Cavemen Hostel Taipei Station Branch

The clerks were noisy all day, constantly moving around and never stopping. They coughed very loudly and angrily, and slammed drawers with a lot of force. Why do they hate this place so much? It made me feel really scared. Such a bad experience.

At this price, I expected a lot more. I usually pay around $600 a night and know what that standard is like. This place cost over $1000, yet the quality was lower than every other hostel I’ve stayed in. I’d only recommend it to someone with no other choice. There was a thin golden hair on the blanket, even though my hair is thick and black. After lying in bed for a couple of hours, I felt ticklish. They had support equipment for travelers, but the package had never been opened. Despite charging twice as much, they provided no tea bags, snacks, towels, slippers, or anything like that. I also saw a staff member arguing with a customer in poor English. There were so many foreign guests, and the staff couldn’t even have a proper conversation with them?

The only useful thing in the place was that each bed had an outlet. The wifi was terrible, the bathroom disgusting with bad drainage, and the so-called kitchen couldn’t be used: no fridge, no utensils, not even a spoon. There are no windows in the hostel, so the air felt damp, dirty, and stuffy. Dorm rooms were cramped with too many beds. The staff were nice but spoke almost no English. The lobby was cute, but nobody seemed to socialize there. The place also seemed oddly full of elderly Taiwanese people. I couldn’t tell if they lived there or might be homeless. Overall, terrible.

The only acceptable thing was the location, very close to the main station. We stayed a full week, unfortunately, and I wouldn’t recommend this place to anyone for more than a day. I especially wouldn’t recommend it for female guests or solo female travelers. The shared female dorm was tiny and right by the lobby, so women had to walk past all the guests to get to the bathroom. There was no sense of privacy. The bathroom was hazardous and unsanitary, with hair everywhere at all times, never clean, and heavy mold on the ceiling. The other guests were loud and felt entitled to make horrible noise every morning while packing to leave. We got maybe three hours of sleep each night and were exhausted throughout the stay. The cleanliness was disgraceful. I found discarded contact lenses in my bed, and the room was never cleaned, not even once during the entire week.