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Next morning I was up at 5am and as I arrived on the second floor via the stairs there were TWO even bigger rats having a chat outside the hotel's pride and joy 'The Napoleon Suite'. This was the only hotel in my Indonesian walkabout with a lift/elevator (and a Napoleon suite) and as I had them trapped by the door I stamped my feet and scared them inside before pressing the button for the ground floor. I raced down the stairs just in time to see them dashing out of the lift and across the lobby with no one but me to see them! What a shame, if the service is bad I like the management to know about it! Worse than the rats were the cockroaches big as crabs that came and went about my room the night before, as thought it was really theirs and I was just a temporary occupant - I suppose they were right in that respect!
The Hotel Afiat in Makassar Indonesia.
A hotel in one of the most fetid cities in the world. and recommended in 'Lonely Planet'. It was so filthy I never even took a shower (though it's usually just a bucket and scoop anyway, the kind I like best) - I didn't want to risk togging-off in such squalor. There was nowhere to hang anything so I had to revert to my 'trick' - a piece of fishing nylon for a clothesline to get my gear and pack off the floor which was alive with tiny insects (not just ants, unfortunately). After a night of listening to the scratching (both meself and the insects) I was up early and planning my escape to the wide open spaces of the north and the land of the Torajans, a 14 hour bus trip and that's another story in itself.
My room was next to the lobby and the staff, now mostly horizontal, were still lounging about in a fug of cigarette smoke and farts, either dozing or gawking into their mobile phones--seems to be a worldwide pastime these days. When I asked to sign the visitors book (this time it was important for me) they didn't have such a thing so they gave me a sheet of paper on which I wrote in BIG print: "I'VE STAYED IN SOME BAD HOTELS FROM PANAMA TO PAKISTAN, SHARM-EL-SHEIK TO SHETLAND AND BEYOND AND THE HOTEL AFIAT IS THE FILTHIEST SH…. HOLE I'VE EVER SLEPT (mostly un-slept) IN." And they even helped me pin it on the notice board for future travellers to see.
There is an indescribable feeling of freedom that comes with stepping out of such a dive early in the morning - a new day and the whole world yours for the taking all you have to do is walk on down the road, a sort of light-headedness. I've had this feeling many times in my travels, it's like a drug and it's the only thing that can scratch the itchy feet and when you hit that spot it's a kind of euphoria, as though you were 'untouchable' in your freedom, like a bird out of a cage, and you want to scream with delight and you have the feeling your brain and body can just take off across the world. I remember that feeling stepping out of the train south of London at the Blackwall tunnel from where I would hitchhike down to Dover or Folkstone, the train full of commuters with their briefcases, umbrellas and sad faces while I have the whole world to explore, just my little backpack and passport and even then I had no plan, no real destination, just an idea - or off the ferry in France or Wales or off the train or bus in South America, shouting "I'm Free!" A feeling much more important than any thing or any place you might ever visit, - the true essence of freedom.
Another bad hotel - this tale from a previous trip, was the Grand Hotel Braila in Romania shortly after Ceausescu and his terrible wife Elena got dragged out and shot during the year after the Berlin wall (di maur) came down. I wanted to be first in to see the time-warp that was typical of those countries then and the previous year had travelled through East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary - more stories to come from there too.
I had been down to the Black Sea Delta by boat, to Sulina via the Danube with the Russian border on the north bank, and arrived in Braila in the evening. I went up the filthy marble steps and the dirty woman at reception gave me a key to a room on the first floor next to a stinking toilet. I opened the door and heard a faint scurrying - not one small animal but thousands of cockroaches around the hand basin and in the wardrobe and there were some in the bed too (the only other thing in the room) when I pulled back the dirty sheet. I nearly broke my neck going down the grand marble staircase half covered in the ragged remains of a carpet (that may have been beautiful in days of the Austo-Hungarian Empire but was now only a danger to life and limb) and the filthy woman gave me a key to a room on the third floor with THREE beds and THREE times as many cockroaches and toilet smells at leastTHREE times as bad!
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