When you’re dirt tired from travelling, a roof over your head is enough. It’s during these moments that you realise – too late – that your standards have dropped a bit too low. You’re sleeping in a horrid place. And no, I’m not talking about slow wifi or cold coffee. More about cockroach corpses and fellow guests that seem fresh out of prison. Although daily life was probably more comfortable in the can than in these hell holes:
[Disclaimer: alas, I haven’t taken many pictures of crappy rooms. I will start doing so.]
Unknown hotel, Chiang Khong, Thailand
A solo trip through Southeast Asia gives me an early experience of deplorable sleeping conditions. I candidly remember a guesthouse in Laos where the walls are so paper-thin that even a set of earplugs and the fan on the highest setting cannot drown out the snoring of a guest down the hall. To add injury to insult, he turns his television to volume ten at six in the morning. At least the snoring is over.
But that is not too bad. I have little objection to Spartan hotel rooms. On the contrary, I like simple places. I don’t mind sleeping on a wooden board, as long as it is a properly maintained wooden board. Filth, however, is something else.
Worse is the ruin at the Thai-Laotian border in which a bunch of slumlords/tour operators accommodate me and a fellow traveller. An old, bloody plaster sticks to the wall and snails crawl all across the ceiling. An army’s supply of pubic hair from previous guests lingers in every corner of the bathroom. As soon as I lie down in the bed, it collapses like a jelly pudding. A TripAdvisor reviewer calls it “literally the worst place on earth”. Damn hard words, since Auschwitz, Guantanamo Bay and the football stadium of RSC Anderlecht are, undeniably, also places on earth.
Hotel Oasis, Ampana, Indonesia
To reach the Togean Islands, one of the most paradisical places on earth, we’re sentenced to a night in the port city of Ampana. Lonely Planet recommends staying in Hotel Oasis and we follow that advice. All the more because we find a cockroach corpse on the floor when checking out another inn. I myself can handle quite a bit of dirt while travelling, to save a few bucks of drinking money, but I can’t get away with that in the company of a lady.
Oasis it is. The name sounds good and according to Lonely Planet this hotel has clean rooms and good service, “but don’t expect to sleep before the karaoke bar next-doors closes at 11 pm.” We are not killjoys. If it keeps the local youth off the streets, we can live with that. At a quarter to eleven, we brush our teeth and put on our nightwear. We forgot for a moment that we’re in Indonesia, where “rubber” time applies. The Indonesian word for ‘tomorrow’, ‘besok’, can literally mean any time in the future, from tomorrow to a few years from now.
At three in the morning, we’re still shaking in our beds to bad dangdut. It frustrates me so much that I rush into the bar in my underpants to ask them if the hell they know what time it is. When the karaoke finally calms down an hour later… it is time for the morning prayer in the mosque a little further.
NY Loft Hostel, New York, USA
It’s harder to find an affordable hotel room in New York City than a safety razor in Lena Dunham’s bathroom. In the end, we cough up 140 dollars for a private room in a hostel. For that money, the two of us could stay for a week in full-board on the aforementioned Togean Islands. Is the NY Loft Hostel at least okay? Uh. Well, let’s just say that the hostel is like the city itself: no love at first sight.
Compared to New Yorkers, people in Antwerp, the most arrogant city in Belgium, are modest and don’t take themselves too seriously. I will never forget the black bulldozer who, after I lifted her laundry bag from the only available chair in a laundromat, approached me and sneered at me that I “must earn the right to be in New York”. Nope, thank you very much, I’d rather scoop out a horse stable with a dessert spoon.
The welcome in NY Loft Hostel isn’t exactly open-armed either. The receptionist, a whale in a tracksuit, barely looks up from her phone. Worse is the room, so hot you can easily grill a turkey in it. I open a window. Loud bachata wafts in all night. The accompanying dance is, according to Anete, sensual, partly because women push a knee between those of their male dance partner.
Which is exactly the procedure I have in mind for the deejay, with the necessary addition that I would also make a rapid upwards movement with that knee towards his manhood. Because the deejay shouts so spiritedly that he resembles the type of Latin American football commentators who are paid by the vowel. Add the tiny beds, so small that even overnighting hobbits would lament them with bloodshot eyes, and I consider 140 dollars daylight robbery even by capitalist New York standards.
Hotel Maya, Benque Viejo del Carmen
Most budget hotels in Central America are concrete bunkers. At best, they are clean and contain a fan that provides the necessary respite from the heat. At worst, you risk electrocution when taking a shower and you have to step over drunk prison types to enter your room.
In San Vincente, a provincial town in El Salvador, the innkeeper, dressed in a dirty tank top, searches for the correct key for tens of minutes. Right, this is the kind of place where no one ever closes the door from the outside. When he finally finds it, he drags a gigantic bucket of water towards the room. No tap works in the bathroom, which is separated from the bedroom with a shower curtain. Also in San Ignacio (Belize), El Estor and Playa Grande (both Guatemala), we do not necessarily have the time of our lives.
But nothing beats Hotel Maya in the sleepy border town Benque Viejo del Carmen. The mattress in our poky room is so worn out that even the most ragged bum would turn his nose up. All night long, I struggle with the springs that torment my back through the mattress fabrics. Even bed bugs don’t get near. No, you shouldn’t be afraid of pests here, but rather of venereal diseases.
The shared bathroom is laughable, although we’re closer to crying. Faeces from previous guests still float in the toilet bowl. We soon discover why: flushing is impossible. When we report this to the manager, a man with a throat problem, he pushes a spot on his neck in order to get a hoarse word out of it: “I will take care of it.” After which he asks his son to solve the problem. It looks like a scene from Breaking Bad. That evening, we find a bucket next to the toilet.
And if that isn’t enough, our neighbours are blasting ranchera music at six in the morning. Hello? Is this the UN Human Rights Council?