Up Front

with the Editor

These lines are being hacked out in one of the bedrooms of Honiara’s Hotel Mendana, on a typewriter borrowed from obliging mine host Ron Laird after I had mentioned that I wanted to catch the mail with a few words for PIM “on the subject of hotels”.

To have put such a dangerous weapon in my hands, without restriction, was the act of a brave and honest man, for only five minutes earlier we had both learned that my hotel booking, made a fortnight ago in Sydney, had never been received at the hotel and that I have a bed for only tonight—and I have that only because of some juggling by *0 . . 1 ... . , , .

But thats hotel life in the Islands these days, and as a seasoned Islands traveller I have only myself to blame for not having triple-checked the booking. The explanation I have got from the local airline representative has the undoubted ring of truth.

Hotel bookings made in Sydney, he says, almost always disappear into the intricacies of both the Fiji and Solomons telegraphic network, never to emerge. They had recently misplaced an entire tour party this way.

I simply should have known. But there is a bright spot, which will be good news for other travellers if not for me. Lost hotel bookings are the only real dangers left for the travelling man in the South-West Pacific these days. Any regular stayer-at-hotels in Papua-New Guinea and the Solomons over the last 10 or 12 years will agree that the experience has not now the elements of despair it once had.

I knew the time when brave men would pray out loud that the hotel had lost their booking, so they could throw themselves on the mercy of some acquaintance with a house and a cheerful wife, where the food was edible, the linen clean and the bathroom not awash. But the booking was always there, and they served their sentence manfully, it wac in , oul S rSi thro PS h drink N fnTn I f learn^ d 1° IT u° night ’ t 0 St pf n fb e hour when there was nothing for it

but to stumble down the unlit pas sage, past the noise of the dripping taps in the communal bathroom whose concrete floor was covered in paches of green slime through which toads occasionally scrambled, whose urinals stank no matter how frequently you pulled the bent wire attached to the mechanism, and on into a humid bedroom, crammed with two other lumpy beds besides your own.

'Hictonr' lief maioiiu ii>i At Rabaul once while waiting for a plane that probably never did turn U P> some of us began to swap notes on New Guinea hotels, and we formulated a list, by common con sensus, on their common charac teristics. The list must be in one of m y notebooks still, and should I find it I shall forward it to Robert Langdon of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau a s a document worthy of preservation as genuine contemporary b ,s l or y. ave rage New Guinea hotel r P° m _, at , t ! iat P me our consensus showed, looked like this: It was built of fibro-cement or sheets of plywood, whlch might or might not have ex tended to both floor and ceiling, J P lnts w . ere concealed by cover-strips °* varying widths and thicknesses, ° f the r °° m WaS rr y *l unlll J, , whirHL W ® r ® *?! part,tlons * h h dld n °* 80 3,1 the wa k UP lPeai?t to notice any m - * he rooms adjom *f g ;J?® Walls h £Y e one coat fS f °£ grey , pamt - The windows would not have glass, and they might have insect screening, but probably onl y boy wire” to keep out those intruders who couldn’t be bothered entering through the unlockable door.

There was no powerpoint no wash basin or mirror were to be

found in the communal bathroom), and the beds were of varying styles and sizes. There was a single, shaded globe in the centre of the room, and one of the beds might have a plastic reading lamp, blackened where the bulb had burnt it, attached to a bed head.

The furniture was a single con struction of boxwood and odd timber offcuts, faced with a green cotton curtain, and meant as a cupboard/ hanging space. Nobody used it; you kept your gear in your suitcase.

You could get yourself a towel thin enough to shoot peas through if you had the initiative to find the housekeeper and get in a word during a temporary lull in her loud abuse of the sullen houseboys.

The dining room of this typical hotel always had a potted palm. At the table you had the soup of their choice, but you could choose either the grilled chop or the “salad meats” for the main course, and for dessert there was tart and custard.

Contrary to what might be ex pected by those lucky people with no experience of territory hotels of that time, the food would arrive with a startling rapidly. No sooner had you swallowed your lukewarm soup than your plate was whipped away and replaced by the lukewarm chop.

The boy would stand off a little, warily intimidating you to get it down quickly so he could get on with his job as he saw it—that of substituting empty plates for full ones. Men have died from ulcers developed in Islands dining rooms.

These standards have not entirely disappeared from the South-West Pacific, but they have almost gone.

They are passing quickly because of the advent of the newer hotels, built from the ground up to the newer standards, such as The Gateway in Moresby, The Melanesian in Lae and Rabaul Travelodge.

The newer hotels have air-con ditioned, self-contained suites, carpets, room service, piped music. They and some others have forced the new standards on to owners and managers who otherwise would not have cared less.

Most of the old hotels have up graded, and although this has been done with varying degrees of suc cess, we travelling men know what an improvement they are. .

Nobody will mourn the passing ot the old standards that persisted foi so long. In retrospect those hotels were colourful; in reality they wen a depressing example of an attitude of expediency that at one time poisoned the Islands atmosphere.

Stuart Inder