Breakfast Buffet Bonanza

Lately we have been having some trouble staying within our budget. The truth is we have one general rule which I think is perfectly reasonable. Corinn will claim that it is my rule but I respectfully disagree, plus she benefits from it anyway. The rule is that we need to stay in a comfortable hotel at the end of our long, exhausting often uncomfortable, yet highly rewarding biking days. When I say comfortable I mean the following: no apparent bugs (the cockroaches here are the size of my hand), no obvious filth or any other unnecessary grossness. If you know me well, you know what a giant baby I am when it comes to things that crawl. You can ask my sister Cathy---this issue goes way back to when I was little. She used to have to check my bed for creepy crawlers every night before I would agree to get in it. Now Corinn has taken on that duty for me and I could not be more grateful. I might protect her from dogs with sharp teeth but what she does to protect me from insects is far more brave. I like dogs. She hates bugs. She also routinely shields me from the multi legged beasts that have taken up residence in our rooms. I’ll never know how many cockroaches, spiders and ant colonies she has bravely and silently destroyed for my benefit. Remember the rule…. ‘no apparent bugs.’ What a girl!

So, back to my point of the budget. We can sometimes find remarkably clean and comfortable rooms for around $10-12. Sometimes, we are not so lucky. After riding all day long, we are sweat soaked, filthy, smelly and just slightly resemble human beings. We are beyond exhausted from pedaling our faces off in the most oppressive heat imaginable. All we want to do is get clean, return to our normal looking selves, eat something that will not kill us and sleep soundly in what at least appears to be a clean bed. Not too much to ask for, right? Well, sometimes it is.

What frequently happens is that our rational, logical selves have been left on the side of the road 20-30 miles back before the day’s journey comes to an end. We drive up to the first place we see and for $4-7 we can sleep with the cockroaches. After I run out of the hotel or guesthouse with my arms flailing, we ride on. We come to another hotel that is $8-11 a night. Instead of cockroaches we can sleep in a room that has poisonous black mold hovering over the bed and smells remarkably like the inside of a squat toilet even though it has a western style one. Is it crazy to think we would go to the newer, bigger looking hotel for a $20-25 night? I think not!

Here is how we masterfully rationalize our choice…one simple question to make it all okay “Is breakfast included?” If the answer is yes, “Is it a buffet?” If that answer is yes then we’ve got ourselves a deal.!

This has only backfired on us once - when we stayed at the Don Xuyan hotel in Long Xuyen. It appeared to be a clean enough hotel. However, while I was trying to wash the day’s filth from my body I looked up at the shower curtain and gasped in horror. I shouted for Corinn to come in and showed her the dirty pair of women’s red and black lace underwear draped over the curtain rod! The best part about it was that when we called the front desk they assured us they would send someone to clean the room. The housekeeper came in and removed the underwear. All set, the room was clean.

I guess the question you are asking is, why would breakfast being included be a reason to stay, especially when we can score a perfectly acceptable meal on the street for $2? The answer is simply that we have become white trash in Asia.

Corinn and I can turn one breakfast buffet into a full day’s worth of food. Here’s how it works. We both enter the room and assess the buffet. We then split up and return to our table with platefuls of food that we feel would be useful during the day…proud of each other for our ability to think outside the portable food box. We then each return to the buffet to obtain the food we will actually consume while sitting there. Corinn then proceeds to create some sort of distraction. This can include asking questions to the wait staff she knows they will not understand. This inevitably will bring other members of the wait staff into the conversation which will in turn free me of their ever present gaze. She also has a great ability to shield me from the business men and other respectable diners so I can get down to business. I must have been paying close attention to how my Nana pocketed things at restaurants when I was a kid. I can fit an enormous amount of bread, bananas, butters, jams and anything else transportable in my purse. There have been times that I have pulled out 3 French bread loaves, 4 pieces of toast, 8 bananas, 4 boiled eggs, 8 packs of butter and 4 packets of jam. No joke. Corinn and I pat ourselves on the back on a daily basis at the things we get for free. Toilet paper is huge. We are known to give each other high fives for pocketing a full roll from a one night stay. Corinn still pulls out soaps from our favorite hotel of all time, which we stayed in over a month ago. She also keeps a stash of salt and pepper from the same place.

It’s survival of the cheapest and we are good at it.