Sabaidee Valley Resort, outside of Paksong, has a lovely setting overlooking the Sabaidee Valley, but only the villas at the back of the property have this view. The restaurant, club house and coffee shop are all at the front end of the property along the road.
Our spacious villa was nicely furnished, but hadn’t been used in a while and needed a good airing out. The toilet hadn’t been cleaned and they were just filling the small private pool. There is no safe in the room and the wifi is iffy as the hot spot must be in another villa. The bed was comfortable and we had a great night’s sleep with the windows open.
The grounds have great potential with nice plantings but are in terrible need of tending, grass knee high and weedy beds.
The sunset viewpoint has an unfortunate tree growing right in front of the setting sun.
Unlike most of the upscale establishments, which cater to Westerners, the resort has a mostly Asian clientele. On a weekend in early November all the clients were Asian except for us and one other couple.
Restaurant
Breakfast is not very good. They brought hot items such eggs and noodle soup to your table. The fried eggs are precooked and have been sitting somewhere for a while. There isn’t much to the breakfast buffet, some bread for toast, a few kinds of cereal and some fruit.
The most interesting item was the made to order dumplings, something like a savory ebelskiver. The coffee is good but only powdered creamer is available.
Dinner is on the same open air terrace just off the main road and therefore doesn’t take advantage of the garden setting of the rest of the property. Mosquitos were also a problem early on but subsided later in the evening. When we arrived just after 6:30 there were a few tables taken but it was relatively quiet. Still, the servers were overwhelmed. We ordered straight away but it took forever to get all of our dishes. We didn’t finish until nearly 8:30 and had to go up front to ask for the check as we could never get the server’s attention.
The food for the most part is good, especially when it arrived fresh hot as did the stir fried cabbage with fish sauce. A simple dish with great flavor and the cabbage cooked but not too much.
The Vietnamese style fried spring rolls were still crispy but had been sitting somewhere before serving.
The shrimp in pepper sauce had good flavor but the dish was skimpy on the shrimp, more of a vegetable dish than a shrimp dish.
The fried river fish was 5 small fish fried whole. You could crunch down the whole thing bones and all, maybe not the head, but I’m sure some do. Not quite as hot as they should have been, especially for the hour or more we waited for them to arrive.
November 10, 2018
For links to all the posts in this series see the Laos/Cambodia page.