The  PALM  BEACH  INTERNATIONAL  HOTEL.

The Palm Beach entrance. The candi bentar (split gate; one side shown here) is the first sign of past opulence. The brickwork is magnificent. The grand reception desk and large lobby, reached via a semi-circular driveway, is inside to the left, the restaurant is in the centre distance and the car park to the right.

I did not see the security boom lowered once during our stay.

The hotel business cards thankfully drop the ‘International’ from the full title, with good reason I would think. The only thing about it that might warrant that inclusion is the combination of the Americanised layout, the Dutch building style (if you want to call it something else I won’t argue), its wonderful location in Bali, its current ownership, which I believe is Chinese, and the present short term Javanese management.

In summary it is grubby, run down, dilapidated and un-cared for by a manager who might be just the latest of many who have had only a two month contract; but what a wonderful past it must have had and what a wonderful future it could have with an owner who had the will and the wealth to restore it to its undoubted former glory, parts of which still show their sparkle, in the gardens particularly.

I put these thoughts up front only partly to provide what I think is an accurate first impression for readers who are researching places to stay but also, I confess, in the hope that it will not become too popular and we will always be able to find accommodation there in future at a very cheap rate which was US$40 in January 2009.

~ o O o ~

The long and ornate reception desk staffed on this day by Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail, AKA Wayan, Diyeh and Malvi.

This is the fifth such one and two star hotels in Bali that we have adapted as our ‘home’ over the past seven years and it is the one that we will try to return to first in future. We have become accustomed to the process of adaptation now and have the system down to a bit of a fine art.

It goes like this; – we check in and Herself inspects the proffered room to make sure it is adaptable – we move in the bags and baggage (Made will have already delivered our ‘stay-in-Bali-bag’ with the ‘tool kit’ in it) – Herself goes off with Made to the nearest supermarket for water and other essential supplies – by the time She returns I have stripped the filter pads out of the air conditioner, cleaned them under the shower rose and replaced them; the A/C unit now works wonderfully.

I have taken apart that shower rose and scraped out the accumulated sand and gravel that the pump always seems to draw up from the well and deposit in several (or many) jets, either blocking them completely or causing odd jets to squirt out at all sorts of divergent angles.

I have phoned for ice, lots of it. It comes on a plate -

- - - but a nice plate with burgundy and gold rings around the edge.

Back from the supermarket comes two bottles of bleach and a small, short handled scrubbing brush. Through the lid of one of these bottles I drill a small round hole with the point of the pocket knife from the tool bag. Replaced onto the bottle it becomes a squeeze bottle to squirt bleach along the top of the shower tiles up near the ceiling. An extra squirt at the tops of the vertical grout joints and the first wall is lightly scrubbed with the brush, mainly to distribute the bleach across all the grout lines. The second and third walls follow and finally the floor.

All this is done to the accompaniment of the first well-iced G&T and B&D.

From the ‘stay-in-Bali’ bag comes the modified Aussie power board with the Indo plug, the Indo triple adapter and the travel hairdryer. The first of the bathroom towels goes onto the bottom of the turned off ‘fridge and the running hair dryer (connected to the fridge power outlet via the triple adapter and modified power board) is put into the fridge somewhere near the iced –up freezer chamber (it always is frozen and will not accept the ice cube tray, if there is one).

Some time later when the fridge is thawed out and cleaned up and, in this case after a Nasi Goreng and several Anker beers at the Pantai restaurant just across the road and a massage on the beach, the shower walls etc are sprayed off with the shower rose and we are ready for bathing in a sparkling environment that will rival any of the five star hotels that we’ve been in and which themselves don’t stand up to close scrutiny in the corners and under the hand basin.

Some time later the rest of the bathroom is similarly spruced up and the cleaning girl is amazed next morning!

‘Well’, I hear you say, ‘I wouldn’t go through all of that and pay for the room too’, and I don’t blame you for that approach but for us the savings of a $40 a night room with a good bed and clean sheets rather than $140 a night for a similar bed and a fairly clean bathroom is no contest. We have plans for the $100 a day savings.

We found that the hand basin was almost totally blocked and as the tool-kit does not yet have a large 500mm shifting wrench I had to call the front desk and ask for the engineer to unblock the S bend, please, and could we have a plug for the basin so that it holds water after it is unblocked.

Dead silence from the desk but soon there is a knock on the door (I am still hanging on to the phone) and someone (maybe not the engineer) comes with a plug which even fits the drain and inspects the drainage flow. Five days and three reminders later, the day before we leave, the engineer unblocks the S bend. We then need to use that plug, which is probably taken back into protective custody when we do leave so that those who follow us will have to ask for it too, and the supply can be noted on their check-out records.

If my grey cells do me justice, the hotel is laid out in a five sided pentagon shape around the property. The three story accommodation blocks are on four sides of the pentagon and the lobby, entry and car park are the fifth side. This layout, rather than the more common rows of ‘cell-block’ accommodations is another suggestion of planning with a bit more thought than went into some other places of the era.

In the centre of the pentagon is the ground-level kitchen with the restaurant on top. This puts the restaurant up at the level of the mid- tree canopy, level with birds, flowers, animals and great big bunches of coconuts. It is a most pleasant outlook at breakfast time.

Breakfast itself is good, self serve with plenty to eat, a bit of variety each day and something special is not out of the question.

 There are actually two such kitchen and restaurant combinations. The second restaurant was pressed into service when five bus loads of secondary students from west Java turned up for three days and nights on an educational excursion. The second kitchen though, with all of the commercial equipment and machinery still in place, is used as an unorganised storeroom for discarded materials. There is also a well presented chapel adjacent that had recently been used for a wedding.

At the back of the restaurant is the nice pool with a stylised scorpion marked out on the floor tiles. It is vacuumed and chlorinated every morning and warmed to a nice temperature, neither unpleasantly soupy nor chilly when you first enter. We found it very pleasant to be in during the frequent tropical downpours of comparatively cold rain. It does suffer from a number of broken tiles with sharp edges and some very slippery edge tiles particularly on the just submerged seats across the dividing line between the children’s pool and the big one. Warn the kids (big and small) not to play chasey across there! The underwater lights are long broken and I don’t think either the pool bar or the massage enclosure are used currently.

Alongside this magical Dutch/Bali style restaurant, with its soaring ceiling of polished timbers and large, ornately carved central column, there is a concrete block and steel pool towel area (and perhaps past drinks bar) with a white fibreglass ‘vergola’ roof that might have once been operable but now has a broken and unused mechanism.

In the wall of the restaurant facing the pool is a large fish tank that would have been an object of great interest to children in the past but is now partly filled with rocks and broken bricks, the front glasses are cracked and the concrete surrounds spalling with rusting reinforcing rod showing.

On one side of the pool the gardener has arranged a colourful mass display of newly flowering plants whilst on another side small trees are bursting out of long rusted half 44 gallon fuel drums, held together it seems, by coats of flaking white paint.

Such are the opposing enigmas to be found throughout the hotel – remnants of grandeur brought down by untold ages of neglect or lack of refined planning.

The three storey accommodation blocks are de-centralised and largely hidden behind trees and shrubs. Even when (or if) the hotel approached capacity, such a planning device would give the impression of a much smaller and more compact facility. Each room unit is set back slightly from its neighbour and the adjacent verandas or balconies are screened from each other for a little more privacy. The clay tiled roofs diminished the sound of the tropical storms we experienced and several times we woke up and opened the balcony door to be surprised that the skies were in full flood, having heard nothing in our room.

Each block is divided into two halves with the stairways rising from a central, fairly large and open, common breezeway area. This space is fitted with comfortable woven cane chairs and makes a nice relaxed informal meeting area. I can imagine in the old days the Dutch Gentlemen would gather here after dinner for liqueurs and pipes or cigars to do ‘secret men’s business’ while their wives supervised the children in the pool and discussed ‘secret women’s business’.

Brilliant and spectacular flowers in some corners of the gardens I have not seen before, or at least I don’t remember them.

In another corner, this one just inside the entry against the wall of the reception building, there is builder’s rubble and junk.

Sitting in a slightly smelly little pond, on a miserable, overcast morning, this water lily rising in splendour above its base roots was irresistible.

On the other hand this partly dry and abandoned ‘fish pond’ in front of the other half of the block that we were in was a haven for mozzies until I attacked it with some spray.

The large and lively fish in the pond fronting the veranda on ‘our’ side would have loved then as a delicacy I’m sure.

The leaves in this green patch on the other side of the fish pond in front of our veranda usually nodded a morning greeting to me as the rain ran off the roof and pushed them down momentarily.

At the end of the car park this old fibreglass boat and trailer and the discarded steel props and bricks have been abandoned back in the scrub for so long it will need an orchestra of chainsaws to ever free them again.

- - - but then there are always the little orchids.

So, do I recommend the Palm Beach International Hotel?

You’ll have to make up your own mind I’m afraid, it’s such a mixture that it really depends on what your level of tolerance is to some things that are not so nice and how much you find the price attractive.

For us it suits because over the years we have learnt to become adaptable in this level of accommodation and the price REALLY is attractive, especially knowing what we can do with those savings, but perhaps above all it is near the old Holiday Inn/Balihai Resort where we are close to many of our old friends and the Pantai Restaurant and the beach is a very short walk just across the road.

27.1.2009

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