The 100 Rupee Hotel Room

I like to save a buck where possible, and there´s a certain thrill in finding a hotel room for the equivalent of just a few dollars. I've stayed in such a wide variety of hotels in the past decade: the San Francisco Clift at $400 per night, $200 per night romantic B&Bs, a $30 plywood cubicle with a twin cot and chicken wire for a roof in Brooklyn NY, a $2 bed in a crumbling hostel in Managua Nicaragua, and so on, up and down over the years. Comforts are nice to have but hardly essential and staying cheap has never bothered me much one way or another.

When it comes to hotels in India, what you pay for is what you get. We find our most recent room at Hotel Mehrangarh in Jaisalmer´s old city for an uber-cheap 100 rupees a night ($2). It has a private bathroom, is free of vermin, and is located near the entrance to the old Fort on the hill. I discuss with Nick and the older English bloke who shared our ride and we agree it´s not the nicest place we´ve ever seen, but it´s servicable. We go ahead and book a room and are happy just to be settled.

But as we spend our first nights in town in the hotel I become unsettled. The bed turns out to be a glorified wooden board (technically there´s a mattress but it doesn´t do much for softness), the wall is crumbling near a huge water stain, and the only window faces into the hotel and is occupied by an enormous portable A/C unit surrounded by ripped cardboard to stuff the holes. I can live with these flaws, but the room also is located near the central stairwell and I discover the staff have a habit of waking up pre-dawn and shouting loudly to each other right outside of our cardboard-covered "window." The flourescent hallway light just outside our door buzzes very loudly and they flip it on at odd hours of the night and forget to turn it off. Light + annoying noise + shouting in Hindi = cranky Laura.

Another thing I really happen to enjoy is shopping around and understanding what my options are. While Nick is stuck in bed with traveler's sickness one day, I decide to give myself a tour of Jaisalmer's hotel accommodations. With no set budget in mind and Lonely Planet in hand, I head off to Ghandi Chowk, the town's central market square. Vendors call after me, "madam, madam, please look madam, best deal, half off, madam..." trying to get me to buy stitchwork bedspreads, clothing, faux silver jewelry, leather bags, bottled water, camel safaris, and bike rentals, but I'm on a mission and ignore them all.

I limit myself to choices surrouding Ghandi Chowk, so we can relocate much closer to the action. I see a midrange hotel first, which has much tidier rooms and softer beds. The man who shows me around has a lazy eye and thick tufts of hair growing from the sides of his ears (not in, on), but for 650 rupees ($14) the rooms are significantly more comfortable than Mehrangarh. I feel better already.

For kicks I tour luxury rooms in a former mansion, Hotel Mandir Palace, set well back from the noise and chaos of Ghandi Chowk in a huge private courtyard. The hotel is made of beautiful polished marble and has all the modern amenities in a romantic setting fit for a maharaja. The room is extremely secluded and quiet, but at 4600 rupees ($100) I think this might be a bit overboard.

Next I see several Lonely Planet recommended budget hotels along a street off the Chowk: Hotel Swastika, Hotel Renuka, and Hotel Ratan Palace. The rooms here are a (small) step up from Mehrangarh and hover around 300 rupees ($6), but I'm not in love. They are much more central and are reportedly low-hassle on the camal safari front, but the bottom line is that these places are still shabby and very minimal, with hard beds and questionable bathrooms.

I have wandered into a nice-looking textile shop called Killa Boutique, sticking out like a sore thumb in the middle of the dusty market. This is a store in the proper sense and the glass door closes behind me blocking out the street noise and mooing cows. I chat casually with the employee, and he doesn't pressure me to buy anything at all. I learn that the boutique sells some items to the Anthropologie chain in the US and that they are associated with two Jaisalmer hotels: Killa Bhawan and K.B. Lodge. Killa Bhawan is as expensive as Mandir Palace and built into the fort walls, so staying there is an ethical no-no (the fort itself is crumbling due to current water usage at 12x original capacity on the aging sewer system). But I do decide to check out K.B. Lodge and set off down yet another cow-pie covered lane to find it.

The moment I walk into K.B. Lodge my mood changes. The rooms are tastefully decorated in shades of deep reds and warm yellows, the bathrooms are clean in the truest sense, the beds are soft and have proper pillows, linens, and blankets, towels are provided, and mosquito-repellant incense burns a wonderful smell into the hallways. The staff is friendly and happy to show me rooms at two price levels: 1600 ($34) for a small room, 2200 ($47) for a larger room. Complimentary Chai, tea, coffee, mineral water, and breakfast is included to boot.

As a final option, our "internet man" Kamal shows me a hotel he's associated with, Hotel Peacock. A nicer room is 500 rupees a night ($11) and at that price falls in comfort level between Mehrangarh and K.B. Lodge, but the hotel is across the street from Swastika and Ratan Palace putting it in a perfect location off the Chowk.

Later I return to Hotel Mehrangarh and discuss options with Nick, who's finally starting to feel better. We desperately want to move hotels that night but by the time we get out for dinner it's already late. At least armed with a variety of options it makes staying on one more night a bit easier.

I'm hesitant to splurge on K.B. Lodge though by far it's my favorite of all the hotels. Nick, always the more romantic of us, encourages me to worry less about cost and pick the hotel that I liked the best. He says my mood has changed dramatically for the better just having seen options, but he can easily tell how much I want to stay at K.B. For context, at $47/night the room is more than our entire daily budget (about $42).

We decide to compromise by staying at Peacock for one night, going on a camel safari for a few days, and then treating ourselves to one night in true comfort at K.B. when we return with sore asses. This feels by far like the right choice.

I've learned a few things while in Jaisalmer. It's not as easy for me to stay in the cheapest-of-the-cheap as I thought. Maybe I'm not as young anymore, or maybe I've gotten too used to comforts, or maybe it never was that easy and I always just settled. I don't need to stay in a real luxury hotel (trust me, there are some - one maharaja's palace outside of Udaipur hosts the likes of Bill Gates for $2000/night), but there's something to be said for spending a little more to get a little more. We should be able to spend 300-500 rupees on hotel rooms for most of our stay and take a nicer K.B.-like room once every few weeks to break up the routine and get a really good night of sleep.

At our next stop, Agra, we'll definitely shop around and view several hotel rooms. It's not worth taking the first room we see for the sake of squaring our luggage away immediately. It's also not necessarily worth taking the cheapest room we find, even if it is fun to bargain down to 100 rupees a night.