Bats and Bedbugs: Budget Hostel Tales

If you are lucky your room will come with a free plant pot

Ever walked in on your dorm-mate having sex with the night watchman? In the land of crazy hostel goings-on, that doesn’t even make the list. Are the stories true? You never know, the good ones just keep going round and round.These ones are, I promise!

In one hostel we found in Oaxaca, Mexico, the owner refused to wear any clothes and only sold drinks to people who could get the tip into the tip jar from the other end of the bar. When the police came in to complain about the noise he lay on the bar naked and refused to talk to them until they scored a basket. To their credit, they did, and without even batting an eyelid!

In another hostel in Lijiang, China we tried to leave after three days of freezing rain and no hot water. The owner refused to let us go and locked us in our room with three tiny puppies for two hours. As we left the hostel with our backpacks, he tried to charge us for the puppies.

It is always encouraging when the staff at a hostel go out of their way to help you. In Valladolid, Mexico we complained about the bedbugs. We would have moved, but the last two places we had tried had them too. Apparently the town was in the throes of a bedbug plague. We went off to visit a few Cenotes and came back later that day to find the hostel owner stuffing burnt curtains into the bin by the front door.  We went up to our room, which was completely soaked and had no curtains. The owner and the maid had spent the day blow torching the entire room to get rid of the bedbugs for us. All went well until they set fire to the bed and had to use a garden hose to put the fire out. They gave us a new room, which, of course, was infested with bedbugs.

In Mendoza in Argentina, we heard a story about a couple who had a bat in their top floor room. The windows were jammed open and it kept flying in and out, scaring the daylights out of them. They complained but the watchman just shrugged and rolled over in his hammock. After a couple of hours they were woken up by a knock at the door. The watchman came in, walked over to the bed and handed them a can of fly spray before going back downstairs to sleep.