The Hostel From Below the Ground

I have stayed in cheap places before and been fine. I am not fussy. But the Backpackers Nest in Korovgrad broke something in me. I found it late, after a long day, when the two hostels I actually wanted were full, and the price was so good I ignored the way the booking page had exactly one photo and it was of the sign.

Reception was a man behind a cage of chicken wire in a hallway that went down. Everything went down. The dorm was in the basement, a converted cellar with no windows and no ventilation, just a single bare bulb and eight bunks jammed so close you could touch the person across from you. The air was wet. There is no other word. It sat on your skin. And there was a smell, sweetish and organic and old, that seemed to come from the walls themselves, and that I could taste at the back of my throat within a minute.

The door to the dorm had a lock, technically. A hasp and a padlock loop. But the screws holding the hasp to the frame were loose in soft, damp wood, and when I tugged the whole plate lifted away from the jamb with almost no force. Anyone in the building could have opened that door with one hand. I mentioned it to the cage man and he shrugged and said it was fine, this was a safe area, which is exactly what a person says right before it is not.

I lay on the top bunk fully dressed with my valuables inside my clothes and my backpack looped through my arm, and I listened to the pipes, and to a slow steady drip somewhere behind the wall, and to a scratching that I told myself was pipes too. I did not sleep. Around three a man I had never seen came down the stairs, stood in the doorway breathing for a while, decided he had the wrong room, and went back up. The door, of course, had opened for him without resistance.

I had already made my escape plan. There was a night coach at six forty from the depot two streets over, and I was going to be on it, out of that cellar, into fresh air and a proper bed in the next town. I had my ticket. I got to the depot at six twenty five, which should have been plenty, and the bay for my service was empty. Empty. I asked the man in the booth and he looked at his clipboard and said, without emotion, that the coach had left. When, I asked. He checked. Six twenty six. Fourteen minutes before its own printed departure time.

That would have been merely infuriating except that in my sleepless state I had done something stupid. Trusting the coach, I had let the driver stow my big pack in the hold when it pulled in early, then stepped away to buy water, and the driver, ahead of schedule and impatient, had simply gone. My bag left without me. My passport was on my body, thank god, some instinct had kept it there, but everything else, clothes, medication, the little gifts I had carried across a continent, rolled off into the dawn on a coach I was not on.

It took three days and two bus companies to be reunited with that pack, which turned up at a lost property office smelling, somehow, exactly like that basement. I threw most of it away. I still cannot sleep in a windowless room.