CHIENTAN Youth Hotel

The staff were accommodating, and the room was clean, though the pillows were a bit small. The place is only a few minutes' walk from the MRT, so it's easy to reach from the airport. My only reason for not giving 5 stars is that there's no wifi in the rooms, only in the main lobby.

The rooms are tiny, and I was put in the oldest building. There’s no elevator there, so we had to haul our suitcases up three flights of stairs. Someone actually fell on those stairs. The bathrooms have no air circulation or AC and get really stuffy. It was unbearably hot for most of my five days. There was no AC on the first night. We were told it would be fixed that night, but it wasn’t working until two days later. Even after that, we needed a fan running all the time because the room still wasn’t very cool. I also found cockroaches, lizards, mosquitoes, ants, and gnats in the room. My laundry was stolen three times, and the washing machine kept getting stuck every five minutes. The dryers didn’t work either. I felt like an egg frying in a pan the whole stay. Don’t come here. I’d pick the Grand Hotel across the street instead.

The setting feels a bit like a campus, and there are rooms in different sizes. Mine was a small two-bed room, but it was clean and tidy. The view faced the river, and I could watch the sunset. I was lucky enough to catch fireworks one night, too. Meals were healthy, with little oil, sugar, or salt, and the menu changed each day. The food was pretty good.

We were very happy with our stay, especially because we were traveling around TAWIAN in a rental car. The scenery at and around the hotel was lovely both during the day and at night, and we enjoyed spending time there. It has a huge parking area in the garden. Since the hotel is a little far from the nearest MRT station, this high school dorm style place seems better suited to drivers like us than to backpackers getting around on foot.