Do NOT Come If 

Most guests love Kaaimans River Cottage but 2% REALLY don’t like it. For your sake and ours please read everything below.

DON’T COME IF……

• You expect a manicured environment.
• You will be bothered by mud, leaves, trees, visits by wildlife (baboons, genets, spiders etc).
• You will be bothered if there is a rain spider in your bedroom. Sometimes there are almost no spiders in the cottage, other times (especially when it rains), they come indoors – we cannot prevent this, and do not endorse killing them. They are part of the ecosystem and eat mosquitoes.
• You can’t live without your hair straightener, hair dryer, and microwave oven. (Our solar power will switch off if you try and run a hair dryer, hair straightener, blow heater, anything with a motor).
• You expect staff available to carry and fetch for you.
• You don’t want to learn to row, how to anchor a boat and experience the outdoor reality of a tidal estuary, tidal variations (muddy low tides). You cannot “just nip to the shop to buy something quickly”. It will take 10 minutes to cross the river each way before you even get to your car to go into town.
• Your idea of a holiday is a hotel, or a place where you park your car and moments later you are in your accommodation. You NEED to cross a river in a rowing boat.
• You will be bothered by some small amount of water in the bottom of the rowing boat. We do not provide staff to bail the boat and inevitably there is water for one reason or another (eg rain or just river life). The boat does not leak.
• You will be unwilling to respect our septic tank sewer system. We are SERIOUS. If you cannot resist throwing things other than human waste and toilet paper only down the toilet then DO NOT COME TO STAY. 
• Baboons sometimes come past the cottage. There are troupes on the mountain. If you leave windows and doors open/unattended, you risk them coming into the cottage and causing damage. So for example, don’t leave upstairs windows wide open whilst you are spending time downstairs. Don’t leave windows / doors open whilst going to the beach. If you hear the baboons (you usually hear them first), be in a position where you can quickly/easily close the doors/windows in the rooms that you are currently spending time in. Don’t come if this will be a problem. I have only seen them twice, but 2 guests in the past three years have mentioned them coming past, once even stealing something from the kitchen.