Ready to get in the pool we headed down the dark hallway, up the stairs, across the lobby, down the stairs, and outside to the pool. We did a lap to survey the area. It was coolish out so the hot tubs were packed, I quickly realized one thing that I was going to miss from the ship...an adult area. No offense to anyone with kids but I hate being in a hot tub with kids.
We swam for a bit and was able to find an empty hot tub, but there was a lot of leaves and debris at the bottom of it that made it feel like we were in a swamp so we got a little grossed out.
After drying off we decided to walk over to Kidani village as we had never been over there before. It was nice, kind of like a small Jambo house. We decided to try out their pool, it's a little smaller but has a much bigger slide. The slide was fun. You can get some decent speed going on it.
We wandered back to Jambo house, got ourselves cleaned up and just relaxed for a bit.
It was finally time for dinner. We have been looking forward to trying dinner at Boma for several years. We had breakfast there probably 3 or 4 years ago and thought it was tremendous. We were fully aware of how expensive it was going in. It was mercifully a pretty quiet night in Boma, I've heard that it can get a little crazy, but there was plenty of empty tables this night.
We wasted no time trying a little bit of everything. I was excited to see they had ribs and some kind of crusted beef at the carving station. The ribs were pretty tough and went uneaten. I would have thought that they would be fall of the bone tender. The beef similarly had a nice flavor on the outside but was pretty tough and chewy. I hate wasting food but neither was worth the trouble. There was a lot of great side dishes though. Our favorite thing we had the whole night was peanut rice. It reminded us a lot of a dish we get at our favorite thai restaurant back home.
The withdrawals from the ship were starting to set in as well... as we sat there eating our food just the two of us we were feeling pretty lonely. We had gotten used to eating with our table mates and our serving team who would talk to us a lot. Now it was just the two of us and a server who pretty much only came by when we weren't at the table to clear our plates and drop off new drinks.
We did several trips to the buffet but it was finally time to leave. We paid our check, close to $90 with tip for two people and no extra drinks... With the main dishes being so underwelming this felt like a huge rip off. There were plenty of good flavors but the "Big Ticket" items weren't very good. We left pretty disappointed, $90 at Jiko would have been money much better spent.
We had seen in our huge packet that they were doing some night vision goggle viewing near the pool area that night so we went to check it out. It was pretty neat but there was only 1 Ankole cattle asleep in view, and it was pretty far away. But hey you can't control animals...we had fun with the glasses anyway.
I will say that as unfriendly as most of the staff was the field guide staff scattered around the viewing areas were great and very friendly.
We grabbed my tripod and took a few more pictures of the lobby.
There was a camp fire going on just outside the lobby that Jenna kept herself entertained with while I snapped some pictures. One other thing we quickly missed about the boat though....no bugs on the boat.
It was a crazy day so we headed back to our room.
At this point we started to notice some other short comings with our room.
The tv didn't work so well and the image quality wasn't so hot. Expensive hotels should have HD...that's just lazy. It was also one of those tv's where it takes a solid 3 seconds to change channels, anyone remember how easy it used to be to channel surf before digital cable? Also we couldn't get our shower turned on and had to get maintenance to come. It got fixed relatively quickly.
Also just a quick word on the bed...it was like a cheap motel. I was completely amazed at the poor quality of the bedding. It was completely uncomfortable.
Also I'm not really sure what the deal with their AC is but despite all my best efforts I could not get the room to stay cool. It kept switching to auto. We sweated all night, even with the ceiling fan on.
Maybe I expect too much, but other than the view it felt like we were in a Quality inn.
Next...Downtown Disney