For someone whose living depends, in part, on writing about
travel services, I feel oddly indifferent toward hotels – to my mind, the point
of travel is not where you sleep, but what you do. So long as I have a good
firm bed and a hot shower, in reasonably quiet surroundings, I’m pretty
satisfied. I’ve never been impressed with five-star rankings as such, largely
because to my mind they’re pretty meaningless unless you have no intention of
ever leaving the building.
That attitude dates from my earliest trips to Latin America,
in the mid-1970s. Before then, I had visited Mexico several times, but really
only the borderlands, and had never quite placed the country and the region in
any conceptual framework. It was in San
Cristóbal de Las Casas, in the state of Chiapas,
that I first really appreciated the contrast between the smug comfort of the First
World and the Spartan utilitarianism of the Third.
There, on a truly shoestring budget, I stayed in a six-bed
dormitorio with five other gringos for five pesos each - at that time about
US$0.40 per night. On one particularly dark and drizzly day, most of us
remained in the room reading, with the door shut to keep out the cold, and we switched
on the light - a 25-watt bulb (approximately four watts per person) hanging
from the ceiling. Soon thereafter, the passing owner noticed the faint light
escaping the room, opened the door and flipped it off with the admonition that
“Electricity is very expensive!” For many years after that moment, I continued
to spend much of my travels in what, later, I came to call “George W. Bush rooms”
- they all had dim bulbs. Even though, as I’ve gotten older and appreciate greater
creature comforts, I can’t resist rating hotels not by stars, but by wattage.
That’s why, when I read trade magazines such as Conde Nast
Traveler, I still cringe when, in their annual “Hot List” of the world’s best
new hotels, they boast that some of them cost less than US$300 per night
(in the current issue, that comes to 62 of the 154 mentioned). Still, I always
look to see how many hotels appear from my region of choice. This year’s list
features just one hotel from Argentina,
but four from Chile.
The only Argentine accommodations on the list is Recoleta’s
Hub Porteño (pictured at top) which, though
I have not stayed there, I did pay a visit in December. This 11-room hotel is
little unusual in the sense that it’s an all-inclusive facility; Argentina’s
all-inclusive hotels, of course, are more often guest ranches and isolated
resorts than urban enclaves. As you might guess from its Francophile look and
location (adjacent to the similarly exclusive but substantially larger Park Hyatt
Palacio Duhau), it’s not in the “Under US$300” category.
In Chile, I have in fact stayed at Hangaroa Eco Village & Spa (pictured
above) which, however, was in marcha blanca (roughly translatable as “soft
launch”) when I last visited Easter
Island a year ago. Unfortunately, when I visited Valparaíso
in the same month, the recycled Victorian Hotel Palacio Astoreca (pictured
below) was still undergoing its transformation from a crumbling Cerro
Alegre mansion to an elegant new boutique hotel. It’s one I would be
curious about staying at and, astonishingly, it still falls into Condé Nast’s
“budget” category (which the Hangaroa most assuredly does not).
One of the Chilean entries is the Hotel Surazo, a modern seaside hotel in the
central coast town of Matanzas which, prior to its listing, I had never even
heard of. There is also the all-inclusive Hotel
Refugia which, apparently, hopes to turn the city of Castro
in a luxury gateway to the Chiloé
archipelago. I can’t give any of these star classifications, but they’re
all upwards of 100 watts.
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