DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY
Pity I didn't read the reviews…read morebefore booking, if I did I would have chosen elsewhere to spend 4 nights. For the $750 we paid for a four night stay, it was an absolute rip off & Tanglewood Gardens' advertising is an utter joke & extremely misleading. The images on their website have either been extremely photo shopped or taken 40 years ago!
Owner seemed friendly enough upon arrival, handing us a complimentary bottle of wine & directed us to our cabin under the Chapel & we made our own way there. First impressions were the paths were very uneven & it was a bit of a mission hauling our luggage over the broken & upturned pavers.
Upon entering our cabin, we were greeted with a bit of a musty smell, but put that down to the fact we were in a rainforest. The cabin appeared clean & tidy but very out dated furniture & fittings. There was a large screen television, Foxtel and a full-size fridge but no smoke alarms installed, which was a concern, considering the light switches were all over the place & very confusing - the light for the toilet was above the kitchen table, the switch for the spa was amongst the overloaded power board near the television. The air conditioning unit cord was running under the bathroom basin, which was on a dreadful angle & looked in danger of falling off the wall, the air conditioning unit itself was about 12 inches off the ground & very close to the spa.
Right outside the front door, there is a little table & chairs & unfortunately the septic tank which is a bit off putting.
There was bottled water provided & thank goodness for that, as it was impossible to clean your face & teeth using the water coming out of the tap. When filling the spa bath, the water was like mud, so not sure if they use tank or dam water, or if the pipes needed upgrading, but it was disgusting. The shower had very little pressure to it and the water of course was still filthy.
Each night we were woken by a loud clunking sound, which we put down to a water pump constantly switching on & off, the fridge motor was also extremely loud when it kicked in. My husband is a very heavy sleeper, I am not & had very little sleep whatsoever.
After spending a second night there, we discovered a rat trap, fully baited on the floor behind the bed's headboard... right behind my head where we slept!!! This was the last straw for us & we decided to check out two days early.
The owner saw us loading our car with all our luggage & quickly approached asking how things were. When I explained about the clunking sound keeping us up all night, she appeared very apologetic & said she had no idea what the sound could be & had never had a complaint about that previously. We didn't get to tell her about the filthy spa water & our horror of finding a rat trap behind the bed but she did offer another cabin, promising she would make it all nice & pretty for us, begging us to stay the other two nights. We were attending a party on the coast that evening & explained we would be staying on the coast that night, but would return the following evening & take up her offer of the Rainforest Cabin, to which she seemed pleased not to lose a guest.
The final evening we were given the keys to the cabin with brief directions on how to get there. Paths to the Rainforest Cabin were 10 x worse than the path to our previous cabin.
We were shocked to see the filth of the decking, clearly this had not been cleaned for some time & the decking was badly deteriorated. Upon walking into the cabin we were hit with an overwhelming smell of mould & damp. The carpet felt damp to walk on. No spa, just a shower with no pressure, which took forever to warm up, a very noisy air conditioning unit, a much smaller television, no Foxtel, just six channels & a remote that didn't work.
The fridge was a bar fridge & the room was filled with mosquitoes, quite a lot of spiders & webs throughout the cabin & there was even a huge cockroach crawling around the kitchen sink, who obviously lived under the microwave judging by the stack of cockroach poo underneath. We had to wash the plates & utensils prior to use as they were filthy. The water did appear a slightly better colour than the previous cabin but still disappointing. The Barbecue on the back deck was filthy, as were the table & chairs, not very inviting at all.
There was a damp rid container sitting on top of the kitchen cupboards & some sort of automatic air freshener which clearly didn't do anything to disguise the smell of mould. The furniture & fittings looked as if they came out of hard garbage. BYO firewood - none provided. Clock & some lights didn't work. My husband felt he was being bitten in the bed, I couldn't stop coughing due to the mould, so we left in the middle of the night. Emailed the owner, to this day, have not received a response. Tanglewood Gardens is an absolute disgrace. Needs a lot more than TLC!
