The Great Circle Lodge

The staff and owner are very friendly. The site is in a beautiful location, with wide-ranging views of the landscape with the Aberdare mountains on one side, and Mount Kenya at the other. There's a trampoline which my son enjoyed very much, and lots of open space. One could probably fly a kite there nicely when there's wind. At my request, the staff turned off the security lights at night, which made for some great night sky watching. Even better, there's a small (130mm) telescope of decent quality available on the site (though it needs to be thoroughly cleaned and collimated). The rooms and bathrooms are of a good size. The bar is a nice round half-open banda with a fireplace in the middle, a nice place to hang out and warm up on colder nights.

The room amenities are not at all what booking.com says they are. There are 2 sub-queen size beds (not more than 4 feet),a small side table and 3 or 4 hooks in the room; that's it. No closet, real table, or even fridge or kitchen as was advertised (to be fair, the owner told me that he had repeatedly reported this booking.com, but they won't fix it). The bathroom also has no hangers or surfaces whatsoever to hang towels or put toiletries etc. Highly inconvenient. We asked for our trash bin to be emptied twice, but it didn't happen, so I had to do it myself. There is a shared kitchen and fridge available, but I was charged another 1,000 KES to have used it, which I wasn't told about beforehand. Cleanliness of the kitchen isn't great. There's also a shared bathroom bungalow which one can use when in the bar/restaurant, with a sink on the outside which had a lot of bird poop on it, which looked like days old. Finally, while Mt. Kenya is visible when you walk to the fence facing it, it is otherwise blocked by small trees and shrubs, which is a pity. The restaurant is also a small crammed place without any view, despite the great extent of the site otherwise.

Customer service was excellent

No cemented paths to wash room which r outside hence makes it difficult expensially during rainy season.