Sacrificial Shirts & Hotels with Towels

The world looks different through tired eyes. When you’re tired, your standard of acceptable challenges lowers drastically and every obstacle looms ten times larger than life. The world also looks different through refreshed eyes. A good night’s sleep, and yesterday’s problems can seem silly, abstract, and ridiculous. They can also seem completely incomprehensible: What was I thinking when I signed up for…?

Many, if not all, of my solo journeys have been of the hostel variety. I stayed in Wadi Rum for a week with a change of clothes and a camera. I’ve hostelled in the French country and on the Beirut corniche. I’ve taken night trains in order to save on hotel costs. Four of us girls did Italy for two weeks in the cheapest hostels available- we got what we paid for, hostel-wise, but the stories? Priceless. I remember sharing a flat, wooden mattress with Stacy, whom I barely knew, on the outskirts of Venice, in the freezing cold. We’d sleep with our backs together and just as we warmed up, our hips would start hurting from the mattress and we’d have to shift our bodies in order to relieve the pain, maintain some nominal degree of privacy, and share body heat under the thin blanket as the wind blew through the crack under the doorway. We didn’t sleep much, but let me tell you, there’s no better way to make friends.

So I consider myself a sort of experienced low-budget traveler. Nothing much surprises me anymore, not after coming into our Roman hostel at 2 AM and finding other people in our beds. Egypt, I thought, should be a piece of cake. And it was, in that there are hostels, and they are dirt cheap. Budget travelers have an easy time of it. But by the end of the trip, I was ready to turn in my hostel card and graduate to the next level of world traveler: hotels with towels.

Our Pension in Cairo was a sweet little place in Zamalek, near embassies and a Panini Café, with a pleasant courtyard where old men gathered and talked all day and, as far as we could tell, all night. Our room had two beds, a little balcony, and a shelving unit. The shared bathroom was relatively clean and there was hot water. The owner, Mr. Hady, was nice enough, a round man with a friendly, but serious, face. Lisa and I were happy to have found an affordable room that didn’t have bugs or dirty sheets. But when we went to take our showers we realized that the cute pension didn’t have towels, either. Nor had we brought any. So we made a sacrifice: We each took our cleanest dirty shirt (an odd tribute to Johnny Cash, perhaps) and used it to dry bodies and wrap up wet hair. This was surprisingly effective, but also … grimy. The towels were dry by morning, ready to be packed up again and hauled to our next destination. We were satisfied with this system.

But then came Nuweiba. Our Lonely Planet recommendation turned out to be very, very lonely. Not a woman in sight, in fact, and no other hostellers, despite the fact that they told us that all the rooms were booked (which, if you ask me, was a weird, but baldfaced nonetheless, lie.) It was a tired, rickety little room with two single beds and clean pink sheets on the crooked sidetable. The door stuck to the frame and required a good deal of shoving to open. The whole room was about as big as my bathroom in my studio apartment. Not to worry! I thought. I’ve done this before! I thought. So we took it. Grand total: $1. That’s right, no zeros.

But then we had our adventures with Mr. Mohammed and the Jeep That Wasn’t (Be patient! That story is coming soon.) And we returned after dark to our small, tired room which was next to the tired, smelly bathrooms and had ants crawling under the crooked door. The room seemed smaller now that there was no sunlight peeking in through the rafters, and sketchier now that we knew there were no other women around. There was no sound. Our mouths had a bad taste after our aggravating exchange with Mr. Mohammed. Slight feelings of claustrophobia crept up on us from the wet tile floor. Lisa slouched on her bed and I slouched on mine, and we conspired. We conspired to leave, to get outta Dodge, and somehow get to a hotel, a hotel with towels and windows and no groups of silent young men playing cards on the balconies above us. We weren’t sure it was worth it. It would be more prudent to stay put for one night, deal with the ants and the crooked rafters. Wouldn’t it? It was only costing us one dollar. Who could beat that?

But it wasn’t worth it. The tipping point had been reached, and we tipped. We didn’t know exactly how to escape, since there weren’t any taxis (which only heightened the feeling of claustrophobia), and it turned into quite an ordeal when we managed to do it, but we did. We escaped to the Dahab Hilton, a five star resort on the edge of the Red Sea, a resort with whitewash bungalows, big square patios, and three swimming pools. A resort with minibars, wake-up calls, and towels. Never have I so appreciated towels.

We rinsed our sacrificial shirts and hung them up on the towel rack. We slept like the dead in an enormous, fluffy bed with feathery pillows. We woke to the sun streaming through our wooden shutters. And the world looked a saner, approachable, and refreshed. What were we thinking, staying in Nuweiba in that one dollar hostel? Why didn’t we plan this better? How absurd is it that we paid someone 300 pounds to go to a hotel we didn’t even know had vacancies? It seemed ridiculous and abstract to me, like it had happened long ago, back when I Didn’t Know Any Better. But after a good night’s sleep on a fluffy bed, I knew better. I knew that that trip was worth every piaster and the $80/night hotel was the best money I’d ever spent.

The silly part is that I’d stayed in the Dahab Hilton before, in 2002 on my first trip to Egypt. I knew it existed, but I had ruled it out as too chichi for our low-budget adventures. But upon further reflection, I realize my folly. At $80/night, that’s what, a Motel 6 in Grand Rapids? Yeah.

So I’m done with the hostel vacations, at least the rougher sort. It’s worth the extra few dollars to have a little towel luxury that will make my vacation a vacation and not an exercise in sacrificial clothing.