From the outside, our hotel in Vang Vieng looked promising – almost like a five star hotel. But it turned out to be the worst stay of our entire trip through Southeast Asia. It’s a warning that you need to be careful when picking a hotel.

Warning
This article will contain graphic pictures of disgusting cockroaches. You have been warned.

For our stay in Vang Vieng, we picked the Lisha Roungnakhone Hotel. We picked it because it was affordable and the room was spacious with a balcony. We were still smoking at the time, so the balcony was especially important.

When we arrived it looked beautiful from the outside. I thought we had lucked out – we were looking at what seemed to be a 5-star hotel with a pool. We went inside and checked in. Everything was smooth up until the point we walked into our room.

It wasn’t the room we booked. It was much smaller and with less furniture. Thankfully, after going downstairs to complain this was quickly rectified. Our new room still wasn’t quite what we booked, but they allowed us to move some furniture from another room so we had a desk to work on.

I will say this about the hotel, the staff were very friendly and accommodating. They quickly rectified any mistakes and helped us whenever we asked. Unfortunately there’s only so much you can do in a hotel as run down as this.

The rooms clearly weren’t maintained, having a hodgepodge of different furniture in each one. Much of the furniture was broken or aged. It felt like who ever owned the hotel had given up a long time ago. In some ways it was anachronistic with modern style beds and chairs that felt like they were carved in the 1920s.

We quickly discovered there was no WiFi in the rooms as advertised when we booked the place. We talked to the staff but they couldn’t help us. How could they? The only router was on the ground floor, leaving the rooms completely out of range. We found a weak signal near the door, so we dragged the desk over just to get a sliver of connectivity.

The hotel offers free Chinese breakfast, but I gave up on that on the first day. I’ve lived in China for 11 years and know the difference between bad Chinese food and food that simply isn’t to my taste. This? This was just terrible.

In fact, I might even say that the food at this hotel is the worst food I have ever had in my entire life. Bland, cold, poorly cooked food, some boiled eggs and sloppy rice. I picked up a few things and tried to eat it, but I couldn’t cope with it. Luckily there are some really great street food places just outside the hotel where I would breakfast most mornings.

After one day in this hotel I ended up with food poisoning. Thankfully people at the local pharmacy speak English so I was able to describe my symptoms and get the drugs I needed to deal with it, but it wasn’t a pleasant couple of days.

Now, I cannot necessarily pin the blame on this hotel for this – food poisoning can take a few days to show up sometimes, but I would later learn that this hotel was infested with cockroaches. Every time I came back there would be one or two cockroaches scurrying around the room. Even if the food wasn’t the culprit, the cockroach infestation didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the hotel’s hygiene.

We didn’t want to waste money or spend time and effort moving, so we still stayed here for the few days we were in Vang Vieng. Still, it’s a lesson learned. Next time, we’ll pay a little extra for a hotel where the only things scurrying around are the guests.