The worst hotel in the world
Certainly the title alone was enough to catch my eye. “The Worst Hotel in the World!” shrieked the newspaper headline, and the story came with a photo of a cruddy room with shabby drapes and cheap linoleum flooring. The Hans Brinker Hotel in Amsterdam promised “no amenities, rude fellow guests and terrible food,” all documented in an accompanying book titled The Worst Hotel in the World. Wait a minute! Is there a traveller anywhere in the world who couldn’t challenge that “worst hotel” assertion? I can, and I have the photos to prove it.
Apparently the Hans Brinker is only a fairly ordinary shabby backpacker-oriented hotel where a bed costs between about $32 and $71 a night, which is not cheap, and the book was simply part of a clever ad campaign by a Toronto-based ad agency designed to entice cheap backpackers. Paid nights at the Hans Brinker subsequently rose from 60,000 to 145,000 per year. It seems the idea of honesty in an ad campaign really appeals to backpackers, most of whom are young (and broke) and to whom honesty has some value. More than likely so do cheap room rates.
I don’t have any photos of the Hans Brinker Hotel. When I stayed in Amsterdam I was on my own dime, so I found the cheapest room I could. It turned out to be an old jail and my room looked exactly like a jail cell. The walls were tiled so you couldn’t scrawl graffiti on them. There were no windows. The key to the door was the size of a pickaxe. I have since found a better photo of poor room design; note the electrical outlet located in the ceiling. I enjoy collecting signs as well, although I don’t think you need a warning not to poop in the pool. Warning: In Cambodia you may find that the sink empties directly on to the floor, so you may get toothpaste on your shoes.
Let me say that I have enjoyed both the very best and worst accommodations on the planet over the course of the last 50 years. Maybe I shouldn’t boast about the worst ones. I started travelling very young, as a teenage hitching between Montreal and Vancouver. It’s a very long way. I forget how many times I went back and forth before settling in Vancouver. As a teenager I had no money and along the way I slept in some truly remarkable locations. I remember the first night on the road, I slept in the vestibule of a church on a Saturday night across from a bar in a small town in northern Ontario listening to the drunks yelling and woke up just before the parishioners showed up for Sunday morning service. On my hitching trips I slept in fields, culverts (never a good idea in rainstorms), telephone booths, the occasional Sally Ann, the back seats of cars, and on people’s couches when lucky.
On my many trips around the world I have slept in places where I wouldn’t allow my dog to catch a snooze, but this does not necessarily mean they were “hotels.” Caves, tents, ditches, beaches and the like are not actually hotels. Basically, if you sleep for free you get what you deserve. I remember waking up on a beach in Mexico in the dark of night when the Federales swooped in with guns and pickup trucks full of sniffer dogs and carted all the dope smokers off to jail. I once went to the police station in Oklahoma City as a teenager and tried to get myself arrested for vagrancy so I could get something to eat. The cops laughed and took me to the Sally Ann.
On the plus side of the ledger, since I became a travel writer I have frequently enjoyed some of the finest hotels and resorts in the world, some with room rates up to $15,000 a night. It’s amazing what tourist agencies will do to impress travel writers who are published in metropolitan daily newspapers. Fact is, the very best rooms and suites in many hotels are not always booked, so the hotel often “upgrades” the writer to a better room whenever they can. You go from an executive room to the presidential suite where someone has thoughtfully left a bottle of champagne on the dining room table along with a bouquet of flowers and a personal note from the general manager inviting you to dinner if you can possibly spare the time in your busy schedule.
Want to know the most expensive hotel room in the world? It’s the Royal Suite at the Atlantis Hotel in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where rates start at $57,000 US a night — along with much more moolah for the catering. I didn’t sleep there but I bounced on the same bed as Kim Kardashian just to test its quality. If you are interested in a reservation, sorry, apparently the suite is booked solid every day of the year by Arab oil sheiks. The main room parties over 100 people with a great view of the Arabian Sea but I was shocked to find there was no swimming pool.
In Taiwan, the tourism board gave me my own villa deep in a lush bamboo forest somewhere out in the countryside (it was dark when we arrived) located in an 80-hectare private garden, the largest in all of the Orient. The villa was based on some sort of zen theme, or “minimalist.” In 2,000 square feet there was only a futon and a small desk, the full extent of the furniture. The bathroom featured a tub so large that it took two hours to fill and in which you could go swimming. I didn’t ask the room rates. I seldom do on press trips. I really don’t want to know. I once enjoyed a “Grand Tour” of the best hotels in Switzerland where the daily room rates cost more than my car. But silk sheets and penthouse suites really don’t interest me that much anymore. It’s the people you meet on your journey through life that stick in your memories.
My vote for the world’s worst hotel room I have ever experienced was in the Mong Kok District of Kowloon, a neighbourhood listed in the Guinness Book of Records for having the highest population density on the entire planet. There are 278,400 people crowded into a crazy jumble of decrepit 1960’s style cheap concrete highrises in just a few square blocks, so close to each other that you can watch your neighbours TV if you don’t have one of your own. For those counting, that’s 130,000 people per square kilometre. Ouch.
I rode the express train from the Hong Kong airport into Kowloon. My taxi dropped me off near midnight and finding the “hotel” took some time because there was no sign of any such accommodations. At $24 per night the Dragon Inn was the cheapest hotel listed online anywhere around Hong Kong, which may be the most expensive city in the world. There were two small elevators, one broken, to serve about 30 floors. Even at midnight people were crowded like sardines into the tiny cabin. When I got off at the 20th floor, a tiny sign on the wall pointed down the hallway to the “hotel.” Some floors of the building were cheap apartments, the rest offices and apparently some light industrial. It most certainly did not look like a hotel.
When I got out of the elevator, the corridors were dark, lit only by the occasional 25-watt bulb. I wandered down the hall and finally found a tiny cubbyhole where a clerk was watching a TV. He didn’t even look up from his miniature screen, simply handing me a key and pointing me back the way I had come. The building featured an interior atrium, so all the rooms faced inward. Laundry was draped over every balcony, pipes leaked and groaned, babies cried from the apartments, rusty old fans shrieked and moaned, water taps dripped. It was like a horror movie. The only lighting emanated from the blue blur of TV sets flickering in the gloom of the atrium. The entire setting was eerily reminiscent of the original version of the movie Bladerunner, the classic science fiction/horror movie that signifies what the future will look like. (Not very nice.) I crept along the corridors in the dark, half expecting to meet Harrison Ford with a weapon or a killer replicant wanting to chew on my bones. There wasn’t another soul in sight, the only sound an incessant groaning of ancient plumbing and the drip, drip of leaky pipes and the reek of stale cooking wafting forth from some of the cheapest and smallest apartments in the world. .
I turned around several corners and finally found room 237 and inserted the key. The door opened easily but it struck me immediately that I had the wrong room number. The room was, obviously, a broom closet. Yes, there was a tiny bed in it, but nothing else. No window, nothing. The entire room was slightly more than a metre wide. Stretching out my arms I could almost touch each wall. At the foot of the bed a tiny door opened to reveal a tiny toilet. A sign on the miniature sink warned against “excess use of water.” When I turned on the tap to brush my teeth, no water appeared at all. A tiny showerhead provided a trickle of tepid water before dwindling away to a piddle. When I sat on the toilet, my feet reached right through the doorway into the “bedroom.” The toilet, of course, did not flush either.
I am a tall person, and when I lay down on the bed my feet jammed against the far wall, necessitating that I needed to curl up to sleep. There wasn’t enough room to put my pack on the floor so I balanced it on the toilet seat. There was no bedside table on which to put my glasses or keys, so I put them in my shoes. Above the door hung a tiny TV, about the size of an iPad, where I squinted at the tiny people on the tiny screen until the effort put me to sleep.
Let me note that the Dragon Hotel was nowhere near the worst I have ever slept in the traditional sense of the word, with bedbugs and cockroaches and the shrieking of small dogs being killed and eaten in the streets below by their betters as I have enjoyed in other countries. I was simply intrigued by its size. I have never slept in a broom closet in a replicant atmosphere before, and I never wish to do so again. The hair on the back of my neck stands up at the possibility.
In the morning I awoke with a start, dreaming that I was stuck in a dystopian future with replicants as my best friends. Leaving as quickly as I could, I discovered both elevators were broken, so I walked down 20 flights of an unlit stairway with my luggage to a dark windowless basement full of puddles. I managed to squeeze through a small window and emerged out into the real world to discover about 7 million people on their way to work in a flow of humanity that testified that Mong Kok is the most densely populated neighbourhood in the world. Whenever somebody ask me if I know a cheap hotel room in Hong Kong, I always show them the photo, but a sense of pity requires me to ask them how tall they are.