Bug life

Bolivia is a disappointment. There is little scope in this country of extreme altitudes and diverse wonders to add meaty detail to the cockroach scale of hotels. Reasonable comfort comes cheap and clean and the cockroaches exist mainly where they should be, as part of the Amazonian rain forest eco system. There, even the largest cockroaches are as nothing compared with the hand sized hairy grey spiders frequenting basins, bathrooms and verandas; the builder spiders with huge swollen abdomens, caught in night walk torch beams busily weaving intricate webs that disconcertingly wrap your face on morning treks and giant, scary but relatively harmless tarantulas irritated into appearance by a gentle but insistent twig poking into their nests. Forest guides instruct that the truly dangerous spiders have visible red fangs – visible if you are prepared to get up close and personal enough to check.

Chalalan Ecolodge in Madidi National Park is run by the local community who have lived in the area for hundreds of years and know the rain forest and its other inhabitants like the backs of their hands. Reached by boat, 5 hours or more, from the small town of Rurrenabaque where a tiny tropical airport reminiscent of a Graham Green film set provides reasonably reliable air connections with La Paz, Chalalan is as isolated in the forest as one could hope although an instant international community of fellow visitors somewhat dispels any serious sense of solitude. As evening falls, the voices and laughter of several boatfuls of guests on the lake by the lodge suggest a more populated setting as they spot the colourful and clumsy hoatzin or stinkbirds, their complicated genealogy possibly linking them to the flying dinosaurs; the elusive and, swimmers are assured, friendly caiman and high living red howler or capuchin monkeys glimpsed playing noisy tag up in the canopy where they are threatened only by the long talons of hungry harpie eagles.

The Chalalan community takes guardianship of its forest home seriously. Men may hunt as they have always done, the odd deer for instance for the pot, but even the meanest bug, a nasty painful killer or bullet ant for instance, will be avoided, not killed without good reason, nor the clinging strangler fig, that will suck the lifeblood from other better and more beautiful forest trees, be cut back to its roots. It is nature, red in tooth and claw as we all know and the rain forest is not a soft or hospitable place.


An overrunning rainy season that has caused flooding and bank erosion in Amazonian rivers and landslides in La Paz has made the trails round Chalalan wet and muddy and unconducive to the spotting of a rare jaguar or tapir or the great snakes well-hidden in murky undergrowth. Instead we enjoy glimpses of peccary, the wild forest pigs; macaws, best through the Chalalan telescope, broadcasting their loud domestics to the wider forest; get an instant education in strange forest flora like the walking palm and the cat’s claw vine, in their idiosyncratic lives, survival mechanisms and local uses and, sliding in the mud, try to avoid unwary grabbing of handy trees and vines often covered with sharp spikes or self protecting biting things. Much of life continues undisturbed a hundred feet above in the canopy and one longs for harpie wings to explore from the air to see more of the monkeys than the badly focused hairy blobs caught between branches in my ever hopeful photographs.

We stay in lodges raised above the ground, some with attached bathrooms, others where a trip to the loo in the night is a nerve wracking experience when armed only with a small torch that makes little impact on the intense forested dark as indistinct blobs race away from your flipflops down the verandah steps. Beds are comfortable with mosquito nets providing a flimsy sense of security – in the forest clouds of their relatives follow your path, kept at bay by the sort of deet insect repellent that pins your face to your skull when applied. Electricity is solar powered, or, as in our case, not, due to a defunct battery; a minor irritation only given the desire for sleep induced by rich fresh air, dark night walks, home and away team evening football games and a powerful line in cocktails made by a young barman with a very liberal hand. Food is home cooking; a stew, vegetables, light soups, salads, juices and home- made bread plus a less natural line in puddings. The chocolate mousse, more of a bizarre soup must have come from an Angel Delight packet, a pity in this deliciously chocolate fuelled country; and then tinned peaches. Nothing much wrong with a tinned peach mind you.


So, a cockroach hotel I suppose but by design. Elsewhere in Bolivia, high altitudes discourage bug life as much as the well swept rooms, clean linen, showers and loos that actually work and even heaters and electric blankets in the coldest places or, improbably and delightfully for cold feet, fleece sheets – forget that crisp ice cold linen, these are the way forward for chilly souls. In the Salar de Uyuni, the high salt desert in the south west of the country, turned during the wet season into a gigantic natural mirror, the hotel is made of salt bricks, even the beds and tables hewn from great slabs of salt, bright rugs saving feet from a floor that looks like an explosion of dishwasher salt.


In the remote Siloli desert with its mineral coloured lakes, hot geysers and rocks like petrified forestry, we play testing games of bananagrams at an altitude of 4,600 metres in a hotel that really is in the middle of nowhere. When the generator shuts down the darkness is complete and, we are told, a duende, a ghost or incubus, prowls the passages, luckily only bothering Bolivian guests in their beds. It is generally believed that the duende is the unquiet spirit of a workman killed as sacrifice to Pachamama, the all pervasive mother goddess, and duly placated enough by blood to bring luck to the hotel. Our female guide has to share a room with our indefatigably brilliant jeep driver and the duende fails to put in any appearance to detract from the fleecy sheeted comforts of this frosty oasis under its endless canopy of stars.

Hotel Lowlife - the Cockroach Scale

Unquenchable curiosity continually tempts the keenest traveller from the path to luxury and lounge lizardry in search of less well-trodden trails. For some, nothing less than a polar trek or conquest of the greatest summits; for others, the sight of a rarely mentioned Renaissance fresco, a mosaic pavement buried by desert sands, or the jungle hidden tombs of some long gone dynasty. New travel destinations are rare as hens’ teeth but fashions come and go like boutique hotels and places less travelled are still to be found without braving the extremes of height and climate. There is, for instance, nothing like a recent war zone for the insatiable tourist who wants to be alone although check out the risks before you go. The addicted traveller delights in the discomforts and sparse amenities that thin holiday crowds in an unspoilt area and, even in our shrunken World, there is always somewhere isolated and uncomfortable enough to offer a hint of adventure.

I must admit to only the slightest interest in travel that calls for survival training. I don’t much like camping but to visit the distant places I most want to see I can cope with a tent even if I can’t put it up. In reality canvas is often preferable to some of the basic hostels, hotels and guest houses in parts of Asia and Africa, Europe too, as experienced by the thrifty backpacker. Your own sleeping bag or pillow with dirt of recognisable provenance is more inviting than an unwashed and potentially bug ridden alternative. The back of a bush is an airy improvement on a hole in the ground in a dark and reeking cubicle, a bucket of clean water better than the dribble from a public shower. I do envy the travellers in converted 4x4s crossing vast continents with every possible amenity including fridges, stoves and beds ready to unfold from door and boot; their roofs laden with jerry cans of water and fuel. This is cool caravanning and not at all the same as the Winnebago option but it isn’t cheap and the inhabitants of these fascinating vehicles are usually disappointingly unglamorous; retired and well-padded, on their trip of a lifetime, seldom young, beautiful and fancy free.

Camping as the least bad option is not always possible or advisable so, for readers of this website, I suggest a new scale of hotel and guest house ratings and hope people will send me details of their own unstarry accommodation for the benefit of others. The most basic hotel may not get the worst rating, don’t forget those expensive establishments, far worse than the fleapits for their dashing of high expectations. Cockroach Ratings will be entirely subjective judgements for and by travellers set on adventure in less cushioned places or simply short of cushioning cash. 5 stars should mean the heights of hedonism, 5 cockroaches is about as bad as it gets and, shamelessly bastardising their prestigious model, the absolute opposite to the Michelin Guide’s 5 spoons and forks offering ‘Luxury in the traditional style’.





To be avoided at all costs unless there are no options whatsoever or you have a passion for entomology, no sense of smell and very large rose-tinted spectacles. This place will be very dirty indeed. The bathroom will be flooded and smell terrible. Any basins or baths will empty directly onto the floor where the water will pool around the blocked central drain. Where the water comes from is a mystery as no taps or showers work and buckets are unavailable unless you have your own. European loos will be blocked and/or not working, the dry cistern balanced carefully atop a pipe unattached to any plumbing. Squat loos will be evidently over patronised and naturally unflushable; pouring water down the hole probably won’t help much. If there are doors they will be too short for female modesty. The insect life will be distracting.

The bed will be a plank, the mattress bruising, the pillow a rectangle of hard green or yellow foam rubber. Greying mosquito nets will be populated by flying cockroaches and spiders. Discard any sheets or blankets at all costs. There may be bed bugs or fleas and mosquitoes will abound. The room will smell of drains and Deet. Naked wires will coil out of the walls at all levels and If there is electricity it will be intermittent. All plugs will be dangerous. The fan, if it works and it is hot, will clank ceaselessly through its wobbling revolutions, alternatively it will be very cold. There will be a television; it will be the only thing that works.

The staff will be the surly individual with a squint who takes your payment in advance and several undernourished children clutching mops and buckets. Another television will be on at deafening volume by the entrance. Many of the squinty ones friends will be loitering there eyeing up the luggage and the guests, talking and laughing loudly. There will be no shop or restaurant nearby for food or bottled water. If there is food available in the hotel, just starve. With a torch, sleeping bag, strong bladder and good book, you may pass the night if you have to.





The same but less so

This is probably the correct category for the genuine basic hotel – not at all the same thing as the basic hotel of the tour operators. It is quite simply the only place to stay in a small town, in Ethiopia for instance, and almost certainly the restaurant, bar and brothel too. It is the equivalent of the Indian Dhaba, the stopping off place near the main road for truckers and drivers the length and breadth of the sub-continent, providing chai, local food and women and a charpoy to sleep it all off. Some dhabas are famous for their excellent food; some of those have grown into flourishing modern restaurants and are on the tourist trail. In India, however, there are usually alternative places for tourists to stay catering for even the most penny pinched, not always the case in Africa.

Some might give the basic hotel a 4 or 5 cockroach rating but I think it is better than that. There is no pretence at all about a basic hotel and, in desert places, the insect life may not be too bad either. Cockroaches are extremely rare; mosquitoes dependent on place and season; bed bugs and fleas less endemic in places where rooms are unshuttered little boxes swept daily and many sleep out of doors. Bathroom facilities cannot be recommended, are very public and are only to be tried in extremis but someone will almost certainly supply you with a bucket of water. The shower, a pipe sticking out of the wall in an inadequate cubicle, may provide water – buckets are usually preferable. You may find a scorpion but although more dangerous, they are shyer, nicer things than cockroaches and stand still to be killed.

Insects aside, life is sickeningly easier for the male traveller in such places and the basic hotel will usually be patronised largely by local men, mainly truck drivers and traders. They will naturally stare a good deal whether you are 19 or 90. The bar/restaurant will have rats in the rafters but the food, freshly cooked, will be edible. Omelettes or scrambled eggs and bread are nearly always good enough and pasta or rice are ubiquitous. Aside from the rats, the public area of the basic hotel will have a television showing European football, Hollywood or Bollywood films, a local soap or news. The audience will interact loudly with the television in between power cuts. The television is in any case at top volume to rise above the roar of the generator. When it is finally turned off around midnight the silence feels like a solid structure.

You will of course have your own sleeping bag, pillow, towel and torch and will expect nothing more than you get. Under your surprisingly clean mosquito net, you will sleep like a dream.

Both this and the 1 cockroach category may mean more of the above but with slightly improved facilities, less dirt, more electricity or water, less animal life. Alternatively we slip into rating hotels that sometimes come into other tourist categories. They are triumphs of hope, the owners’, over experience, the patrons’, and may, for instance, have 1 or even 2 stars on tourist websites, albeit not for any Michelin standard in comfort or quality food. They probably cost US$50 or more a night depending on location and have decor that is either exhausted and vaguely historic or brand new and temporarily glossy plastic. For their first few weeks things work ok. By the time you arrive in week 10, tired, dirty and craving some promised modern amenities, nothing works at all.

The restaurant is serving only one dish from its extensive expensively bound and badly spelled menu. There is beer but it is probably warm, the fridge is broken and the sweating businessmen in straining suits are drinking local whisky while eyeing up the bar girls. The telephone gets through to the front desk and no further. The whole place was made of concrete in a week and is cracking a week later. The carpeted passages smell of damp and the bathrooms of drains. The plug on the television is the wrong size for the wall socket and there is no aerial cable. There is only cold water today and maybe forever. The fittings arrived flat packed from China and have been constructed without benefit of the instructions which are in Chinese only – the plastic furniture is chipped.

Service is either nervously smilingly and uncomprehending or enraged and obstructionist although there are a lot of staff. You have a row with the manager when you want to change rooms due to the bad smell and end up in the bridal suite which has gilt plastic curlicues on everything and smells too but mainly of disinfectant. Nothing works.

There is a huge unspeakable beetle in your room or worse, a praying mantis. They are attracted by quasi luxury. There are 2 large cockroaches in the shower. You kill them with a handy book. Later you find two more in the basin.

Like the 2 cockroach hotel, you will have found hotels of this category in your Lonely Planet or Rough Guide and it will be on the hostelbookers.com website. It will probably be the only hotel off the tourist track in a small town, in India for instance, that foreigners can or ever have stayed in. It may be the place in a capital city in South East Asia or Africa that more poverty stricken travellers frequent if they can afford better than a youth hostel or a doss house. It will be quite clean and most things will work. It will be on a main street over a street level shop selling pots and pans.

There will be occasional internet connection and a laundry service that returns both clean and, dependant on location and climate, possibly well-ironed clothes. There may be a very loud antique air conditioner in your room with no temperature control. Your choice, boil or freeze. You will get CNN, BBC World, Al-Jazeera and plenty of English language films with subtitles on the television although the colour will come and go a bit. Someone will have touched up the paintwork and may have tried with the decor. Pity about the curtains and the grubby plastic flowers.

There may be a restaurant. Unfortunately the cook will try too hard to produce tourist friendly food so it will be filthy and you will be better eating on the streets. Breakfast may be fine.

Something will leak in the bathroom, probably the cistern of the loo, but not too much. Failing piped water, and this is possible off the beaten track even in better or less cockroached categories, there will be a ready supply of buckets of hot water. Loos may be European or squat but will be clean. There will naturally be a cockroach behind the curtain and another, squashed, by the reception desk.


The Michelin Guide additionally categorises hotels for particular bonuses in views, peaceful setting, atmosphere or some other unusually pleasing feature. I doubt these are any more relevant to the cockroach scale than the symbols for tennis courts and indoor or outdoor swimming pools. It is unlikely that you will find an exercise room although a television is, as previously stated, almost mandatory, working or not. It is not entirely out of the question that a 2 cockroach hotel may have a so-called conference room. It will have aspirations to being a business hub. In general you will probably settle for what you can get and further details will be irrelevant but just in case you stay somewhere long enough to notice, I am defining the cockroaches a little further.

For unusually decent location regardless of the number of cockroaches they will be on a red background

For unusually helpful people running your cockroach hotel, this sign will be an additional indicator

There is little point in suggesting that this or that sight is worth a journey or a detour. If you have got yourself there it is probably for your own good reasons or due to the failings of local transport and you will not need anyone else’s opinion to make up your mind what you think. If you have very strong views about the merits or demerits of a particular place, say so. You can guarantee that good or ill you are encouraging some other adventurous spirit to go there.