Our Hotels So Far

Laura and I leave one week from today, but we still haven't booked every night of our trip. In the early stages of our planning we struggled to decide if we should book hotels in advance—which would mean we'd have to really nail down our dates/itinerary—or simply should up in different cities and try to find lodging on the spot. Ultimately, we've decided that in heavily touristed areas, we needed to book in advance, but when we're off the beaten path we'll try to give ourselves more flexibility and find places when we show up.

This means that we've book hotels so far in Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, and Rome (and may a few more places that are slipping my mind now). And some of these places sound pretty exciting.

In Rio, for example, we're staying at the Maze Inn. This may be the lodging that I'm most excited about for the entire trip. It's an independently run budget hotel, located in a favela near the beach. At first I was ambivalent about staying in a favela. Rio's slums are ultra dangerous, and I didn't want to go there to gawk at the poor. However, the reviews I've read suggested it was relatively safe, and as a missionary in Brazil I experienced a fair amount of poverty which will hopefully prevent me from assuming an overly touristic or voyeuristic attitude. In any case, however, the hotel has great prices, a big breakfast, and a jazz night that we'll be in town for. So far, the staff has also been super helpful—this morning, for example, they emailed a response to my request for instructions on how to get to the hotel using the city buses. I initially thought I found this hotel in an Lonely Planet guide book, though I subsequently can't find it in any of the ones I have right now, so either I already returned that book to the library or I found the hotel somewhere else.

In London, we're staying in easyHotel's Victoria location (I may have mentioned this in earlier posts, but I can't remember.) As a chain hotel, this experience will contrast sharply with our Rio experience. However, the hotel is an ultra economic company that bases its rooms off of ship cabins. They're really small spaces, which translates into really low prices. This hotel was recommended by Rick Steves.

In Paris, we're staying in a hotel called Hotel Camelia Nation. At first I was very skeptical about this hotel, because it wasn't listed in any of the guide books Laura and I checked out. However, we found it on a hotel listing website and because we hadn't read about it elsewhere, we checked practically every website we could find that reviewed it. Ultimately we decided that was in a cool—if potentially loud—location (near the Bastille, and we'll be there on Bastille Day), and it was the lowest price we could find at a non-chain hotel. I'm still slightly afraid that it's going to be crawling with rats or something, but it looks cool and had a lot of decent reviews.

We just booked our Rome hotel a few nights ago, so I haven't decided what to think about it yet. It's called Hotel Italia Roma. It came recommended by the guide books I mentioned above, as well as Fodor's. It's well located as well, and so that sounds good.