Piss Hotel

Once again I find myself arriving on dark in a strange town, completely buggered after setting out at 5.30am and spending all day on various chicken buses, with seats so close together that sitting itself is like a yoga stretch and the oppressive heat of the day combined with the
incessant stopping and going make the very idea of sleep unimaginable. This time it was La Ceiba on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, another one of those nondescript stepping stone port towns on the way to some where else - in this case the island of Utila. After walking a couple of
kilometres in to town, I head to a guide book recommended hotel to find that it has since shut down. I then head to the seedy part of town, to find a couple of hotels who want to charge me way too much for a box with a bed in it. Getting more and more tired and desperate I stumble
across a place, two storey painted green weatherboard, with a distinct lean to the left. The price was right, and the room is a box with a bed much like the other rooms - dark, dingy and dusty, but I am sold by the leopard print curtains. So I trundle back downstairs, fork out the $4 and head back to the room to lie down. And that is when I notice the general background smell of urine which doesn't seem to have a single source but permeates everything - the bed, the floor, the walls, the door, the dark hallway, the toilet, the stairway. Sometimes it dissipates so that it almost disappears, but then suddenly it reappears, not particularly strong, just lying there in the background, waiting for you nose to suck in a little more air than usual, and let the smell waft
in to your senses.
How exactly, I wonder to myself, can an entire building reek of urine - has somebody simply pissed all over the place, or is there a toilet on the roof which leaks through the building. (I had to rule out the second option as I later discovered that there was no running water, so there
couldn't be a toilet on the roof) I noticed the graffiti on the door which said, Osama bin Laden is alive and is living in Honduras - and I wondered if living in a piss hotel would drive a man to jihad. Someone else had written, This place is filthy, and someone else had responded, Nobody forced you to stay here.

But no answer to the piss smell mystery.

The good thing about being dog tired is that I soon fell asleep, putting that particular mystery of the universe out of my mind.