Nepalnews.com Mercantile Connumications Pvt. Ltd.

Manic Monday morning. Amongst the many emails, there is one that gets your attention. The regional office has given your branch a short deadline of just 15 days to complete the annual strategic plan along with definite figures for the next year. Are they crazy, a whole year’s estimated figures in just two weeks? It should require a minimum three uninterrupted days of planning with inputs from all functional heads. So what do you do? Call-off all operational activities and not take calls for three days next week. Clients and suppliers will most likely visit the office anyway and seek to whisk away some of your key people.

Maybe the answer lies in organising a weekend away in a nearby resort along with your team and this is where Park Village Resort come in your awareness realm.

The Park Village Resort is located in the northern tip of the Kathmandu valley in the picturesque Buddhanilkantha and is spread over the substantial space of very well designed landscaped gardens dotted with a wide range of flora at various stages of its growth. The first thing that one notices in the resort is the way the management has tried to integrate bio-diversity in its facilities, though there are more tropical species than others. This may gradually change as the plants age and become bigger and bushier thus making the bio-diversity mix more wholesome.

The resort offers more than 40 rooms in the form of English/European country cottages with most rooms boasting of a sitting area and a cute little balcony overlooking the gardens for evening or morning sit outs.

Karna Shakya (and his family) who are behind this property leave no doubts about their personal passion for bio-diversity as can be seen reflected by many elements of the property. “Earth Watch,” the main restaurant cum dining room, serves breakfast, lunch and dinner with buffet style meals for its numerous meetings groups mostly from the development world who appear to have developed a soft spot for this property. Beware. While your team might be discussing hard core bottom lines, performance and aggressive market penetration it is likely that in the nearby meeting room these “development-walas” could be playing incomprehensible and noisy games to foster gender equality in Kailali and Achham districts. For the evenings, your team’s preference of entertainment may just be at odds with the madal wielding “Dohori Laingik Saman Samuha” of the other in-house conference group. It would therefore be a good idea to check with the management if there are other workshops scheduled parallel to your weekend. Furthermore, it is highly recommended that the resort be avoided should you decide to take your family for a weekend break while a large workshop group with delegates from all over Nepal has just arrived. That definitely is a bad idea and a waste of money.

The A la carte menu at Earth Watch is multi-cuisine and the restaurant has a tendency to disappoint due to the non-availability of items listed on the menu, which presumably can be attributed to the management’s dependence on meetings, seminars and workshop. Though for independent travellers it offers convenience of buffet meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Surprisingly, perhaps the best delicacy of the resort is our good old momos, which is best while nursing your favourite drink in one of the garden gazebos or in the room balcony overlooking the garden in the evenings. The nastiest fare in the resort is their cookie which they serve during their tea breaks. Believe me, it is stony and tasteless.

The bar near the lobby is nothing to write home about and is disengaged from the core ambience of the resort. Huge leather upholstered sofas feel out of place in today’s day and age. Our plastic bag toting development conference delegates add to its woes. The bar counter looks unattended most of the time and the bottles are displayed in the most unimaginative fashion.

The resort perhaps has one of the best swimming pools of its type in Kathmandu and a fairly well equipped health club, one speciality restaurant, a barber shop and a beauty saloon and for the joggers it offers a well rounded jogging strip within the resort. It also provides a cemented top table tennis facility and a pool table but the mainstay of its leisure facility is its beautiful swimming pool. However, for the uninitiated the time with oneself out in its numerous garden sit-outs would serve well and provides opportunities to search your soul away from the hustle and bustle of Kathmandu.

There are plenty of options for small and medium sized meeting rooms, for breakout sessions and plenary. In this regard the resort scores pretty high and furthermore there are enough options for pre-function area, for tea/coffee and networking session during meetings and workshops. No wonder this resort has become the favourite haunt for the development organisations in Kathmandu. The downside for the private sector is its limited connectivity with the dial-up line. A two sentenced instructive email will take about 10 minutes to go through but again this constraint would probably be contained once they install wireless connectivity.

The employees seemed helpful and organised but at times a little too casual and probably stems out of the nature of business they have been catering to during the short duration since its establishment. So if you are seeking a private weekend away with your loved one or a two-day brainstorming session then Park Village could just be the right option for you. But do check who else is going to be there.