A Night in Squalior!

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Our last minute train ticket took us to a city, that had a fort and a palace, called Gwalior. However, they really should have called it Squalior! The city was disgusting (or at least the part of it that we saw). In the darkness we lugged our heavy bags the half kilometre to the hotel district. Crossing a bridge over the train tracks our lungs burned from the fumes of the traffic and the exertion from the weight of our bags. We walked past parts of sidewalk that my sense of smell alone told me had been converted into unofficial urinals. There is nothing quite like the pungent smell of undiluted urine (by far the most prevalent unpleasant smell in India). The “hotel district” was practically under the train bridge which gave it a sinister feeling. We ended up walking around the whole area because we were navigating using the Lonely Planet’s useless map. When we finally asked where Hotel Mayur was, someone pointed us down an alley too small for even a car.

Out of the three affordable hotel listings in the Lonely Planet, we chose the one which was listed as “a solid choice” over the other two described as “pint-sized” and “gloomy, rough, but clean enough”! Three nasty budget hotel listings, for a city of almost a million, are hardly adequate for the Backpacker’s Bible! This hotel was my first awakening to the Lonely Planet’s shortcomings. The review had obviously been written years ago and copy and pasted in the following editions, because the hotel looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in 10 years and was coasting off its good review, trapping backpackers too discouraged by the neighbourhood to keep looking.

It was a nightmare! The first room they showed us had something crawling across the floor and smelled like smoke. We took the next room we were shown because we didn’t want to go searching for another hotel in that sketchy neighbourhood in the middle of the night, and unlike the previous room, there was nothing crawling on the floor … yet. Not 10 minutes after settling into our room, Jim squashed something crawling across the floor. So we did what Jim calls “Urban Camping” and set up the mosquito net (to keep the creepy crawlers out of the bed) and used our own sheets and sleeping bags. It was actually quite cozy! We survived the night and got the hell out of there the next day!

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