Mi casa es tu casa (unless you're washing up wrong)
The joys and perils of Airbnb – we should know, we've stayed in about 100 of them.
Don’t roll your eyes but the practicalities of backpacking were very different back in the day. When I travelled through Mexico and Central America in 2013, I didn’t even have a smart phone. Of course they existed, but I’d never owned one – they were expensive, and I was fresh out of university. Upon arriving in Mexico for an stint for an expat newspaper, my overly concerned internship coordinator gave me an old burner phone for emergencies, but even that disappeared somewhere a few weeks in (I suspect into the hands of security staff at the Guatemalan border).
At any rate, wifi wasn’t yet a given in Latin America, but if you were lucky the hostel you were staying in might have a shared computer with 30-minute time slots and Outlook Express. Usually, I’d scribble my precocious little blog down in notebooks and then type it up during quiet moments, or at an internet cafe, along with the occasional proof-of-life email to my parents and closest friends. And then the rest of the time… I guess I sat around reading and talking to people? Just kidding! I’d obviously sit waiting for my turn on the hostel computer so I could scroll through Facebook. It was 2013, after all.
So no, this is not one of those posts claiming that life and travel were better before smartphones. I mean, it probably was better in many ways – the ability to switch off from the real world and the stresses of home had to be easier before WhatsApp and Instagram. But in other ways it was definitely harder (how on earth did I ever get anywhere without Google Maps?). Mostly, it was different, and in any case the two trips are hardly comparable; travelling at the age of 34 was always going to be a different experience to the trip I took when I was 23.
One of the biggest differences between now and then, I am willing to bet, is the advent of Airbnb. So long, smelly hostel dorms and outdated guidebook recommendations! Backpacking as an adult in 2024 means often having the luxury of your very own room and private bathroom for a snip of the price of a hotel or guesthouse. Dave and I have stayed in a couple of hostels in pricier cities during this trip (Buenos Aires in Argentina; Mendoza, La Serena, Valparaiso and San Pedro de Atacama in Chile), but mostly we’ve been living it up in Airbnb apartments, simply because we can.
It’s not that we’re snobs so much as the value is just better on Airbnb. Prices do vary from place to place, but not by much: for between £20-25 a night we’ve been finding consistently decent and often really lovely one-bed apartments pretty much everywhere we’ve been. It’s very hard to justify paying often the same price for a grubby room in a hostel with a damp and squiffy shared bathroom. The first place we stayed in Chile was a hostel in San Pedro de Atacama, which did have a private bathroom to be fair, but the shower only delivered boiling water so we couldn’t use it. Plus, there was a river of green liquid running by our bedroom door from the decaying water tank outside which kind of put us off. It was cheap though, comparatively.
Perhaps my standards are just higher now I’m a semi-functioning adult. Almost certainly Airbnb and the wider choice of website available today have raised the bar in terms of backpacker accommodation options. The fact is when travelling as a pair, hostels very rarely pay off.
The first disclaimer here is that we have couple privileges: if I were backpacking solo, I probably wouldn’t want to spend that much on accommodation each night; I might want to stay in the odd hostel for the social aspect, too. I am constantly reminded of how much easier it is to travel with someone this time, both financially and administratively (ie, having someone else to share the job of looking up the bus times…) even if it is a little bit less cool.
The second disclaimer (and it’s a big one) is this: Airbnb is not perfect. I am writing this newsletter from a somewhat eccentric Airbnb in Nazca, Peru, which – a surprise to us! – is actually an abandoned hotel. We were handed two enormous keychains for the five-step process of locking and unlocking the building’s security gates and left to our own devices as the hotel’s only guests. The shower also electrocutes us, but then again the bathroom door is only chest-high so we can easily check to see if the other is still breathing. And hey, it’s nice to have so much space.
Every Airbnb has its quirks: it could be noisy neighbours, dodgy air-con, or abandoned hotel ghosts – you never know quite what you’re going to get. A few weeks ago we stayed with an artist in Curitiba in Brazil – this time it was a shared space option, ie. a room in his home rather than a place to ourselves, because we were feeling especially cheap. Not only did he appear to be running a 24-hour community 3D printing operation – which involved several random people walking through the apartment at all hours of the night – but I woke up at 5am when his alarm went off to remind him to start pressing olive oil.
Even Ata the artist was very pleasant, and to date we’ve only had one negative experience with an Airbnb host, though it’s a grudge that will live rent free in my head for the rest of time. In Valdivia in Chile, we stayed in a guesthouse run by an older woman obsessed with rainbows – I’m talking rainbow striped exterior walls and hand-sewn rainbows on every pillowcase. She had also printed out her house rules and grumbles in rainbow colours to stick all over the kitchen walls (“Don’t wear slippers outside!!”, “Can’t find a mug?? It’s probably in your room!!”). Somehow the bright colours really added to the passive aggression.
One day we came downstairs to find the ancient cooking pot we’d used for dinner was out of the cupboard and back in the sink. Dave washed it up a second time, and the next day the pot appeared back on the counter with a note. Long and petty story short: Dave convinced me to give her the benefit of the doubt and leave the place a five-star review. But then the bitch left me a really mean one over that bloody pan!
And then there’s showergate, which I wrote about last week: Dave's hand is still sore from where the Airbnb’s shower door shattered and cut him quite deeply, quite the drama. I also wrote that we hadn't been billed for it, and left on good terms with the host, but unfortunately I spoke too soon… A few days ago Dave received a bit of a guilty-sounding message from Aragon requesting £562.10 payment for the replacement glass. Reading between the lines, I think that in order for Airbnb hosts to claim on the platform’s insurance cover, they have to put the costs to the guests first. Guests can then challenge it, and Airbnb decides the outcome.
Now we’re engaged in a back-and-forth with Airbnb, putting across our “evidence” to be judged against Aragon’s. I feel very confident that we did everything the right way in the moment – contacted the host straight away, cleaned up the bloodstains, admitted no wrongdoing – but I fear the jury in this court case are not acting independently. The trial continues.
It’s been a full week of tourism, beginning with sightseeing and excellent £2 menu del dia lunches in Lima. I swam in the sea, grateful to see smaller waves than the enormous ones that kept everybody out of the water on Copacabana a few days earlier. Dave and I danced with locals in a square in Miraflores and ate a big plate of cow hearts (excellent) and chicken gizzards (gross, pointless). We also trudged halfway across town to find the Museo de la Nacion, which the Rough Guides South America book promised was “one of the most extensive and important museums in Latin America”.
Getting there was fun: giving up on Google’s phantom suggested routes, we followed the locals’ lead and stood on the corner of a main street shouting our destination at bus drivers as they bombed it past, until one of them finally said yes, and let us on. But when we arrived at our destination, an enormous concrete building with Ministry of Culture signage, we were told that the museum no longer existed. These days, the Ministry of Culture was just that: a government building full of civil servants’ offices. “We are a poor ministry now, we only have money for corruption,” a friendly receptionist cackled. However they’d kept a small gallery on the sixth floor which we could go and see if we were interested. And since we’d come all this way, we obliged.
The first image that greeted us on the sixth floor was a floor-to-ceiling photograph of a dead dog, and the exhibition didn’t get much cheerier from there on. It wasn’t the best date I’ve ever been on, but eye opening nonetheless to learn about another civil war in Latin America that I had no idea existed until so recently (the 1980s until 2000). I say learn – there was very little information in the “exhibition” itself, the room was really just a place to store all the leftover images of dead bodies. But we endeavoured to Google it once we got somewhere that could afford public wifi.
The very best part of Lima was, of course, meeting up with our good friends from home, Zlata and Greg. It felt strangely normal to see them so far away from home – on the night they arrived, we jumped in a taxi together and went for an incredible dinner at a high-end Japanese restaurant. We could just as easily have been in east London, although the pisco sours were definitely stronger.
Lima is known as the food capital of South America, and away from the (still excellent) £2 market lunch menus the restaurants are modern and the fish dishes are seriously high quality. Dave and I were lucky enough to piggyback on Z&G’s culinary tour of the city on Wednesday and it was quite possibly one of the best days of my life… We started the day at Ciclos café, where I finished my first ever cup of coffee (a stumpy with oat milk, light roast). Dave drank and finished his first ever five cups of coffee (it was a tasting session), which should probably never happen again. The man thrives on so little sleep already, I just don’t think I could cope.
From there, we went to a market to be fed about 20 different fruits, some described as “laxative, so be careful”, topped off with raw chilis, just to really dance with danger after all that coffee. The world’s largest pisco sours followed, along with the most elaborate lunch of eight fish courses (five made from the same seabass, selected by our tour guide on the way in) and a chaser of beef tongue. By the time we began our afternoon walking tour of Lima’s historic centre, we were all feeling pretty sloshed.
A fun fact we learned about Lima: it never rains! During the winter months a sea mist covers the town in the afternoons, which is apparently moisture enough for the plants that grow there. I’m not saying that was the only piece of information I retained, but it was a fuzzy afternoon, ok.
We said goodbye to Z&G for a few days while they take the smoother route down to Arequipa, Lake Titicaca and Cusco. We’ll meet up again in Ollantaytambo this week ready for Machu Picchu, which I’m super excited about. Meanwhile, Dave and I took the bus down the coast to the Península de Paracas nature reserve, where we spent a day touring the peninsula and and wildlife watching from a little boat. And do you know what? I really felt like I was on holiday.
Travel bits and tips from this week
In Lima, Dave and I stayed in this Airbnb in Barranco – definitely the cool area of town, but the shower was dire.
We ate ceviche and set-menu lunches for £2 (with unlimited orange squash!) in the Mercado Central, and also around the historic centre.
If you choose your lunch venue right, there’s often a big TV with a cracking telenovela playing for entertainment.
Dinner with Zlata and Greg was at Osaka – epic Japanese-Peruvian fusion.
Our tour was organised through Z&G’s holiday wizards, but we drank coffee at Ciclo café and ate an obscene amount of fish at La Picanteria.
In Paracas, Dave and I stayed here at this charming guest house (great shower!).
And now we are here in Nazca at the creepy abandoned hotel. But plenty more to say on that next time…
Paracas nature reserve, but this is just a nice bit of sand.
Very much looking forward to hearing more about El Overlook Hotel