Well it has been a while since I last posted on our ‘ Travel Tales’ blog, in fact not since we opened Morley House Guest House in Bathurst, South Africa. I guess that kind of took over our lives for a while and put a slight halt on our travels. Thought it was about time to look back on the whole experience.
Buying a property abroad, applying for all the necessary red tape and setting up a guest house business was incredibly hard and at times very frustrating. However, I have covered all this in previous posts and we were just about to open when you last heard from me.
We think that we set up a beautiful guest house and tea rooms in an incredible part of the world. We hoped we provided top quality accommodation, food and hospitality at a fair price. We had self-catering accommodation, a b and b room, a glamping tent, a tea rooms offering home cooked food and even a small bookshop. Most guests enjoyed the experience and we even have 5 stars on Tripadvisor and got a write up in the latest ‘Rough Guide to South Africa’ ( excellent breakfasts apparently). However, you can’t please all of the people all of the time and some guests were not always happy. They were usually people who booked the tent and then were surprised when they arrived that it was a tent (albeit a luxury one with beds etc) or the guests who booked a 200 year old cottage and were disappointed that it wasn’t up to modern standards. Maybe I should write a book !
Unfortunately, the main problem was that the business was too seasonal. We were hectic busy during Christmas and Easter or when there was an event on in the village such as the Bathurst show, but at other times it was very quiet and not sustainable long term as a sole income. People didn’t seem to travel to Bathurst because it is a beautiful historical village with stunning scenery and lots to do. They visited for a special event or to visit people. Maybe one day the Eastern Cape will get the number of visitors as it’s more famous brother, the Western Cape.
Oh well, you live and learn and have to move on. Emma went back to teaching in August 2017 at a school in Ethiopia. I continued to run the accommodation business for another before I went to join Emma and also get the white board markers out of the cupboard. We were not very good at being apart. We are still glad that we gave it a go and we still have a gorgeous home in a lovely part of the world that we can go back to and visit. We have loads of amazing friends in the village and we will always cherish the experience of running a guest house in South Africa.
(Ps. Looking back with hindsight from 2020, we are glad we moved on when we did as the terrible Covid pandemic has decimated the South African tourism industry. I hope South Africa can recover from the effects of the outbreak and we can visit soon when the virus has gone).
