Highway Hotel

Last year, this was the only hotel I could find near the mountain and not too far from the city center for 500-700 baht. This year, Google Maps showed lots of small hotels along the roads near the sea, including four or five near Cicada market. Around 80% didn't take bookings, though, and the mountain is more than an hour away. Booking prices also seemed to swing wildly: we saw this hotel listed at 460 USD for seven days in the morning, and a travel agency quoted the same price during the day. We booked somewhere 100 meters from the sea, but that evening Google Maps showed this hotel at 500-700 baht again. If a booked hotel asks on arrival, as they did in China in October, “Which account did you send the booking money to?”, we'll come on our own. We stayed at a hotel near 7-11 with plenty of rooms, but no pool, just parking space. Maybe Oyo is in the next building, farther along. The location has a long history, going back perhaps 2,000-30,000 years, since the mountains are so close to the sea. The road in the Paleolithic was “already from Africa but still not Argentina.” But which modern Thais could experiment with ancient ghosts? I also wouldn't feel assured of my safety there in the evening if I were a foreigner. The sea is only 20 meters down a road by fields and forest, and giant lizards live toward the railway station. Farther west there's what seems like a dormitory for Europeans, who may be riding motorbikes without licenses. In the dark, locals have their own ways of dealing with police rights. Chinese visitors won't understand “mei-each you fang jian,” but Malaysians, Japanese, Vietnamese, and people from Myanmar can walk there.

Getting around was hard, and each trip to eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner meant paying for a taxi there and back. Transport was difficult to find, too, so the fares added up. The residence area had nothing nearby, and it was far from town and other activities. The online pictures didn't match what I found in person. I chose not to stay and requested a refund, but still lost a few hundred bucks in service charges. Getting the refund was difficult, and their replies to my messages felt like a joke and a waste of time. To me, posting those pictures was a scam. Don't let the low price tempt you without considering the transport costs. My advice is to stay away.

We booked three rooms for April 18, and the real rooms were nothing like the website pictures. They smelled musty, weren't clean, and the bathroom doors were literally rotten at the bottom. The towels were badly frayed around the edges, too. It's disgusting that OYO allows a franchise location to operate this poorly.

The bed sagged badly in the middle and felt old, so I slept poorly. I could hear everything through the paper-thin walls. The toilet smelled the whole time, and when we went to collect towels, we saw them lying on the storage room floor. That didn't seem hygienic.