The Hostel to Top All Hostels

If you were to create the uber-hostel--the hostel to top all hostels--it would probably look something like Sim’s Cozy Garden Hostel in Chengdu, a place so crammed with hostel amenities that it takes awhile for it all to sink in.

You enter through giant wooden Chinese gates and are then immediately plunged into a garden courtyard. There are five floors of rooms, but the building seems to ramble in all directions at all sorts of different heights, and most of the common rooms feel like you’ve stumbled onto the Swiss Family Treehouse although you aren’t in a tree. There is everything a hostel purports to have: a travel desk and reception desk that always seems to be manned with four to six people, all busy helping travelers, seemingly at all hours. There are travelers’ post boards, a restaurant, a bar, ping pong, billiards, a laundry, recycling centers, notes posted about travel to Tibet, bikes for rent, toys to donate, trinkets to buy, storage rooms, the cast-off clothing nook, internet center, and most important to us--free dvd rental.

Running in and out of all of this are the travelers, of course, a wide and varied bunch, and it seemed they are easier to meet here than in other hostels we’ve stayed.

The rooms themselves were not bad for $24 a day (two twin beds with a private bathroom). It's not the cleanest place or the nicest place, it's just the most backpacker-friendly place you'll ever see.

This is what you get for $24! The beds are on a platform about two feet off the ground. You can store bags underneath. This is where we stayed for about a week while Kinsey and I were sick with mild fever and fatigue.

The rest of the room...the tv and dvd player proved to be vital. I watched a ton of movies while we were sick. Sim's had a selection comparable to Blockbuster.

The only thing I wasn't keen on were the bathrooms which didn’t have a separate shower area, so you showered in the middle of the room next to the toilet. That in and of itself wasn’t a problem, as we've seen a lot of that, but…in our particular bathroom, the water pooled around the toilet and wouldn't drain, which was an icky mess later in the day.

  It doesn't look bad from this angle, but the hand held shower hose  is behind the curtain. It was hard to find a good place to put your clothes while you showered.

Nevertheless, if you travel to Chengdu, head for Sim's--when you meet travelers later on down the road, you'll find out you all have one thing in common--if they were in Chengdu, they were at Sim's too.