Hostels I Have Known

by Li Sian Goh

A totally unbiased review of the hostels I’ve stayed in.

In the six years since high school that I’ve been travelling independently, like many budget backpackers before me, hostels have been my crash pad of choice. I’m basically a connoisseur now.

The Flying Pig Hostel, Amsterdam

€17.90 per person per night

I was 19 and travelling alone for the first time, and this place smelt of weed, unwashed people, and something like rats. The weed smell was especially strong when you went near the grody little crèche in the basement, screened off from the kitchen by a glass wall and a door, which seemed to function solely as a smoking room for blonde men with dirty dreadlocks.

The Flying Pig also held itself out as having a “relaxed and funky atmosphere, with a real Amsterdam party vibe!” I could not think of people I wanted to party with less.

Having a bad sense of direction and a pathological fear of getting lost, the fact that it was winter meant that I spent a lot of time in the 10-bed dorm, resolutely not talking to anyone and wishing it hadn’t gotten dark so soon.

Schlafmeile Hostel, Berlin

€9.70 per person per night

This hostel was the WORST. To tell the truth, I don’t remember anything about how it actually was except that my friend and I arrived in the 8-bed mixed dorm when a white dude who’d been sitting on his bunk introduced himself. His name was Rick and he was from California.

My friend, who was from New York, chirped, “No way! I’ve always wanted to go to California!”

“No, man, you don’t,” he said. “California is full of retards.” Taken aback, I snapped back that I didn’t think he meant people with actual intellectual disabilities, which was the best comeback I could come up with at the time. Ableist Rick said something defensive about how he didn’t mean intellectually disabled people, just liiiiike, dumb people, before we dropped it, because I don’t actually love confrontation with people I have to spend the next six nights with.

Also in our dorm was this other white guy named Tobias, who asked if he could play music and threw a passive-aggressive fit when I said, “Um, can you use earphones?” He kept talking very loudly about how hostels were meant to be cheerful hubs of community and not, like, libraries. Later that night he kept everyone else in the room up after lights-off by loudly misremembering Bob Dylan song lyrics.

Things came to a head a couple of nights later, when we had a beer with Rick and his friend, the latter of whom (surprise!) turned out to have a yen for making “ironic” statements. When I said, “I don’t think that’s very funny, you’re being kind of racist,” he quickly subsided into mutters about how unfair I had been and how angry he was and how dare I, since it was his beer we were drinking (sadly true. They had bought a six-pack from the corner store and asked if we’d like to join them). Then my friend ended the night by sleeping with Rick.

Anyway, this friend and I don’t talk about Berlin much, except to laugh at Tobias.

Adelaide Hostel, San Francisco

$40 per person per night

Perhaps I have not been entirely fair. The main problem with most hostels (and, if you are me, the main problem with most things in life) was the other people. This is a problem that, like most problems, can be resolved through the application of a little more money. Three months after we started dating, my partner and I booked a hostel for a weekend in San Francisco and opted for a private room, just the two of us. A reasonable indulgence: suffice to say that I had never been so happy in my life.

The room was decorated with that tacky, trendy aesthetic that so many mid-range hostels seem to have in mind, with cheap purple velvet fleur de lis wallpaper and an equally outrageous bedspread. There was a tiny, immaculate ensuite bathroom, and the room faced east, so that even though it was December you were woken in the morning by California sunlight streaming through the shutters like a hot summer dream.

The hostel was located in the Tenderloin, which is one of those rare San Francisco districts that has thus far managed to resist gentrification. Though most hostels worth their salt offer reasonably central locations I must say I’ve never felt the ease of that so keenly as when strolling out of the hostel, hand in hand with an attractive boy, right into the heart of Chinatown, the Mission, or any other place in that pretty, hilly city you’d want to explore with your new love.

The Richwood, Torquay

£17.25 per person per night, with “Free Bottle of Wine Upon Arrival”

A bed & breakfast we’d booked for a three-day seaside holiday. The B&B was run by two landladies in their fifties who had bought a Victorian house five years ago, restored it, and made it a going concern. Inside it was rather darkly lit, and you had to lift your suitcase over many flights of stairs before arriving at your room.

Otherwise it was lovely. There was a kettle in the room, teabags, and free shortbread. The landlady who signed us in proudly informed us that the room had been newly recarpeted, the walls newly painted, and that even the sheets and bedspread (a pattern that managed to be loud and dowdy at the same time) were new.

“The last occupant of this room started to run a bath then left for the day,” she said, looking accusingly at us. We guiltily assured her that we would never do anything like that. Only half-mollified, she left the room to bring us fresh towels.

On our last night, we decided to stay in for dinner and ordered a Lebanese mezze from the in-house restaurant, for 6:30 p.m. At the appointed time we wandered down to find the table spread with tiny plates of the promised mezze. “We wondered where you’d gone!” the landlady said, looking at the clock. It was 6:32.

Taylor Hotel, San Francisco

$39.50 per person per night

A nobler disappointment has never been borne. Hoping to recapture the happiness of our lost youth, a year later we were together again in the Bay Area and booked a room at the Adelaide Hostel but ended up having to cancel the booking when one of us came down with stomach flu. Toward the end of the week he got better, and we decided to spend two days in San Francisco as intended.

We had made the booking for the Adelaide hostel, but when we arrived we were told that all the rooms had been occupied and that we would be dispatched to the annex one street over.

It was a building of rather grim aspect and when we entered it didn’t get much better. A nondescript reception (uncharming), an old cage lift that made alarming noises as we rode in it (frightening), a traffic-facing room (agrypnotic), and an old, bare mattress with stark white sheets and no outrageous bedspread (adequate, but oh how so strangely disappointing).

At least we had our own bathroom, though.

Queen’s Hostel, Penang

49.50 Malaysian Ringgit (or 13.13 USD) per person per night

“Hostels in Malaysia aren’t nice,” my mother said when I told her that was where we were going to stay, in much the same tone as one might say, “You’re going to die there.”

I was fairly confident we’d make it through. This was a women’s-only hostel that had been featured on Time Out, but it accepted men as long as they were in the private rooms. Or as they put it: “your male companion.”

When we checked into the hostel, I made sure to send my mother pictures: the bright walls, the color-coordinated communal toiletries, the rainbow-painted shutters and steps, and the lime green bedsheets. There was no bed frame for the mattress, but why quibble?

The last night we were there just happened to be the eighth day of Chinese New Year. On the street just outside the hostel they were setting off fireworks and firecrackers to celebrate the birth of the Jade Emperor well after midnight. In the room, we lay sadly on the mattress clutching each other.

I said, “This is just like that scene in Titanic when the ship goes down and the old couple lie in bed cuddling as their cabin fills with water.”

“Yes,” my male companion said, “except that the ship is blowing up instead of drowning and instead of being sadly resigned we’re like, ‘Yes please just blow up already.’”

In the middle of the night, after the festivities had finished and we had drifted off to sleep, he shrieked, flailed and nearly fell off the bed. There was a cockroach lying dead next to him, crushed by the weight of his body probably as we’d slept.

In the morning, just before we checked out, I noticed two more cockroaches. Those were alive.

Yosemite Bug Mountain Resort

$57.50 per person per night

A place that barely deserves the label of hostel, so luxurious were its beds. The bathroom we were sharing with one other private room, but it was so immaculate it might as well have been private (I do not think the other guests showered at all during the time we were there, a remarkable feat for visitors who were presumably staying there in order to enjoy the National Park).

Affordable, too, compared to the other options. You had to drive 40 minutes to get to the park, but what is that in California?

Dinners at the Yosemite Bug café were equally perfect: on the first night, for $12 each we had pork chops with jalapeno jam, roasted zucchini and most of all a cornbread, cheddar and bacon pudding that sounded weird, but was so original and perfect my mouth waters just thinking about it.

Anyway, the Yosemite Bug barely qualifies as a hostel, and indeed it is known as a “resort.” That being said, it was part of Hostelling International and did that annoying hostel thing where they don’t provide you with toiletries upfront but sell them to you at reception, in hotel-sized bottles. Would definitely go again, but bring your own toiletries.

Li Sian lives in Singapore, which is officially the world’s most expensive city. She feels ambivalent about Airbnb. Follow her on Twitter here.

Photo: Quartier Hostel

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