Lodging Review: That's It Guesthouse, Pretoria
This is the only one of my trip's accommodations so far that I cannot recommend. It fell short in the following ways:
1) The advertised wifi was nonexistent when I was there. There just was no signal whatsoever, so something must have been broken or turned off. The guesthouse hostess/owner told me to wait for her husband to help me, but in the 3 days I was there I didn't catch one sight of him. This was something I asked about every day.
2) Breakfast hours on the weekends (when I was there) is only 8-9am. On the weekend! Weekdays are no better, with serving time of 7-9am.
3) Reception hours, i.e. when the owner was around, were extremely limited. On the weekends, she was around only until 2pm. So if you did want to use the one computer with internet, since the wifi was not working, and it was after 2pm, tough luck.
4) Screwy help with booking tours in the area. I would expect that a guesthouse would help with tour bookings. At first, the owner said that she would call only after 8pm so she didn't have to pay for the call. Then when she did help book my tour, she told me it was a full-day tour, covering Johannesburg, Soweto, and Apartheid Museum. When I got in the van, it turned out to be only a half-day tour covering Soweto. The tour guys were nice, and fit in as much as I wanted into the time they had. But given that she only uses this one company for all of her tours and transfers, and took up a good 10 minutes of my tour time chatting with the driver about random things like worker's comp (the only phrase I could pick up through all of the Afrikaans) since they were chums, I can't help but think that it wasn't a simple miscommunication.
On top of it all, the room's decor made me feel like I was in an old-people's home.
If I ever did come back to Pretoria, which is highly, highly, highly unlikely, I would stay at a hostel. For a city where it's so dangerous to go outside at night, it would have been nice to have other people around to socialize with. Or at least just see that there were other people around.
When my early morning transfer to the Kruger safari arrived, I was never more happy to have woken up at 4:30, so I could finally leave!
