Never Trust A Hotel Review

As most people probably do, we always ensure we check reviews before we book to stay somewhere. A bit of due diligence before parting with hundreds of pounds is surely a reasonable thing to do? 

However, one thing I’ve become aware of having stayed in such a large number of places, in a short period of time, is that you can never trust a hotel review.

One person’s idea of a delicious breakfast, was my idea of what you’d imagine getting served as an inmate in a South American prison.

A tropical paradise - surprising one guest who was shocked to find one insect.

Likewise, someone’s horror story 1 star review, just because they found an insect (in what is effectively a jungle), leaves me wondering why they wanted to holiday amongst nature at all.

Or negative feedback for a hotel, because the nearby sea, yes that natural force of nature, had too many waves.

These are extremes of course, but I’ve also seen many 10/10 booking.com reviews where people have then gone on to add some negative feedback and it leaves me wondering why some people don’t understand the concept of scale.

Surprisingly no mentions of the toilet being in the shower cubicle, for this hotel.

So here’s the part I’m meant to tell you what you should do to avoid any disappointments. A list of hacks. A top 10 list for guaranteeing a perfect stay every time.

The problem is that there is no magic formula. Travel inevitably involves discomfort, compromise and occasionally realising that your idea of somewhere doesn’t quite match reality.

The longer we travel, the more I realise people are often reviewing their own expectations as much as the hotel itself.

Hotel reviews tell you less about the hotel than the person writing them.

If you enjoyed this, you might like the below too…

One Last Push

My legs tighten. One last push. Over another bump in the gravel and the climb finally gives way, opening out into a plateau. A stretch of green rice fields ahead, the sun catching on the flooded plains. Zebra doves make their mechanical whirring sound overhead as a worker in a conical hat walks past.

It feels like I’m in a film. And yet, somehow it is exactly as you’d expect it to feel in a place like this. Early morning mist lifting above the tree line. Mount Rinjani sitting behind it all, fixed against a big blue sky.

Mount Rinjani looming large, Tetebatu.

We cycle through small villages where children run out to greet us. Smiling and waving with the kind of enthusiasm you don’t question at that age.

Back into the fields and another scene opens up. A narrow dirt path raised between paddies, water on either side. Palm trees line the horizon. A small thatched house sits just ahead. A woman walks along the path, and it stops feeling like a film set, to something lived.

The tempo is slow, meandering, but deliberate. Getting lost feels like the point. There’s always the sense that something might appear just around the next bend.

Tetebatu rice fields, Lombok, Indonesia.

Eventually, we reach Hideaway Coffee - a name that, for once, doesn’t overpromise. It’s tucked away along a narrow pathway off the main road. Past more rice fields, through the edge of someone’s yard, a hen and her chicks scattering as we pass.

We leave the bikes at the top of a steep hill. Where a sign announces we are at the Hideaway, yet it’s nowhere in sight (appropriately). Narrow dirt steps cut through thick greenery. A short walk, a bamboo bridge, and then it opens out into a clearing with terraced levels where the eclectically furnished café sits, blending into its natural habitat. It feels like a natural end point.

We sit with coffee and pick up a book from a nearby shelf about why humans evolved to have a brain.

I look up from the page for a bit and take it all in.

Hideaway cafe - living up to its name.

If you enjoyed this, you might like the below too…

The Third Space

Having a third space is having a place outside of your home, or workplace, to convene or relax. It might be purposeful, like a pub or a café. Or it could be something less obvious, like a park or a beach.

During my time in the Philippines, I’ve found it more difficult to write. That may well be natural - a trough, a kind of writer’s block. Then I was ill, which disrupted the best part of a week…Not exactly a fertile environment for creativity.

But even accounting for that, I think the biggest reason comes back to the idea of a third space.

CYC Beach, Palawan. A would-be third space?

Of course, the Philippines has many of the things I’ve mentioned before. But none of them have yet felt like mine in the same way they have elsewhere. The beaches, particularly around the more popular parts of Palawan, often feel utilitarian. Places designed to serve movement. Boats coming and going, ferrying people out to the natural beauty that sits just beyond, out at sea.

They are gateways, rather than places to settle.

A cafe in Coron Town - a perfect spot

This isn’t a woe-is-me reflection from a privileged position. It’s simply an observation. Our environments shape us more than we tend to acknowledge. What appears exotic and beautiful on the surface doesn’t always translate into creativity or clarity, if the conditions to properly be present, to reflect, aren’t quite there.

The third space is that condition.

It’s a kind of safe haven. A regular café at home, or a one-off walk through a park while travelling, they serve the same purpose. A temporary removal from the noise of everyday life, whatever that life happens to be.

A freeing of burden. An unravelling of thought. And, perhaps most importantly, a chance to be at ease with yourself.

The Bay of Bacuit

If you enjoyed this, you might like the below too…

Seen From Elsewhere

On a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Cebu, I look down and spot a cluster of small tropical islands off the coast of Borneo. All green jungle, ringed by white sand and clear turquoise water.

I wonder who is there, what it might be like. Within seconds I feel a pull towards them, stronger than anywhere else, despite having been unaware of them less than a minute before.

Tropical beach - Palawan, The Philippines.

The following day I’m lying still on my back in the sea. Clear water, white sand behind me, thick jungle beyond. A group of swifts circle overhead. Then a plane cuts across the sky, and I’m taken back to 24 hours earlier.

Here I am now, in a place not so different from the one I’d looked down on with envy, but on the other side of it. I start to wonder who is on that plane, where it’s going, what they’re seeing below. Whether someone up there has just added somewhere new to their list.

The view hasn’t changed. Only the position.

An aircraft above - a shift of perspective

If you enjoyed this, you might like the below too…

Sri Lanka - Beauty & Discomfort

The ceiling fans whip above our heads at an alarming rate, trying to keep pace with the mid-afternoon humidity as those of us sampling afternoon tea on the veranda at the Amangalla Hotel in Galle attempt to tread the fine line between refinement and simply keeping cool, all while downing cups of hot tea.

It is a slightly nostalgic afternoon for a period of time of which I have no living knowledge. Anemoia, to quote my musician friend Yarni.

The building itself has lived several lives. Once the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, later Galle’s first hotel under British rule, and now a quietly polished luxury stay.

Like many places on the island, Sri Lanka still carries clues of its European colonial past.

Old world luxury - Amangalla Hotel, Galle

In Pettah, a red post box inscribed with GR for King George sits almost unsuspectingly beside a bald car tyre filled with concrete. Even the humble custard cream, that quiet mainstay of the British biscuit tin, is readily available in supermarkets.

But the story here is not solely British.

At Geoffrey Bawa’s Colombo residence and at his country estate at Lunuganga, outside influences appear in more considered ways. Less in your face Mini Cooper energy, more quiet synthesis.

Born to a Sri Lankan father and Dutch mother, Bawa began life as a lawyer before turning later to architecture. What he left behind feels deeply deliberate. There is no pastiche here. No attempt to impose European forms wholesale onto tropical ground.

Instead, Bawa allows the space itself to do the work. Clear sightlines. Considered light. A calm sanctuary designed for thinking and for living.

His trophies are different too. Murano glass. Indian artwork. Fragments gathered from across the world and absorbed rather than imposed.

Geoffrey Bawa’s Lunuganga residence

Sri Lanka today feels like a country steadily finding its own feet. After years of internal strain, a modern identity is forming, unevenly but visibly.

Nowhere is this more apparent than along the southern coast, where development and tourist appetite sometimes appear to be outpacing the infrastructure beneath them. Hastily built beachside accommodation sits beside small local shacks selling fruit, snacks, or lottery tickets.

And then an Ashok Leyland bus roars past, and the old world briefly returns once more.

Workers at the Dambatenne Tea Factory

Travel a couple of hours north of the beaches of the south coast and you reach the tea country at Uva. Another relic of the past, where the country’s first commercial tea bushes were planted by the British. By the early twentieth century, the vast estates that remain today were already in place.

A visit to Dambatenne tea factory, built in 1890 by a Scot, Thomas Lipton, furthers this feeling of the old world. Not only is the factory still standing, but much of the British-made machinery within it remains in operation. Our tour guide was incredibly keen to show these off to ourselves, from the UK.

However, here too, the stark contrasts of Sri Lanka loom large as workers tirelessly labour in questionable conditions for the equivalent of around £3.60 a day. A reminder that cosplaying with nostalgia has very real downsides for those in the thick of the reality of real life.

It isn’t only ornate architecture, beautiful design and tea-drinking rituals. There is a real human element at play, one where people are exploited today just as they were back then.

Tea plantation worker in the hills near Ella

It makes me think about how morally difficult it can sometimes feel being a tourist. The natural curiosity and delight of catching a glimpse into a time you didn’t experience; often via small, real-time moments, albeit in modern clothes and modern technology - sits awkwardly beside an awareness of the hardship faced by others.

The balance between bringing much-needed outside money and avoiding the temptation to turn a day trip into a photoshoot of poverty.

Most people don’t like to be uncomfortable when they travel, but perhaps discomfort is an unavoidable part of seeing the world honestly. Something to learn from, to grow from and to try and affect positively, in your own little way. An opportunity to appreciate beauty whilst also recognising and respecting the difficulties that others live with every day.

As Anthony Bourdain once put it:

“Travel is not always pretty. It is not always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you.”

Railway relics from another era

*All photos used were done so with the permission of those photographed*

If you enjoyed this, you might like the below too…

Paradise Isn’t Always Quiet

A loud rumble of a vehicle passes close to my right side as I walk along the dusty, dry street, narrowly avoiding uneven slabs of pavement and stepping over open drain covers.

Welcome to the hustle of southern Sri Lanka. A place where beautiful seas and beaches sit in uneasy tandem with the overcrowded coastal road. Where nature is in direct competition with humanity’s relentless pursuit of growth at all costs.

A simple walk to the shop for water often turns into an assault course for the senses. A Leyland Ashok bus hurtles through town at unnecessary speed, brushing the already heavy air across your body with even greater intensity, as a seemingly endless fleet of tuk tuks passes by asking if you need a ride.

After almost two weeks away, the prospect of returning to the beach brings a flicker of excitement.

It doesn’t last long.

Ashok Leyland Bus - A Sri Lankan menace

I’d read the beach would be busy with people drawn by the turtles, but I hadn’t expected quite this. Masses of people huddle around the giant animals at the shoreline, lured in by food bought from beach vendors and tossed into the shallows. Visitors crowd around, phones raised, inappropriate poses readied and edging closer and closer.

On one occasion my wife pulls a plastic bag (used for the aforementioned food) from the water, left drifting where a turtle might easily have swallowed it. Nearby, she gently but firmly tells a woman to stop pushing one of the animals for a better photo.

It feels wrong. Upsetting. A little hollow.

A circus, not the quiet encounter with wildlife I had imagined.

It reminds me that travel isn’t always soft edges and easy beauty.

Relaxation at Ahangama Secret Beach

Two days later we finally find a beach that ticks the most important boxes: quiet, safe and calm. We decompress almost immediately. Each sip of the chilled king coconut from the nearby beach hut a literal tonic to the heat exhaustion. 

The repetition of sea-sunbathe-sea-hydrate becoming a seductive mantra for relaxation and unwinding. The day passes slowly and upon returning to the main road, there’s almost a feeling of the outside world being one of calm. And then it hits you again - the offers of a tuk tuk ride, hurtling blue buses and weaving mopeds. The sea breeze is behind you and it’s a race back to the comfort of the air conditioned room for respite.

The cycle continues for a few days and we settle into a nicely compromised daily ritual. Morning light and walks. A cafe. Then to the beach before returning for a rest and then braving the busy streets once more for our evening meal.

Respite at The Kip, Ahangama

We depart the south coast and head to Udawalawe National Park and the following day take a safari. 

Our jeep crawls through winding jungle roads past tropical birds and groups of monkeys who look like that incredibly ugly bloke we all know. Over bumpy tracks into vast watery plains with colourful peacocks and gurning water buffalo (there’s the ugly man again!).

And finally, the king of Udawalawe. The elephant.

We see a few lone males and small family groups along the way, but nothing beat the final roll of the dice when we turned down a quiet back road and stumbled upon a small herd eating and bathing in the muddy water.

Total bliss just sitting in silence. The only sound being the spraying of water and mud onto their hot brown skin, watching these beautiful creatures go about their day peacefully from touching distance. 

And at that moment I realise just how much noise we had been carrying inside and what paradise really means to me.

Elephants bathing in the mud, Uduwalawe

If you enjoyed this, you might like the below too…