Pulling from this thread, what’s the least you’ve ever spent on a hotel/hostel room?
We spent $4 US a night on a room in Hondouras in a really sketchy area. We were backpacking and were on the cheap, and had also brought along sleeping bags and liners. Of course, we did not use the bedding provided, and I hoovered over the seat. Neither of us used the (cold) shower either. No bugs though (that we saw) and it was quiet!
Not the least, but we stayed in a hotel (yes, hotel!) in Topolobampo, Mexico for one night for $14 US. It was almost midnight and we had been waiting all day to get on a ferry but the ferry was being repaired and wasn’t running until 6 am (that didn’t work out and turned in to another crazy adventure…), so was asked a taxi to take us to the nearest cheapest hotel. It was just off the highway outside of the town. Turned out it was where the johns, hookers and drug dealers liked to stay. There was a garage door on the front of the unit that was the entrance. Everything, and I mean everything, was made of concrete. Bedside tables, sofa, and bed. They were either covered in fabric or a mattress (same trip, had sleeping bags and liners). There were four channels on the TV and three of them were porn. There was a pole in the middle of the room, which I took for a support pole until I realized that support poles are not shiny metal and covered in dried goo. They had room service (three food choices) where they’d come to a rotating platform in the wall, put your ‘meal’ in, knock, you collect the food, put your money in, and rotate it back out (I’m not certain what type of meat was in the food, but we didn’t get sick, so meh). You see no one! The taxi driver told us not to open the door or go outside, and that he’d be back to pick us up at 5am! It was awesome!
A bit tame compared to the OP, but here goes. Driving from Florida to Maryland, moi and were planning to push through in one day. Round about North Carolina we ran out of steam and started looking for a hotel. Saw a sign for $19.99, looked at each other and said “How bad can it be”.
Well, it was a dingy old motorlodge with a dried up pool in the middle. Our room had a door connecting to the next room, suite style. A hollow core, interior door that you could probably put a fist through. Dead roach on the bathroom floor. And the kicker? When you came out of the bathroom, you could see that the fabric on the side of the boxspring was missing, just bare springs showing. We were convinced that we were to be axe murdered.
Pushed a table in front of the connecting door and slept a couple of hours in our clothes. Boogied out at dawn.
I was once on a trip to the Grand Canyon with a church group. We stopped for the night on the way down in Laughlin, Nevada, where we got rooms at one of the casinos for $8 each.
Nine euro for a hostel bed in Cadiz, Spain, and god that place was lousy. (The other guests were friendly, though, and I had a good time with them; it was just the amenities that were crap, like the constantly banging bathroom door or the improperly plumbed washbasin that smelled like sewer gas.) Elsewhere in Spain I got perfectly decent, if spare, rooms for between 15 and 25 euro, even in some cases individual rooms with ensuite bathrooms.
At a place called Coral Cove, on a beautiful Thai coastal island. The snorkeling was awesome. A thatched bungalow, with porch and hammock, ten feet from the ocean. It was a perfect little cove, protected by two huge rock outcropingss . It didn’t have an attached bath, but I didn’t mind too much.
I spent one entire afternoon, chatting away to an Irish girl, both of us just lying in the still water, our legs in the ocean, our shoulders on the beach. While we were doing this, and watching the fish jump, in entire schools, (apparently for joy?), a grizzled old man suddenly appeared on a rickety old motor bike. We enjoyed watching him pick his way down the impossibly steep and windy approach. He had a cooler on his bike and had come to sell us homemade coconut ice cream, on a stick. For like a nickel. It was too die for, good. And we didn’t even have to get up from our glorious basking, he brought it right to us. We stayed there the whole day.
It was over 15 years ago now. It truly was glorious though. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
In the backwoods of Tibet in 1985 (a place called xiangcheng in Sichuan Province and part of the Ganzi Tibetan autonomous region), I paid 0.60 Chinese cents for a bed in a 2 bedroom of a “hotel”. At the time, using black market currency conversion, that worked out to be about USD0.15 or fifteen cents.
I think the least I’ve ever spent for a dorm bed was $11 Fiji dollars (about $5.50 US at the time) at the Cathay Hotel in Lautoka, Fiji.
Cheapest private room: 10 Euros, in Mostar, Bosnia: a strictly informal arrangement, in the home of a lady who scopes out likely-looking backpackers at the bus station. And I got to sit outside and have cherries with the family, which was lovely
Im my early days in Thailand, in the 1980s (while Reagan was president), I know I paid 50 baht for a windowless room with a fan on Khao San Road. At that time, 50 baht was US$2. I may have gotten one for 30 baht, not sure; that would have been $1.20.
$15 a night, Stoney Haven Motel, just outside Muncie, IN. 1982-'83. I did opt for the Jekyll Island campground for $12 a night instead of the Buccaneer back when I was just divorced and broke (1998-99). The raccoons robbed me.
$4 a night, in Syria, complete with cockroaches, dirty underwear in the closet, and a shower that literally shot straight into the toilet bowl when you stepped out of the stream.
I don’t remember way back 40 years ago, but the most recent was $17 a night in a motel in Kona on the Big Island. We were traveling with people who lived on Oahu, and thus got the non-tourist rate, and they asked if we would take a room without a TV for a cheaper rate. No problem for us! This was about 1984.
$1.50/person in Lima back about 20 something years ago. It definately was nuthin’ special. I remember the toilet was outside, no door, roof or T.P. and you were perched on a hillside overlooking the town.
