Nightmare in paradise: The worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in

Have you ever stayed in a spectacularly bad hotel? Life wouldn’t be fun if everything was the same. Nice, comfortable hotels tend to be forgettable, whereas I’ve dined out for years, even decades, on stories about horrible hotels. And I bet most travellers have, too.

There are a few contenders for the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in. For a start, it certainly helps my appreciation of a hotel if it’s actually finished.

Many years ago, when China was opening up, I went on a two-week journey to Beijing, Guilin and Guangzhou and the countryside in between. The trip was amazing but exhausting, given the lack of infrastructure. The hotels were fairly rudimentary and the food was ghastly. By the end of the trip we were desperate to stay somewhere vaguely Western with hot water and big, comfy beds.

I was shown a brochure for a new hotel in Guangzhou. It looked gorgeous – a marble lobby and five-star appointments including bars, restaurants and queen-size beds. So we changed reservations.

The hotel looked wonderful when we arrived. The lobby was gleaming, there were porters and a bar where a Filipino crooner sang Waltzing Matilda for us.

However, when I retired to bed that night, I was rattled by construction noise overhead. There were crashes and hammerings. Then the whole room shook. Jackhammers!

It turns out that only the lower two floors of the hotel had been built. They were still constructing it – day and night – from my ceiling upwards. There were no spare rooms – there were hardly any completed rooms – so I went back down to lobby for more Waltzing Matilda.

I can’t remember the name of the hotel, but I’m sure it has been pulled down and rebuilt at least twice since then, knowing China.

I also like to sleep in a dry bed when I pay for a hotel. But that wasn’t the case in my Milan hotel many moons ago. Okay, it was inexpensive, but usually even the cheapest hotels partition the bathroom from the bedroom. Not this one. The shower stall was separated from the bed by a flimsy curtain. When you turned on the shower, there was no way to move the shower head so that it didn’t wet the bed.

I can’t remember this hotel’s name either. It has probably been turned into something by Marriott, which means at least it would have a water supply that stays in the bathroom.

I’ve caught bedbugs in terrible hotels and had creepy people open my bedroom door in the middle of the night, but the prize for the absolute worst hotel experience goes to a little auberge on Moorea in Tahiti, where I foolishly booked a two-week stopover on our way to Los Angeles.

I could have strangled the friend who recommended the auberge to us.

I’m absolutely certain this hotel doesn’t exist now because it barely existed then. It was falling apart at the seams. I suppose you could say it was a charming little – maybe two-star – hotel, with grass-roofed huts scattered in a coconut plantation, not far from the water. Although, as it turned out, the nearby Club Med took up all the waterfront, so the beach was difficult to access.

Romantic? Well, not really. It was August and unbearably steamy. Unknown to us, the French husband and wife who owned the hotel had a violent falling out the night before we arrived, and he had stormed off, barely to be seen again. He was also the chef.

The one other guest was a sinister Frenchman who sat on his verandah chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky. All day. Most of the night. We were sure he was a spy. There was little to eat, no housekeeping and nowhere to swim, unless you wanted to tread over mats of icky sea cucumbers to get into the water.

The huts were basic with no air-conditioning and infested with lizards, mice and mosquitoes. After a couple of days, I came down with dengue fever and spent the rest of the trip on the bed, dizzy and feverish, suffering from blistering headaches. My husband occupied his time killing mice and going out with a local in a canoe trying to catch fish for our meals. We lost a lot of weight.

Our island holiday had turned into a nightmare. I could have strangled the friend who recommended the auberge to us. We had stumbled into a tropical Fawlty Towers.

Has anyone come across a modern-day Basil Fawlty? I’d love to know.