Iris Hotel

The Iris hotel is located quite far from the centre of Toubab Dialao, so there is not much to go to anywhere on foot. The modern, clean and quite big hotel with several independent blocks of rooms has a swimming pool, a bar and a restaurant, so one can easily spend some time there. Steps lead down to a beach, which unfortunately doesn't seem to have been cleaned for ages. Usually the sea is too rough anyway to go for a swim there. Our room was not too big and there was a French window with a railing behind, no balcony to step onto. The view was towards a small courtyard with many trees. There were bedlamps on both sides of the double bed and also a lamp on the writing desk. The empty fridge was so small that it coulnd't even take a big bottle of water. Not very good was the bathroom with no storage space at all, with a completely wet floor after every shower and also only one set of towels was provided for two (we had to ask for another set). There is a buffet for breakfast and dinner with long tables set up for local people from meetings and conferences. The dinner buffet looked rather boring, so we asked for à la carte, obviously being the only ones of doing so. Also there were no other Westerners. We gave our orders before buffet started and were served, when all the other people had eaten and left. So from then on we made our dinner choice the evening before for a certain hour the next day. This way it worked. Food was good and service now excellent with our table of choice reserved. As recommended in Senegal we had mainly fish and seafood: 'Salad Pleine Mer' (seafood salad) or 'Filet de Capitaine (Nile perch) mariné, thus in fact a carpaccio, as starters. For main course we tried 'Thiof' (grouper) grillé, Wok de Crevettes et Calamars or 'Brochette de Lotte' (a local globefish). To drink they had Perrier water and big and small bottles of French wines.