The worst Hotel you have stayed in

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Tan Slacks

climber

Joshua Tree

Apr 29, 2013 - 03:36pm PT

Many years ago while in the Peace Corps in Morocco my friend and I decided to see Spain on one of our breaks. We had very little money and our first night was spent in Algeciras. A port town on the southern coast of Spain. We wandered the streets for while and found what we thought would be a good and cheap place to stay.

The hotel clerk did not speak english and we did not speak spanish, but we bargained him down to about $2.15 US for the night. He led us to a room on the roof, I think it was his room. Still dirty with his dinner dishes and bedding. It was filthy, but it was cheap. There was a another mattress without bedding that we flipped for and I won. At some point in the middle of the night. He came into the room without knocking. He had a very large women with him and proceeded to ask if we wanted to screw her by putting his finger through his thumb and index fingers. he kept saying "cheap, cheap"

We said no thank you and he left. He returned moments later and the best we could figure, he asked us if we wanted to pay to watch him screw her? Again we declined and then I should have seen this one coming.. He assumed we were gay and tried to talk us into paying for a yet unseen boy.

He finally left when we convinced him we wanted to sleep, but we didn't sleep well and in the end I would have been happy to have spent five dollars for a better place...

labrat

Trad climber

Auburn, CA

Apr 29, 2013 - 03:46pm PT

Dang! The Suncoast for Red Rock is listed under the Recent Bedbug Reports

Maybe sleeping at the BLM with earplugs is back on the table ;-(

TWP

Trad climber

Mancos, CO

Apr 29, 2013 - 03:46pm PT

This is a great thread!

Jan:

Concerning your story of:

"Blood on the carpet reminds me of a motel in Durango" [Colorado] .... I don't know if they ever solved that murder and if it was drugs or prostitution gone wrong but the police noted she had gone in there with three guys. She was brutally beaten ...."

Yes, the murder was solved. Gang rape amongst intoxicated Native Americans.

Most posters recall fondly their worst memories of "bug-infested, sh#t- hole" hotels - a category with many worthy candidates for "worst of the worst." However, there is another genre not to be ignored: the spookiest hotel stays of a lifetime.

Here's mine.

While in Colombia in 1971 I made a solo attempt to climb a high volcano Nevado Ruiz, 17,000 feet plus. My route beta consisted of almost nothing but I was told I needed to reach a hotel in the countryside at "Thermales de Cachiri" (sp?). I inquired at the bus station about a bus going to said location and boarded a junk bus venturing into the countryside on back, dirt roads. I grew suspicious once all occupants of the bus had disembarked and we were still in the middle of nowhere. Low hanging clouds and mist obscured all views so orientation was impossible. The bus driver made known he had reached the end of the line and I could either disembark or return to the town of Manizales, some 20 miles back. I asked about "Thermales de Cachiri" and he pointed on down the road. How far he did not know (or say).

Carrying a too heavy Kelty pack, wearing painful Harlin-Leroux mountaineering boats, I trudged along the road for hours. Each odd campesino I passed repeated the same question: "Que hay de vender?" (What are you selling?") In my misery with plenty of time for contemplation I worked out the reason for these serial questions. The campesinos could think of NO REASON why any man would be walking down these obscure roads with a huge pack unless he had something for sale.

After many long hours of walking, with the last rays of light, I beheld smoking vents releasing vapors into the airs - the "Thermals" part of the destination had to be near. Before full darkness set in, I made out the outlines of an abandoned hotel. I entered the vast dwelling. The indoor bathing area/swimming pool and deck had not seen use in years, or decades. Dust covered everything in thick layers. No one present. Certainly no visitors! Shortly after realizing I had reached a ghost town, a small noise from a dark corner behind me drew my attention to the small figure of a young women carrying a baby. Tentative inquiry led to two discoveries. She was alone with her baby in this deserted morgue of a hotel but her husband would be home soon. (A universal canard if I ever heard one). And I was free to stay in any room I liked.

I ascended in darkness to the second floor (of course I had no flashlight). A long narrow corridor with rooms without doors offered me a choice of something like 100 different rat warrens to chose from - all identically barren of any furnishing; in fact, anything of value had long since been vandalized and carted off from every cranny of this tomb.

My preoccupation now became personal safety. The rat-like maze of rooms offered my best protection. If I kept perfectly still all night and chose a random enough location, any one seeking to do me harm would have a long search.

Did I mention how long a night can be when you sleep alone in an abandoned hotel, fearful of any human contact, with the vivid acoustics of unrelenting thunder and visuals of flashing lightening storm going on without end? Amidst a Halloween moonscape where thermal vents transformed benign night air into a sulfurous fog?

No boogie men appeared and I probably slept some that night. I saw the lone woman again next morning and asked her which way to Nevado Ruiz, the mountain I had come to climb but never seen. She had no idea.

This epic failure ended by late afternoon, after I had walked across trackless paramo (Andean tundra basically) for hours, blindly seeking my peak, only to run across another dirt road. Here I threw in the towel and hitched a ride back to Manizales in the back of a pickup truck full of large aluminum canisters carrying milk from this ghostly world of paramo pasturalists back to Manizales and civilization.

Don Paul

Big Wall climber

Colombia, South America

Apr 29, 2013 - 03:55pm PT

Worst anywhere must have been an Israeli run hotel in Kabul, expensive but dingy and what I remember most was that the mattress stunk from urine. In the basement was a bar where all the contractors and spooks would get hammered out of the sight of the Afghans. It was like Casablanca, there was a lot of mystery in the air. One guy invited me to go out shooting AK-47s in the desert for fun but I declined. I had something I needed to have translated, a guy working for the hotel took it and disappeared, never to be seen again. I only stayed there about 2 nights until I found a way better place, staying with the kitchen help out back behind another hotel (Bs Place, run by the warlord Fahim and his security agents). That place was ok until they put another tourist next to me, who was too sick to get out of bed, then it was no longer fun and I moved on.

Charlie D.

Trad climber

Western Slope, Tahoe Sierra

Apr 29, 2013 - 04:16pm PT

This one will creep you out:

chez

Social climber

chicago ill

Apr 29, 2013 - 04:17pm PT

Barstow!

Urizen

Ice climber

Berkeley, CA

Apr 29, 2013 - 05:08pm PT

I miss the old Alpine Lodge in Eureka, Nevada. It's been boarded up for maybe twenty years, but otherwise hasn't changed from its final decrepit state when it was open. Pictures of Gandhi and Winston Churchill over the bar. The owner claimed to be the only card-carrying member of the ACLU in town. No wonder he went out of business.

dirt claud

Social climber

san diego,ca

Apr 29, 2013 - 05:15pm PT

Sprock wrote: "the lady in the cage took my money"

A lady in a cage would have been my 1st sign to turn around and find another hotel, sounds like an interesting night,lol

Fletcher

Trad climber

The great state of advaita

Apr 29, 2013 - 05:17pm PT

10b: Not sure if I've stayed at Ray's in Independence. If I did and don't remember that's a pretty good thing! hahaha!

It would have to be really bad to beat that hotel in Beijing.

deschamps: that sounds like the rabbit warren rooms that used to be (still are?) found in Chung King Mansion in Tsim Tsa Tsoi in Hong Kong. Luckily never had to resort to that!

Eric

donini

Trad climber

Ouray, Colorado

Apr 29, 2013 - 05:33pm PT

The Bates Motel.....really, really creepy. I had the oddest feeling someone was just on the other side of the shower curtain,

Brandon-

climber

The Granite State.

Apr 29, 2013 - 05:37pm PT

The Groveland Motel, for four nights.

Only place in town to stay with dogs while the car got fixed. They put us in one of the single wides.

Tweakers kept trying to steal our sh#t. It actually escalated to damn near a fistfight.

Gary

Social climber

Desolation Basin, Calif.

Apr 29, 2013 - 06:46pm PT

10b: Not sure if I've stayed at Ray's in Independence. If I did and don't remember that's a pretty good thing! hahaha!

Ray's Den in Independence is the best motel on 395. The Den Mother does a great job running that place. In no way does it belong in this thread.

Magic Ed

Trad climber

Nuevo Leon, Mexico

Apr 29, 2013 - 07:04pm PT

A girlfriend and I once spent the night in a seedy motel in Ciudad Juarez that turned out to be a brothel.

Studly

Trad climber

Apr 29, 2013 - 07:36pm PT

The Peace Hotel on the Bund in Shanghai

Double D

climber

Apr 29, 2013 - 09:12pm PT

Worst... When I arrived in Watson Lake from Talkeetna AK, Yukon, expecting to find my homies from CA they had already flown into the Cirq and left me to await other friends to fly in with. I had failed to mention to them on previous phone conversations that I was flat broke cept the air fee in. I found this abandoned hotel, set up my portaledge and called it good. The food was scant but the rates were good.

happiegrrrl

Trad climber

www.climbaddictdesigns.com

Apr 29, 2013 - 09:46pm PT

When I moved to NYC from small-town Wisconsin, my family insisted I have a place to stay when I arrived(My plan was to simply get on the plane, get off, and then figure it out....).

Anyway, I found The Allerton Hotel for Women, on 57th and Lexington. It was shabby, and sort of stuck in the era when decent young ladies would require the safety of a chaperoned residence.

Alas, at $235 a week, I couldn't afford it on my $250 a week paycheck.... And so I looked for a cheaper place, and found it in another SRO(single room occupancy) on Central Park West and 108th. Now days that would be a real swank address, but back in 1988, no.

I showed up and the front desk person took one look at me and convinced me that the room next to the laundry in the basement was the right choice for me. I was like "HUH? The only other person who lives down there is the super???" She said "Sorry, that's the only room available."

Looking back, I know she was doing me a favor. But then, I wanted the full NYC experience I had paid for, and to me that meant living where everyone else did, not in some basement cloistered room where I had to walk through the laundry room to get to...

I kept badgering to get a real room and finally she must have figured it wasn't her job to protect the innocence of the babe from the woods of Wisconsin. I go the works!

Excitedly moving my possessions out of the elevator on the 9th floor, I looked down the hallway, the thin hallways and started looking for my room number. It was like a labrynth, with turns here and there that went in circles, through doorways and into dead end. I was soon lost, but eventually did find the room.

As I went to put the key into the lock, a...bug... fell off the doorway. It wasn't *quite* a cockroach. It had orange spots on it. A Flamenco cockroach, I guess....

The room was half the size, and $25 more a week than the (now, I realized) basement room I had occupied; a room which had it's own bathroom, though the shower/tub was shared with the super.

This one had a shared bathroom with any number of others, and it was down the hall, through a door, around a corner and ...oops! That was somebody's room, not the bathroom.... Eventually I was able to figure out which way to go.

The room hadn't been painted in decades, and was a sort of bluish gray in color. It had a window, which looked out into dozens of other windows from other rooms, at all angles. There were no curtains.

The first night, I woke up in the middle of the night to screams. REAL screams. Screams from a woman. A woman being beaten to what may have been her death.

I looked out the window into darkness and dimly lit rooms, and had no idea where the sounds were coming from. What floor, what room? There were hundreds to choose from.

I thought "I have to do something" but I didn't know what to do! Go to the front desk downstairs and say "Someone is killing someone up there. Some where..." I had no phone, there was no hallways phone, no way to dial 911.

No one else in the building seemed to have noticed the issue. Eventually the sounds stopped and I promptly went into denial, telling myself I must have dreamed it.

I then understood why I had been given the basement room, but it was too late. I got what I asked for. Living the life....

It didn't take long before I realized that it was hell in that building, and got enough of a clue to understand I could get a lower rent by sharing in a privately rented apartment. Which I did, and moved to 1st and 13th.

The front desk person from the SRO told me, when I left, that I had to come back after the first of month to get my security deposit back. When I returned, she looked at me like I was still the n00b after all, and laughed in my face. She said "We don't take security deposits here. What are you trying to pull? Get out of here before I call the cops."

john hansen

climber

Topic Author's Reply - Apr 29, 2013 - 11:51pm PT

Wow, great stories everyone. A few nights ago at the Motel 6 in Watsonville Ca, woke up at 2 am to some one yelling "You fu&king whore!!"

Tonight I paid the same price for a great room in Calipatria, just below the salton sea. 72$ clean, has a fridge and a couch, ordered a pizza from the resturant. The staff was great and the key card actually worked the first time,, ,,

Wonderful. I would highly recommend it.

Plus it is only 6 miles or so to the Sonny Bono National Wildlife Reserve.

Any recommendations for a place in Tuscon?