The Chamborres Expedition

In our last post, Dalmatian Coast: Part I, we mentioned how we booked our Dubrovnik accommodations without much forethought at 4:00am on the day we were arriving. Before sharing the many pleasant parts of our visit to Dubrovnik, we will finish telling you the story of our hostel from hell. We hope that you find it amusing and that it will help prevent others from making the same mistakes we did.

After staying up until the wee hours of the morning, we were in no hurry to leave Split and get on the road to Dubrovnik, but had to keep moving. We didn’t know the check-out time of our current apartment. We hadn’t packed. We didn’t know when the bus was leaving. But, thankfully we did know where we would be staying that night in Dubrovnik. Or so we thought…

The bus ride from Split to Dubrovnik was absolutely gorgeous. It drove right along the coast which provided incredible views of rocky cliffs slipping into the Adriatic Sea. After four hours, we had arrived in Dubrovnik. Once we found the address of the hostel where we had booked a room, we looked at each other with a “is this really it?” sentiment. There was no sign, the yard was cluttered with debris, a half dead bird was twitching on the porch, and children’s toys were scattered about. There was no doorbell or buzzer to be found. We proceeded to knock on each of the house’s three doors. Finally, a lady answered. She showed us around, and within seconds we realized the awful mistake we had made.

The place was filthy and in terrible condition: stained sheets, chipped paint, a broken window, busted handles, rusted fan, mold and cobwebs. They were the most uninviting accommodations we have ever seen. After a little discussion, we decided to inform the lady that we would only be staying one night (since we were already locked in due to our online pre-booking) and cancelling the other two nights of our reservation. She blew up! She was yelling at us and threatening to call the police, demanding that we hand over our passports. Yeah right! We kept our cool and explained that our reservation email specified that we could cancel if we paid for the first night. Eventually we smoothed things over, paid for one night, and decided to tough-it-out. In hindsight, we don’t know what we were thinking; we should have hightailed it right out of there.

Attempting to distract our minds from this hellish inferno of hostel, we sat down to catch up on email, book a new room, and do some research about our up-and-coming trip to Turkey. Suddenly, Mike spotted a bed-bug crawling on one of the mattresses; then, Amy moved our camera bag and found another. Before we knew it, we had found a third. That was all it took; at 11:00pm we called the owner of our recently booked (and positively reviewed!) guesthouse and asked if we could check in immediately. This is where our luck turned around.

Nikkolina, the owner of our new guesthouse, was truly an angel. She could hear the distress in Amy’s voice, and despite her guesthouse being full, offered to meet us right away. Amy was nearly having a panic attack as we walked out of the place we now refer to simply as “Hell.” We basically ran across town, packs and all, through the drawbridge and into Old Town Dubrovnik.

When we arrived, Nikkolina showed us to an extra room where we could stay even though it was not typically used by guests. Although just a simple, cozy and clean guesthouse, this place looked like a 5 star hotel to us! It was after midnight by this point, and we knew there was still one more thing we had to do before falling asleep: a bed-bug inspection. Mike’s work history in hotel housekeeping came in handy. We whipped out our headlamp and flashlight (putting them to use for the first time) and went through every single item in our backpacks in painstaking detail. We found one hitchhiker, put him to death, and continued inspecting the rest of our gear. An hour later, we were done and confident we had conquered the situation. Still, falling asleep proved difficult; after some assistance from sleeping pills, however, we were finally able to get a relatively good night’s sleep.

What did we learn from this experience?

• Don’t wait until the day of arrival to book a guesthouse (especially if you’ve stayed out until the early morning).
• Don’t book an accommodation that doesn’t have any reviews online.
• If a place looks and/or feels wrong, leave immediately (dying birds cannot be a good omen).
• When in doubt, only book one night. It’s better to have to switch hotels because they are fully booked than to be stuck somewhere horrible.

You’re probably thinking right now, duh Mike & Amy, this is all common sense stuff. And, you’re right, it is. We like to consider ourselves relatively well traveled people, but the excitement of our RTW trip got the best of us. Yes, it could have been worse, but it felt like the pits at the time. It all worked out in the end, and we will share our amazingly positive experiences in Dubrovnik in the final chapter of this series – Dalmatian Coast: Part III.