Pirates, discos and bagels: The joy of budget accommodation

We’ve covered a lot of Mexico in the last three days - 915 miles to be precise. We’ve moved from the sweltering flat lands of the Yucatan to the mountainous silver towns of the north. Spending so many hours (27 to be precise) watching dubbed films on buses is tiring business. We have therefore been lucky to find some gems of places to rest our weary heads.

We started in Campeche, a pastel crayon coastal town of blistering heat (too hot even for me to sunbathe), where the Maya traded before the Spanish invaded and pirates pilfered. We were staying in the Hostal de Pirata (I won’t translate). We were greeted by a skeleton in complete pirate costume, a chest of skulls with googly stuck-on eyes and two empty rocking chairs eerily rocking. How very apt. The owner was, however, not a pirate (he merely extorted 270 pesos (£13.50) for a night’s accommodation) but an architect. It was therefore a little unexpected to find ourselves stepping over one another in a tiny box room only a metre larger than a double bed with just a sliding screen separating our ’living’ space and the bathroom. The room was hot, and having the windows open only made it hotter. So we closed them and turned on the fan, which creaked like a pirate’s plank.

The hostel was creatively designed, albeit not with space for backpacks in mind, with a wonderful roof terrace. The views across the city to the sea were incredible, although it was too hot to even stand at look at them. To take refuge from the heat we would hide underneath the palm leaf shelter on the roof or stand in the street. It was too hot to be inside. Even though most windows in Campeche don’t have glass, only bars, even the locals found it too hot to be inside. So instead we all stood outside our respective pastel coloured doorway watching each other trying not to move for fear of breaking out in a sweat.

It was a relief to get on our air-conditioned bus and bed for the night. Bedtime viewing was Are We Done Yet? featuring Ice Cube building a house. If an ex-gangster rapper DIY film dubbed into Spanish isn’t enough to send you to sleep nothing will. I slept surprisingly well waking outside a restaurant near Veracruz where I stood watching forlorn cows (the ones with droopy ears) chew maize stalks before getting back on the bus and watching a film about Italians going to the New World to swim in milk with jumbo carrots. Or was I still dreaming?

We got off in Puebla, delirious and not looking forward to, but desperately needing, our next bed, which was in the only hotel with rooms available from the ‘basic’ range touting ‘dingy, dungeon like rooms’. Puebla doesn’t do hostels - the guide book descriptions led us to believe that you either get hell holes or the Hilton. We were therefore rather impressed by the Hotel San Miguel. It wasn’t a dingy dungeon at all, but instead a decorous disco palace. It was a time warp and we had just walked into the 1970s. The Hotel San Miguel had a lot of brown, a lot of Formica and a lot of gold trim. It was a treat. The lobby and lift played the Bee Gees and similar disco hits around the clock, moustachioed Mexican men lounged around on faux leather sofas smoking cigarettes and the lift had large clunking buttons that popped out when you arrived on your floor. I had one of my best night’s sleep of the whole trip here - the room was quiet and the floor length, brown curtains blocked out all light, we even had a (brown) reading lamp. For World in Slow Motion, this was hotel luxury.

Hotel San Miguel is not representative of Puebla. We shimmied out of the door and into a very sophisticated city. Puebla held onto Spanish tradition longer than most Mexican cities and you can see it in the buildings. They are tall and grand, many with ornate and tiled facades and wonderful arched colonnades. Scattered around the streets are seventy Catholic churches and the tallest cathedral in Mexico. With the highland altitude this city definitely felt cool in attitude and clime.
We were up and out early the next morning on a Primera Plus bus to Guanajuato. By choosing a different bus company we were hoping for a different selection of films (I’d actually seen the milk and giant carrots one before with ADO) and weren’t disappointed. Following a BBC wildlife documentary (oh yes!) we were treated to an Indian film - The Namesake. Irritatingly the bus arrived before we found out how the film ended. Such are the hazards of bus travel.

Guanajuato, as we discovered on arrival, is also known as the City of Kisses. No wonder then we had had such difficulty in booking a room on Valentine’s Day. So that is how we came to stay in a bagel bar, well not actually in it, but above it.

Again, slight trepidation upon arrival - there was no hostel entrance, just the bagel bar. Were we going to stay in the store room amongst sacks of flour? Was the hostel heated by boiling bagels? Such was our joy then when we were shown to our room, or should I say apartment. We were the only people staying in a grand old building with floor length windows and wooden shutters with a choice of three showers and a kitchen.

Bagel Cafetin is a gem of a place at only 250 pesos (£12.50) a night. It is stuck on the side of the Templo San Francisco - that’s it glowing on the right in the picture. We awoke in the morning to the sound of congregational hymn singing and the chiming of church bells. Very Sunday.

Luckily we hadn’t gone to bed late the night before, too tired from Digital Video Bus movies (DVB for short) and needing to escape the romance of the City of Kisses. Guanajuato is the most beautiful town we have visited in Mexico, with narrow streets, overhanging balconies and immaculate plazas it feels positively European. A very suitable setting for our romantic Valentine’s dinner of chorizo tacos on a bench. We did steal a kiss in Kiss Alley though, along with the other hundred or more couples queuing to get their picture taken (we refrained). Kiss Alley is so called due to two forbidden lovers who took rooms on either side of this street which is so narrow that their balconies nearly touched and they could sneak furtive kisses. They got caught of course.

The other alley way excitement in Guanajuato is the callejoneadas, which literally translates as alley-men but is nearer in meaning to wandering minstrels. This merry band of velvet bedecked musicians wander through the streets playing instruments (including a double bass) like Pied Pipers, with a merry band of tourists following behind. We tagged along until the point when they asked for tickets, then we scarpered. We wouldn’t be able to understand the stories and jokes anyway, and besides we wanted to get back to our bagel beds.

All three towns have been picturesque, all three accommodations quirky and accommodating and all three showers the best in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. We’re off early again tomorrow to sample Omnibus de Mexico’s film selection on the way to Zacatecas where I have high hopes for the Hostal Villa Colonial.