those places where the vastness of the complex is largely owing to the amount of rooms here, and not down to the facilities. The central square is packed with so much stuff that it’s hard to see the different bars and restaurants. And because it isn’t spread out, you see everything at once. So our little wander wasn’t too revealing. Although we did find the children’s pool.

Our dinner was a buffet and both Becky and I found that it was good, but hard to put together an actual meal - all the different foods were from such disparate places that it made for a strange plate of food.

Exhausted from a long day, we retired to the room where it took me a further hour and 20 minutes to get Lily to sleep - over tired, we think!Okumaya devam et
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Cape Verde 2022 Gezgin
2. Isle of Clouds
23 Ocak 2022, Yeşil Burun Adaları ⋅ ☁️ 23 °C
It’s warm. At 25 degrees Becky thinks otherwise. Amazing what cloud cover and a bit of wind can do - she genuinely has goosebumps. Back home it’s 5 degrees out.

Breakfast is pretty good - Becky told me that she had seen people rating the breakfast on Facebook as the best meal of the day. I’m a big fan of the waffles and pancakes section. Aside from that, it’s fairly standard breakfast on holiday fare.

Today, I suspect like most of our days here will be, was quite simple. We sat by the pool drinking and only really leaving for food. On the occasions that Lily got grumpy, we went for a little walk and she soon calmed down.

For lunch I was just going to grab a burger from the poolside bar, but Becky suggested we went back to the buffet as it had more choice. I still had a burger.

I spent most of my day reading Will Smith’s autobiography, which has been quite interesting so far. In the afternoon I went for a swim in the pool even though it has cooled down. The pool was pretty cold but, being the stubborn ass I am, I continued on in and ordered a drink at the swim up bar - well, you have to, don’t you?

Late afternoon we headed back to the room to shower and get ready for dinner. This included an impromptu bath with Lily in a paddling pool in the middle of the shower/kitchen area. Which, now I say it, sounds weird.

For dinner we were back at the buffet. This time I stuck to things I knew for the most part, and between Becky and I we managed to have all the deserts, we think.

Eventually we retired to bed with a drink and Lily was far more cooperative about bedtime this time around.Okumaya devam et
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Cape Verde 2022 Gezgin
3. Too Cool for Pool
24 Ocak 2022, Yeşil Burun Adaları ⋅ ⛅ 23 °C
Settling into life here is fairly simple, with all the milk stuff set up in the kitchen/shower area all we need to think about each day is when we want to eat and drink.

The temperature is hitting about 25 again today but there’s less cloud cover, and so Becky has applied all the creams. What’s funny is that the deck chairs we’ve picked are barely in the sun.

Lily’s sleeps have been timed to perfection throughout the day. She slept for the first couple of hours by the pool and then I took her for a walk around the resort before lunch which she slept through. We repeated this in the afternoon, only we switched the walk for a swim.

Lily wasn’t too happy about the swim. To be fair, the water is cold.

She slept through a long dinner and we thought she was out for the night.

Dinner lasted a good four hours because we got chatting about parenting techniques and how our parents raised us. It moved into us reminiscing about our childhoods and how it’s no surprise how we turned out the way we did.

When we got back to the room, Lily was not happy. She continued to not be happy for a further two hours.Okumaya devam et
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Cape Verde 2022 Gezgin
4. Groundhog Day
25 Ocak 2022, Yeşil Burun Adaları ⋅ ⛅ 25 °C
All Inclusive holidays are not my thing. And here’s for why.

Despite the promise of seven restaurants, realistically there is only one that is accessible every day. The others require reservations - and we could only get reservations at three of them on consecutive days at the end of the holiday. That means four days at the same buffet. One of the other restaurants is adult only, and the final one is actually only a much much smaller buffet that is closer to the pool. For the sharp eyed amongst you, you will realise that I have only pointed out six restaurants. That’s because there isn’t a seventh. They have just lied about it. To try and get away with it on their website, they list one of the restaurants twice.

The buffet isn’t awful. But it also isn’t great. Much of the stuff there simply doesn’t appeal to me. And the stuff that does is the stuff that seems to only be there for one day and is gone the next.

For me, this lack of variety, this lack of exploration, is in exact contrast to the whole point of a holiday for me. On no other holiday in my life have I visited the same restaurant three days in a row. It’s easy to lose track of days here and it’s hard to write about them, because nothing inherently different happens.

I say this, and yet they do have different entertainment each night. Tonight they had Rockstation on the main stage, and so we decided to sit and watch. I joked that it’d probably be something like Busted rather than real rock. Becky took offence at that.

Turns out I was wrong though - they opened with Sandi Thom’s “I wish I were a Punk Rocker”. What. On. Earth. They didn’t even sing it themselves. They just walked around on stage and occasionally threw out a very lacklustre dance move. It was the least rock and roll thing I’ve seen in a long time.Okumaya devam et
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Gezinin sonu
29 Ocak 2022

1. First Time Flyer

2. Isle of Clouds

3. Too Cool for Pool

4. Groundhog Day