Cheep and cheerful for a stag do, or it would be if the staff smiled. Having said that most people don’t smile very often at all in Latvia after years of communist oppression smiling as was any sign of enjoyment was a bad thing and that’s just the way it is. If a pretty young woman smiles at you she’s probably doing it for money, beware!
As for the hotel it’s a good 25 min walk from the old town and located in a really rough dock area, as someone mentioned previously, the trains seem to run at night, this is when it seems they do all the shunting in the yard next door and its very noisy, you wont get much peace. But if you’re a train spotter this is the place for you, double headed DMU’s pulling miles of coal trucks, the coal being unloaded from docks in front of you.
The rooms are big enough and have double glazing handy to keep the noise of the train yard out but be careful when opening it as they open fully inwards making suicide attempts a breeze, something you might contemplate if you stayed here long enough.
There are no brewing facilities in the rooms which would have been a bonus but after smelling the water from the bathroom taps suggests the water is fed from roof tanks, brushing your teeth in the iron smelling water is a new experience and one not to be missed.
The bathrooms have no extraction fans so if you’re sharing a room with your mate make sure they are of reasonable hygiene! The shower cubicle in our room had a curtain which was pretty pointless as the plug hole didn’t drain as fast as the water entered via the shower meaning the tiny bathroom soon became a wet room. The shower its self had a very simple two tap mixer with no thermostat, very interesting hot and cold experience to be had for the brave.
The heated towel rail was an interesting communist utilitarian bit of pipe work, a u-bend made from 40mm pipe work, ingenious place to hang your towels which are replaced everyday with postage stamp bits of cloth one for each part of the body I presume.
The beds are firm and the mattresses stained with an assortment of colours cleverly hidden from view with a delightful bed sheet possibly reclaimed from a decommissioned German u-boat.
There is a colour TV in the rooms with pay porn which could be the only thing you understand except one English speaking channel, CNN, which get very boring after the first 10 mins, as did the porn channel.
The breakfast is served 0700 till 1000 hrs and consists mostly of cheese and cheese but if you look carefully in the breadbin you will find the odd sausage and scrambled egg. Be careful though, as the other sort of scrambled egg is in fact smoked fish was quite tasty. Brown bread isn’t, its kind of a malt loaf affair, an acquired taste it would seem, one acquired from birth I’d suggest.
The [mostly] female staff are, on the whole, exceptionally good looking bordering on stunning, which will prepare you things to come in Riga.
The Guinness book of records states Latvia has the highest percentage of female to male population in the world they just forgot to mention how beautiful the woman are and someone forgot to tell the women how to smile. If you get the chance to chat to them you soon realise they are just very shy and don’t trust Western European men.
There is a sauna in the hotel but will cost you 15 Lev just to turn it on for an hour so I imagine its still in the bubble wrap it arrived in.
The bar has a good selection of beer and whisky but sadly closes at around 2300 / 2400 hrs and is reasonably priced, again the staff require some warming up so choose your words carefully, be patient and might just get the odd smile and bit of eye contact.
As previously mentioned the hotel is in the middle of a rough looking council estate but to be honest you felt safer walking through it at night than walking through the streets of Manchester, and you won’t see any gangs of hooded children out grafting. Sadly you will see persistent begging, quite often from 10-12 year kids.
Where ever possible book your taxis through your hotel and buy taxi vouchers from the reception, the Latvians are very short sighted and greedy when it comes to tourism so be prepared to haggle with the drivers and make sure your holiday insurance covers you for street racing and time trials as the roads are cobbled racetracks which sometimes get used as a form of transport.
I’d recommend the use of a guide for at least one night out around the town, have a look on the interweb first, ours was found by searching for Baltic stags and worth every penny .
Overall the hotel is cheep not so cheerful and in the wrong place. It might sell its self as 3 stars but one must assume this is rated by communist standards.
Riga on the other hand, is a fascinating up and coming town and one that’s going to end up like Prague I expect, so visit now and you’ll get a very interesting perspective on Baltic life with probably some of the most stunning women in the world.
With climate change, Global disasters and declining fish stocks, this is one place you can still definitely say there’s plenty of fish in the sea.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC
