Finding the best place to lay
your head each night can become something of an obsession for the backpacker. For me, “best” doesn't equal luxury – give me
quirky any day: a musty cave in Turkey, a tree house in Laos, or a hostel in
Damascus accessed up a dodgy rope ladder over the old city walls.
Pre-internet, it was all about
stumbling on these places, or meeting other travellers who recommended them.
Now word-of-mouth has moved online, and while the research junkies of this
world can spend hours comparing reviews (I can’t help it….), it’s now easier
for the best places to stand out.
Hostel Lao was top-rated in
Argentina’s wine capital Mendoza. A converted house, it didn’t have any of the
wacky features that usually attract me – but this was one of those places where
you wake up and ask “can we stay another night?” It did what many hostels can’t
muster: it made you feel at home in a foreign country.
Reason one? Common areas. I’ve
travelled a lot on my own, and this is the first thing I look for. It should be
illegal to have a hostel without good places to talk to other tourists. Hostel
Lao had a comfy lounge like a student flat, a grassy backyard, and the crowning
glory: a pool. It was the type of place where people looked up and smiled, and
each new entrant was embraced into any activity (including an inventive and
very competitive game of pool volleyball using a tennis ball and some string.)
It also had owners who genuinely
wanted to share their city with you. Hostel Lao was run by a Brit called Mike
and his Argentinian wife Celeste. Mike was smitten with Mendoza – not just with
Celeste – but with the region’s fine wines, and was keen we drunk only the
best. We’d heard good things about
Hugo’s bike tours round the vineyards (Dan’s brother and his fiance may even
have named their son after him) but Mike was mortified. “Don’t do it,” he said. “You’ll rock up
looking like the backpackers you are and they’ll feed you all their shit wine.”
Instead, he teamed us up with a German couple and drove us round on a personal
tour of his favourite wineries: which quickly descended into hazy hilarity.
Many Argentinian hostels have
asado nights, where enormous slabs of meat are BBQ’d and shared, washed down
with vats of (cheap) red wine. It’s a fantastic way to get to know other
travellers, and at Hostel Lao we were lucky to stumble on a bunch kindred
spirits, from the UK, Norway, Germany, Canada and the States. The annual wine
festival on – and each night we’d head out en masse to sample wine, and dance.
(I think the boys might have taken out this dance off….)
And we did go cycling – but Mike
sent us off on an alternative route, where down an unmarked drive we found an
old man with the best Malbec in Mendoza, Carmelo Patti, who told us his life
story, fed us samples of his exquisite drop, and sent us on our way with no
charge. We wiled away the afternoon chatting in the gardens of Alta Vista, and
topped off the day with flaming schnapps shots.
There aren’t many days on a trip
where I’m happy to abandon sightseeing and not leave the hostel. But with a
large hangover, takeaway empanadas, and new friends, we spent our last day in
Mendoza hanging poolside. The best bit? As we caught the bus north that night, we
had half the hostel in tow.
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