The Hotel Bravo
Further south in Petatlan, I found what has got to be a personal never-to-be-topped-again best in cheap accommodations. I found a hotel room for just seven dollars per night, and had to take it if only on principal. What a glorious shithole the Hotel Bravo was. The sort of establishment where you could quietly and in peace nurse yourself through the last lonely days of a terminal alcohol dependency. The Hotel Bravo certainly seemed to be in the midst of its last lonely days.
Imagine a building caught somewhere between a Soviet-era apartment house and a long-ago abandoned mental hospital – minus the charm. Discarded mattresses lay in a pile on the third floor. Surprisingly large rooms opened to the wide and quiet hallways through broken interior windows. One room was mysteriously written off altogether – its doorway boarded over. Visible through its broken window, and with its bed, linens, and furniture still intact, it looked like a museum exhibit without its wax figurines.
I was the only guest in the otherwise vacant hotel; I didn’t shower alone though. Small black bugs scuttled around my feet before being washed back down the drain they’d crawled out of. The shower floor and bathroom floor were one in the same. Two five- gallon buckets collected rain water seeping through the blistered ceiling. The shower itself consisted of a single cold-water valve. It did, however, have excellent pressure.
There are a few things a guy can get away with if travelling unescorted by a wife or girlfriend. My stay at the Hotel Bravo was clearly one of them.
Oh yeah, the landlady let me park my motorcycle right in the lobby.
Safe secure parking
My room at the Ritz