(Jen): The Hostel Experience
So it’s been about a week since we’ve been on our own after the project, and after talking with some other students that were more used to travel we had decided to try the whole hostel thing, mostly because we were assured that while they did have college-dorm style, room-sharing-with-total-scary-strangers type accommodations, they also had private rooms sometimes for a slightly higher cost. Still, even the more expensive rooms where you actually get your own bathroom would be cheaper than the hotel we had been staying at when we first arrived in Quito, so we decided to give it a shot.
Hostels are pretty much a rarity in the states, although I can think of at least two in the Bay Area. In Quito, however, they’re everywhere. One of the streets we went up to find our original hostel was basically lined with them. We originally stayed at a fairly nice one that ran about $15 per person per night for a room with a “matrimonial” bed (this apparently means king or queen sized, depending on how swanky a place you’re at, and in this case meant a queen), a twin bed, and it’s own bathroom. It was actually surprisingly quiet since our room was tucked back behind the main lobby and central area, although less so when the ENTIRE PAP PROJECT LANDED IN THIS ONE HOSTEL OMG
Seriously, I think we just shifted everyone from Cangahua to this one tiny hostel in the space of about two days.
So how was it? Well, the bathroom was fine – the shower did have hot water although both the heat and the pressure were rather flaky, but that was something we were relatively used to by this point. There was wireless internet, but it wasn’t strong enough to reach into the rooms and had to be accessed in the common area. The primary breaking point was the bed, though, since the matrimonial basically was a harder bed than the ones we’d had at the central house in Cangahua, and although the other bed was softer it would only fit one person. I ended up on the matrimonial for a few nights, and Mark ended up on the other bed for a while until our stay ran out.
The second hostel we tried was fairly hidden in comparison, a tiny doorway between a few little hot dog and hamburger stands on one of the main streets of the Mariscal. It was cheaper accommodations ($11 per person per night) and came with a smaller room with a queen-sized bed that was actually soft and easy to sleep on. The walls were painted cheery colors, and it had its own bathroom. Unfortunately this hostel had a noise problem – not their own, but because they were so close to so many of the clubs and bars and the general PARTYPARTYPARTY atmosphere of Quito's Mariscal area – and the bathroom intimidated the hell out of both of us. Mind you, we’d used showers with the electric-style heating element in the head at the house in Cangahua and lived, but our stay would probably have gone better if we could actually speak enough Spanish to tell the people that ran the place “hey, your sink is leaking and our bathroom is constantly flooded for no reason at 2 in the morning.”
We also spent a night in Mindo in an actual hotel that ran us about $15 per person, at which point I think our standards kind of hit a new low. The matrimonial bed was fine, but the place had no power outlets, the light in the bathroom never worked, the light that was in the room barely worked, and the doors didn’t even have knobs. That actually wasn’t too bad (at least the shower worked and wasn’t as scary as the one in Quito) until about three or four neighboring roosters decided to get into an e-peen contest at 4 in the goddamn morning and not stop crowing constantly until sometime after we left at noon. GOD DAMMIT ROOSTERS. SHUT UP.
So now we’re staying at an actual hotel not too far away, with wireless internet that reaches into the room, the biggest damn bed I’ve ever seen, and a buffet breakfast included for $77 a night for the both of us. I remember one of the other students (who I assume travels more) from the project laughed and said we were such tourists, with our pickpocket-proof pouches, staying in hotels, and actually having full luggage and such. But honestly, I suppose we are. We’re about ten years older than a lot of the people on the project, and honestly, even when I was their age I hated that sort of communal living and constant party noise shit. Wrong type of personality for it, I guess.
More to the point, I honestly think the whole hostel thing would probably work better without the massive language barrier and if we were actually packed for mobility instead of a stationary location – a lot of the backpackers we’ve seen around Quito use very different bags to carry about the same amount of crap that we have, mostly soft bags that can be slung over a shoulder combined with a huge carry-everything backpacker’s pack on the back with a daypack on the front. That’s the sort of thing I’d probably look into if we were to do this sort of thing again.
Well, that and a travel guide that’s not either six years out of date (our original Lonely Planet guide) or three years out of date (the Viva guide we bought locally) because seriously, those did not help matters.
But in the meantime, it’s nice to have a real room again for a few days before we go home.