Postponements and this weeks guests ..

We had a postponement this week, Sridhar and team were to be here on Friday, 25th July, , but now they will be here only on the 29th of August. So today we just have Vineeth and team at the home stay. They arrived in the evening and were received by Rakesh and Arun in Gonikoppal. Tomorrow they will have company of 8 others

It has been pouring in Coorg, the rafting water levels have surged dramatically, Arun told me both the rafts in todays morning session got stuck in the rapids.. Sounds like every one had a lot of fun, I hope they have some good pictures taken, I need to update my Rafting picture gallery, the last shots are from July 4th, and since then we had lots of folks going rafting… but haven’t gotten my hands on any of the photos taken.

We’ve been blogged!!

Chetan was part of the team that was in Bethel in July 4th, 08 weekend, he mentions Bethel homestay in his blog (http://chetankrishna.blogspot.com/)

Also Pavani, part of the same group gave us a review in Raahi.com, read it here

Hectic Rafting..

For a change we had a quiet weekend in Bethel, We had a team from Hyderabad, Vishnu and his friends(Vinay, Ram, Phalgun) joined us in Bethel this weekend. They were supposed to be there for three days, however they decided to leave immediately after Rafting!! They left behind a Cell phone and pair of pants

The relative quiet on the homestay side was balanced by the hectic Rafting schedules we had.

We had Naveen, who along with his friends were planning to do a trek and also complete White water rafting while they were in Coorg. Unfortunately by the time they finished their trek of Brahmagiri, they were too late to reach for their rafting session.

Nevermind guys, the rafting season goes upto August, hope you had nice time in Coorg.

Dr. Chengapa and his team was another guest who was supposed to come for rafting, but couldn’t make it

We had Anmol and team, who were also scheduled to go for rafting at 330 PM, but actually went rafting with Vishnu’s group at 9.00 AM in the morning

Then we had our gang.. Ravi, Sampath, Sanjay, Santhosh, Shivu, Dhanu, Rajesh, and Rakesh, who had come over to raft, they had lunch in Bethel and went for rafting.. This was first time for Rakesh this season, the first time ever for most of the rest. And it was certainly an eventful start for our folks, they got stuck at the Wicked Witch rapid and had to get off to try and get the raft into the water, instead of steadying things they almost lost their raft, it took some acrobatic diving and rescue from Rakesh and Mohammed (Our rafting guide) to finally get the raft back to the team

Through all this, Ravi, who was rafting for the first time, was at his whimsical best, quote.. “I know everyone dies..but will someone remind me why am I paying money for it” …After seeing Rakesh dive into the raft…”Forget Over Right, Over Left ..if I had to do the same thing..I would have ‘left right..to the next world’” (Over Right, Over Left are some of the commands your learn while rafting )..

Of course after all this..he has already booked the slot to do it all over again
Next time, I’ll be there too ..

As usual I’ll put up photos as and when I get my hands on them..

Rafting weekend….

Here are some of the pics from the July,4th team’s visit to Coorg

The full group at the end of the visit…

Rafting..

11000 volts staring at you..

Hitting the rapids..

By the stream….

Trekking through…

Tippu’s Summer palace, Srigangapatnam

Feeding elephants at Dubare, Elephant Camp

Golden monastry, Bylakuppe (night)

Another busy weekend

This was another busy weekend…

We had Nikil and his team there (4 in all), then we had Samir’s team (Samir, Sushma, Adarsh and Deepti) and Sanjay’s team (Sanjay, Omar, Ranga and Sudeep).

Incidently…Sanjay, Omar, Ranga were the first ever customers of Bethel…

Then of course we had the unexpected surprise element that we have come to expect , John (our first web customers) suddenly decided to come with his team(Chris, Micheal and Kumar)!!

Net net, we had 16 folks in Bethel this weekend, Rajesh (Nelgi) came over to help us

It was Sudeep’s birthday today.
Sudeep, Many happy returns of the day!!, I hope it was a day you will remember for long time.

Photos as I get them..I heard Nikhil got some great shots of rafting and he also had some good sightings of Elephants in Wayanad..

It was busy for me too, I added a rafting page to our website, giving details of rafting in Coorg, check it out here

With me in Coorg for the weekend, a lot of web inquries were unanswered, was not able to make the 48 hour response time SLA that we had set for ourselves.

So I need to send out a lot of apology letters for the delay and get back to the website, it needs some more work (link the blog to the website, update latest photos of Bethel, link to customer reviews in HoldiayIQ, add a generic picture gallery ? …).

Speaking of customer reviews, I hope our guests reading this blog would give us more reviews, it really really really means a lot to us. If you want quick link to where you can put a review, well here it is

Nikhil and team

Nikhil and his team of four are at Bethel today (July 10-12). Nikhil had booked Bethel last month for his team, Arun received them at Gonikoppal.

Hope they have a great time. More later..

Stress testing

The July 4th weekend saw at team of 24 guests from Hyderabad in Bethel. As I keep mentioning, Hospitality is an industry where there is little order and lots of chaos..
This time, we had a team…that was scheduled to be accommodated on July 6th in Nelgi…arriving on July 5th!!..Since Nelgi was full we decided to get the folks to Bethel. Net result, 30 people in Bethel..this was complete stress testing of the homestay..and I think we came out with flying colors….

Btw, This team was also the first team to do White water rafting in the Barapole river this season.

Will post on this soon…