I couldn't resist posting this wonderful article from The New York Times 1 December 2002
Registered NYT readers can also see the article here: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/travel/sundaytravel/01cheap.html" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/travel/s...el/01cheap.html</A>
The Riches of the $12 Room
By DAISANN McLANE
SINCE I began writing the Frugal Traveler column nearly five years ago, people have often asked me what it's like to stay, night after night, in cheap hotels. They say this with half a chuckle, half a grimace, as if unable to decide whether to be amused by, or sympathetic to, someone who travels outside the secure, no-surprises cocoon of standard or luxury hotels.
I assure them I am having a blast hopping from roadside motels to Victorian pensions, and guest houses with bathroom-down-the-hall. But until I started working on a book of essays and photographs of some of the hundreds of hotel rooms I've visited since 1998, I wasn't able to say precisely why I'm always happier sleeping in the less-expensive bed, even when it's doll-sized, lumpy or covered in an atrocious polyester bedspread.
The charm of these cheap hotels became clear to me only when I began poring through box after box of slides. I'd never paid much attention to these photos before, and most of them were taken on the run, in a state of exhaustion. Usually I pull out the camera (and, if I'm feeling particularly ambitious, the tripod) as soon as the bellhop or hotelier shuts the door, even if I'm longing to plop on the bed after a day on the road. (The photo editor doesn't like shots with messy bed sheets.) Working like this, I found it was easy to miss the details that made each of these rooms a surprise, an adventure, a first point of entry to fascinating new places everywhere.
But here they were, and in the frame of each slide I discovered an indelible travel memory. There was the vintage 1940's telephone on the table of the Hotel Lord in São LuÃ*s, Brazil, that I'd used to order breakfasts of succulent orange papaya and thick dark coffee. The shuttered windows of the Xieng Mouane Guesthouse in Luang Prabang, Laos, that opened to the Buddhist monastery next door, filled with chanting monks who woke me at dawn. The impossibly tiny cubicle in the Ryokan Asakusa Shigetsu, in Tokyo, where I could reach out and touch both walls at once, and where the bathroom was so compact I had to learn how to shower while sitting on the toilet.
Cheap hotels have a personality that is unmediated by designers and corporate honchos. These rooms are quirky, and they are not afraid to engage their guests, sometimes even to shock them. The Künstlerheim Luise in Berlin is run by artists who have turned each of the rooms into an installation. Every time I entered the Hundezimmer, or Dog Room, put my key on the bedside table made from cans of puppy food and laid my head to rest on a pillow propped up in a wicker basket, I was reminded, not always comfortably, of the animal within.
In an inexpensive hotel, ghosts feel freer to roam, shadows linger and stories are told. Extraordinary things happen. Maybe if I'd stayed in an expensive hotel in Galicia, Spain, instead of in an extra bedroom in the home of Doña MarÃ*a, in the village of Camelle, the concierge would have slipped a chorizo sandwich into my backpack as I was leaving, but I doubt it. And I am certain that if I'd stayed in a luxury resort in Angkor Wat, instead of the $18-a-night Golden Apsara Hotel, I never would have met Keo Sithan, the manager, who riveted me with the story of his escape, on foot, from the Khmer Rouge.
Pay more for your lodgings, move up the economic ladder, and your travel comfort may be assured. But if you want travel adventures, stay in a cheap hotel.
DAISANN McLANE, the author of "Cheap Hotels" (Taschen), writes the Frugal Traveler column for The Times.
