| Harvey Specter | 06-03-2009 12:33 AM |
Kowloon hotel vies for worst in world
http://a123.g.akamai.net/f/123/12465...n?size=620x400 Quote:
Certainly the title was enough to catch your eye. "The Worst Hotel in the World," said the newspaper headline, and the story came with a photo of a cruddy room with shabby drapes and cheap linoleum flooring. The Hans Brinker hotel in Amsterdam promised no amenities, rude fellow guests, and terrible food, all documented in a new book titled The Worst Hotel in the World. Wait--is there a traveller anywhere in the world who couldn't challenge that assertion? I can, and I have the photos to prove it.
Apparently the Hans Brinker is a fairly ordinary backpacker-oriented hotel where a bed costs between about $32 and $71 a night and the book is part of a clever ad campaign by a Toronto-based ad agency. Paid nights at the Amsterdam hotel have risen from 60,000 to 145,000 per year. It seems the idea of honesty in an ad campaign really appeals to backpackers. More than likely, so do very cheap room rates.
My vote for the world's worst accommodations goes to a "hotel" in the Mong Kok District of Kowloon, listed in the Guinness Book of Records for having the highest population density on the planet, 278,400 people crowded into a crazy jumble of decrepit, 1960s style highrises so close to each other that you can watch your neighbour's TV if you don't have one of your own. For those counting, that's 130,000 people per square kilometre.
My taxi dropped me off near midnight at the Dragon Hostel. At $24, it was the cheapest listed online. There were two small elevators, one broken, to serve about 30 floors. Even at midnight people crowded like sardines into the tiny cabin.
When I got off at the 20th floor, a tiny sign pointed down the hallway. Some floors of the building were residential, the rest offices or industrial. It most certainly did not look like a hotel, but I finally found a tiny room where a clerk was watching TV. He didn't even look up, simply handing me a fistful of keys and pointed back the way I had come.
The building featured an interior atrium so all the rooms face inward. Laundry was draped over every balcony, pipes leaked and groaned, babies cried from the apartments above, rusty old fans shrieked and moaned. The only light emanated from the blue blur of TV sets flickering in the gloom of the atrium. The entire setting was eerily reminiscent of Bladerunner, the classic sci-fi/horror movie.
I crept along in the dark, half expecting to meet a replicant. There wasn't a soul in sight, the only sound an incessant groaning of ancient plumbing and the drip, drip of leaky pipes and the reek of stale cooking.
I inserted the key to room 237. The door opened easily but it struck me immediately that I had the wrong room number. The room was, obviously, a broom closet. Yes, there was a tiny bed in it, but nothing else. No window, nothing. The entire room less than a metre wide. Stretching out my arms I could easily touch each wall. At the foot of the bed a tiny door opened to reveal a tiny toilet.
A sign on the miniature sink warned against excess use of water. When I turned on the tap to brush my teeth, no water appeared at all. A tiny shower head provided a trickle of tepid water before dwindling away to a piddle. When I sat on the toilet, my feet reached through the doorway into the "bedroom." The toilet, of course, did not flush either.
I am a tall person, and when I lay down on the bed my feet touched the far wall, necessitating that I curl up to sleep. There wasn't enough room to put my small daypack on the floor so I balanced it on the toilet seat. There was no table on which to put my glasses or keys, so I put them in my shoes. Above the door hung a tiny TV, about the size of an iPod, where I squinted at the tiny people on the tiny screen until the effort put me to sleep.
In the morning I discovered both elevators were broken, so I walked down 20 flights of an unlit stairway to a dark windowless basement full of puddles. I managed to squeeze through a window and emerged out into the real world to discover about seven million people on their way to work. Whenever somebody asks me if I know a cheap hotel room in Hong Kong, I always show them the photo, but a sense of pity requires me to ask them how tall they are.
Earlier this year, Trip Advisor listed the shabbiest hotels around the world. New York's Hotel Carter took the North American title. A European list has not been released yet. The Worst Hotel in the World ($45.50) is available from Booth-Clibborn Editions. I wonder if they have a section on Mong Kok.
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