By Zak Gainey

In the centre of Giurgiu, a small town on the Roman-Bulgaria border, there exists a rather unassuming white and orange building that is home to Hotel Vlasca. When entering it on the eve of my 15th birthday, passing under its old, tacky blue sign, I had no idea of the horrors that which I would find within those poorly panted walls. “14 pounds! 14 pounds!” exclaimed my father excitedly as he rushed up the dusty steps towards the front door. My father has always travelled on a tight, self-imposed budget whilst on holiday, choosing to stay in, what he called, the “more authentic”, but realistically, the cheapest available lodgings.

Our entry was greeted by the sight of a rather plump, red-faced gentleman leaning over the reception counter, shouting in a language which I can only assume was Romanian, at the seemingly uninterested receptionist slouched behind the desk. The man’s shouting was accompanied by the vigorous waving of his clenched fist, his knuckles clasping a dirty yellow hotel room key. The exchange only lasted a moment but concluded with the man pulling his Astra Giurgiu FC t-shirt as far down his stomach as it could be encouraged to go (only a little above his belly button), throwing the key at the receptionist and marching past my dad and I, muttering viciously under his breath. We then approached the counter and the apathetic receptionist. My father, with a grin a Cheshire cat would be proud of, handed the woman his booking reference and was rewarded with a dirty yellow key. Overcome by his own excellence, he failed to recognise that it was the same key that had been thrown at the woman only a moment before.

As the door to room 43 opened, we began to understand why the departee’s face had been such a bright shade of scarlet. We were instantly assaulted by an overwhelming and suffocating odour of dead fish. Squinting in the darkness we could make out two decrepit single beds, nestled under 1960s bed covers. A lonely bedside counter, void of both its drawers, leaned against at the foot of the beds. My dad scoured the wall the adjacent wall for a light switch, and upon finding it pushed down on upon the sticky plastic. Click… nothing. He pressed it again. Click… still no response. We would discover the next morning that the light was absent a bulb.

The only light that worked, by which I mean intermittently flickered on and off, was the one above the mirror of the doorless bathroom. Sadly, it cast enough light to reveal the state of the bathroom. The walls were covered in black mould, the biggest patch, roughly a meter in diameter was growing on the wall adjacent to the leaking shower. It was the bathtub, however provided the biggest shock. In unison we peered, in a very Scooby Doo fashion, over the edge of the bathtub, to find a mountain of dried cement laying in the centre at its centre. The Cheshire Cat’s grin quickly faded…

In 2009 my parents divorced. A long and unpleasant legal battle then dominated the next decade of our lives. My mother became my primary carer, and my brothers and I travelled to many different countries with her. It was not until 2014, however, that I would be finally able to travel with my father on a budget that was significantly smaller than my mother’s. He decided that our first trip would be to Romania and Bulgaria to celebrate my 15th birthday. Both of us were excited about the trip; I was visiting two new countries and he was finally able to travel with his son for the first time in five years. Standing in the bathroom of room 43, however, the cheap seediness of Vlasca seemed to taint the trip and what it meant for my dad.

But it wasn’t until we arrived home that the significance of Vlasca truly dawned on us. Weeks later we still spoke of it, viewing it in an increasingly comedic light, its awfulness no longer spoiling but humorous. Then weeks turned into months, months into years and still today, over seven years later we are still debating how that cement got in that bathtub. The bad experience we shared brought us together despite the distance that between us. Room 43 transformed from a Stephen King nightmare into a Monty Python routine my father and I would retell time and again.

My dad is turning 64 this year. We never played football together, never fished together or did any of those other traditional father-son activities. But we did travel, a lot, and to some very strange places, with Vlasca igniting our love for cheap, and sometimes, awful travel. That’s the thing about travel: it doesn’t have to be good to be great. It’s the people you adventure with and what you experience with them that makes travel so addictive and rewarding.

If you take one thing from this article let it be this: be daring, take chances, go to places that you wouldn’t normally go or that you don’t think you will like, because you may just come out with an incredible story… maybe give Hotel Vlasca a miss though.

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