Media Release. Immediate. 27 January 2010. Mossel Bay Tourism

Mossel Bay Property One of World’s ‘Ten Most Eccentric Places To Stay’

Mossel Bay’s Santos Express, which offers accommodation aboard a train parked permanently alongside the town’s popular and historic Santos Beach, has been named the second of the world’s ‘Ten Most Eccentric Places To Stay.’

The list was complied by Hostels Club(www.hostelsclub.com), which is based in Venice, Italy, and which, “provides travelers with the ability to browse and make reservations at thousands of our partner hostels and hotels worldwide.”

The site receives a million unique visitors every month.

“This wasn’t a competition or anything: we just received notice one day that we’d been placed on the list,” said Santos Express owner, Allan Robertson.

“We’re stoked!”

The world’s leading ‘Most Eccentric Place to Stay’ is a hostel built in a Boeing 747-200 airliner that’s been permanently parked at an airport near Stockholm in Sweden. Other places on the list included a former prison in Ljubljana, Slovenia, a middle-age fortress in Padua, Italy, various hotels that now occupy ships at permanent moorings in places like Amsterdam, and the interior of a disused opal mine in the Australian desert.

Mr. Robertson said that, although the majority of his guests during the Christmas and Easter Holidays are South Africans, “for the rest of the year, about 80% of our guests come from overseas.

“What attracts them is that it’s very different to your usual four walls and a bed – it’s a real train and you get to sleep in real compartments.

“But the fact that it’s right on the beach is probably the key,” he said.

“We’ve been going for 15 years now, and some of our guests come to Mossel Bay just so that they can stay on a train. The Santos Express has become a destination in itself.”

Mr. Robertson said that the fact that the Outeniqua Choo Tjoe and other trains steamed right past his lodge on a regular basis helped to enhance the atmosphere of the place. “And, of course, many of the guests on the Choo Tjoe come to us for lunch.”

In the same week that Hostels Club announced their list, a Chinese web site named Mr. Robertson’s other product – the Stonehill Restaurant in Little Brak River – one of the ‘100 Best and Most Exciting Restaurants in South Africa.’

The ChinaTravelHong.com site (www.chinatravelhong.com) drew its information from Wine Magazine’s 2008 list, and included the Bahia dos Vaqueiros Restaurant (at Mossel Bay’s Diaz Beach Resort), which it described as, “A fine dining Portuguese style restaurant with an up-market feel.”

“Stonehill,” it said, “is an intimate restaurant with French style dining.”

“I think Stonehill has drawn attention because we grow a lot of the food we use ourselves, so it’s organic and the chefs always have fresh and tasty ingredients to work with,” said Mr. Robertson

“We’ve made ourselves part of the slow food movement on purpose, and we take local products and find the best ways of presenting them to our guests.

“Possibly this is why we made it onto this list.

“The Chinese have a very old, complex cuisine and I expect they appreciate the effort that goes into making food the way we do.”

Neels Zietsman, Chairman of Mossel Bay Tourism, congratulated Santos Express, Bahia dos Vaqueiros, and Stonehill on appearing in the Hostels Club and ChinaTravelHong.com lists.

“Mossel Bay Tourism is very aware that the Internet, and its bloggers and journalists, lead the way in setting trends in the 21st Century, and we’re always excited – and very proud – when they single out local products for mention.”

For more information about Santos Express, Bahia dos Vaqueiros, and Stonehill, go to www.visitmosselbay.co.za.

ENDS 610 WORDS

Tags: africa, Bahia dos Vaqueiros, diaz beach, mossel bay, santos express, steam, Stonehill, tourism