Clarke Chronicles - Places to Stay and Not to Stay

The Clarke Chronicles

Places to Stay... and Places Not to Stay!

This page is a somewhat random selection of notes and memories of various hotels, hostels, lodges and B&Bs that we've stayed in over the last few years. It won't be like the more organised and systematic pages that you might find on a lot of travel sites since we didn't keep notes on prices, menus etc. As of now, we'll try to be more organised about that.

Hopefully the comments might be useful to anyone reading these pages who is planning on going to somewhere we've been (a big assumption in the first place that anyone will actually read them!). For now, the order will probably follow no logic since the reviews will be written as the places pop into my head. As the list expands, I'll try to categorise it more logically so that it's easier to search. We'll start with one of the worst!

The Heathrow Lodge, near Heathrow Airport, London, UK

This hotel is located slap bang at the end of the take-off runway. This means that every 90 seconds or so, a huge jet is screaming overhead as it groans its way into the sky. The main building is a fairly large and rambling converted house. The reception is a cramped counter at the entrance to a small room at the end of a corridor that is staffed by a mixture of disinterested Indian and Chinese guys. The corridors and stairways were narrow and baggage-unfriendly. The only food/drink on offer in the evening was from a vending machine. We were staying a few doors along the road in the annex, which turned out to be very ordinary semi-detached house that had been converted to a six-room horror by knocking out the kitchen to make an extra bedroom and presumably remodelling the upstairs rooms a bit. There were three rooms downstairs, three up and one bathroom, also upstairs. One tiny bar of soap resided in glorious isolation on the end of the bath/shower. In our room, which was downstairs at the back, there was a washbasin, no soap and two tiny hand towels. The bed linen was clean-looking but very cheap, the pillows suspect, the walls dirty and the wardrobe on the point of collapse. The hall light didn't work, which on a dark March evening didn't help.

We managed a night's sleep, of sorts, somewhat interrupted by other noisy tenants returning from the pub. Mercifully, there is a curfew at Heathrow at midnight so the pounding headache repeated every 90 seconds stopped for a few hours.

The shuttle service to the airport existed but was amazingly disorganised. At around 6.45 a.m., a group of sleep-hungry guests assembled inside the hallway of the main building or outside in the car park to wait for the transport. The driver of the first minibus arrived to declare that he only went to terminal 1, 'no uvers, mate'. Another bus arrived but the driver disappeared. By then, one or two people were getting a bit twitched about making their flights. Eventually, a Chinese guy was dragged out of reception to replace the missing driver. This chap had possibly never driven before; if he had he'd not driven an automatic since he used his left foot for the brake. The first time he did this, I nearly lost my front teeth, the second, he nearly lost his. He also didn't really know the way to Heathrow - difficult to imagine, I know - and the way from T3 to T4 was a major challenge for him.

Why Did We Stay There?

We were on our way from Italy to Kenya and we had chosen to fly BA since they have a great baggage allowance to Kenya - 2x23kg each in economy plus their now brilliant no-weight-limit-as-long-as-it-fits-the-dimensions carry-on policy - a photographer's dream. Owing to the troubles in Kenya at the beginning of 2008, BA had reduced their flights to Nairobi to one a day departing 10a.m. This meant it was impossible to fly over from Rome the same morning so we had to fly over the day before. Hence the need for a hotel near Heathrow. A search on Hotels.com brought up several in the £70-100 range and the Heathrow Lodge at about £45. Mmm. From the info it was clearly a converted house, but we had stayed in a similar looking place in Oxford when we went to a wedding a couple of years ago and it was great. OK, it cost more than £45. Billed as conveniently close to all the terminals and with a free shuttle service to take you to your terminal, we thought, hey, it's only one night, how bad can it be? Answer: Very!

Over-all Rating: Worse than bad; I'd rather have slept on the seats at the airport. Interestingly, a few days after our stay, I received an email from Hotels.com asking for comments. I gave what I thought were fairly strong comments and then I read the others. Mine were mild by comparison. Frankly this place does not deserve to remain in business.

Moral of the story - read the reviews before you book! and don't be a skinflint - this is London, pay the £70-100!

Recommendation? Don't even think about it.

Incidentals Opposite the hotel was a pub that offered the only option in the immediate area for an evening meal. The food was on the bad side of ordinary and the ambience was like something out of the Land of the Zombies. Almost all the customers sat staring at the walls or the other customers, couples sat ignoring each other, seemingly mesmerised, but by what, we weren't really sure. Maybe it was the relentless drone of the aircraft that not only stopped all possibility of conversation for about 15 seconds every time one passed overhead, but also the vibration that came with it that threatened to shake the building to pieces.

Hostal Satram, Barcelona

I kind of panicked the morning we were leaving for Barcelona. When checking up on routes etc., I also re-read the reviews on the Hostal Satram on the barcelona30.com website, something I'd only glanced at previously - and these varied from moderately praiseworthy to 'it was so awful I only stayed 10 minutes', 'the smell on the stairs was so bad I could hardly reach the hostel door' and so on.

The hostel was on the first floor of an apartment block and was probably two or three apartments knocked into one and divided up into eight rooms. Six of these had washbasin and shower, but no loo (it was down the corridor), while the other two were 'en suite'. Owing to the quirks of the division of the original apartments, one of the en suites was entirely within the hostel, i.e. it had no windows. In a Barcelona summer it must be hotter than the hobs of hell.

We had booked the other en suite, which had French windows. These looked onto a light well that contained the washing line for the Indian guy who ran the place and who accessed it through our room when we weren't there - I caught him hanging his smalls when I returned unexpectedly one day. Anyway, the room had a bed, clean sheets, the bathroom worked (contrary to the info in some of the reviews - maybe we struck lucky), although getting water into the shower head needed a bit of ingenuity, and the lurid purple paintwork in the bedroom ensured that you didn't spend too long in there. As for the smell on the stairs, it was there, but if you held your breath and ran up the one flight of stairs, it could be avoided.

Why Did We Stay There?

It was cheap and we were on a tight budget! A trawl of the internet, in particular barcelona30.com threw up a number of places the same price range: €50 per night. Many of these seemed to be a bit inconveniently placed, while reading between the lines of the others, and looking at their photos, they seemed unacceptable. The Satram is at least well-situated, just two blocks from the Sagrada Familia. Nearby are a number of eateries and a couple of the La Patisserie places for breakfast.

Overall Rating OK, at a stretch - you gets what you pays for. I wouldn't go back, and I reckon in the summer it would be unacceptably hot and smelly. There was a pedestal fan in the room.

Recommendation Use it if you can't find anywhere better for the money, but don't expect much.

Incidentals On receiving the booking confirmation stuff online, the info said we needed to phone a certain Kamal two hours before arrival otherwise no one would be there to meet us with the keys. This put us in a plane half a hour out of Gerona and also my Italian mobile often doesn't like making calls when we're not in Italy. So I called from Italy the day before and was told the whole calling thing was unnecessary: there would be someone there. There was, not Kamal, but another Indian guy who seemed to live in the reception room - he slept on the sofa. He was very helpful, patiently explained the keys he gave to us and then gave us a map of Barcelona. There's a €25 refundable deposit on the keys.