The Love Hotel

© Flickr / geishaboy500

I have just eaten an aphrodisiac. I am not wearing any panties. And I am in one of Latin America’s famed “auto” (pay by the hour) hotels. How did my innocent search-for-self / pilgrimage across the Americas come to this? Well, you might say its all in a day’s travel.

I had hoped that I could make it from Bogota to Medellin on the motorcycle today, but the Colombian customs agents had an alternate plan for my day. They finally finished my paperwork around 12:30, and that’s when I started riding. I had a late lunch, roadside, and continued riding though some pretty spectacular mountain scenery.

© Alisa Clickenger / RumBum.comAfter several hours of heavy accelerating, even heavier braking, and dodging a wide array of slow-moving vehicles, I stopped for gas. Next to the gas station there was a fruit stand, and I bought a bag full of mangostinos. After I’d sampled this interesting fruit that is to be eaten like a pomegranate, the fruit seller confided that this fruit was known as an aphrodisiac. My Spanish is now good enough that I joked “great, that’s all I need after three months away from my boyfriend.” We had a good laugh, he wished me a good trip, and I was off.

It started to get dark and I stopped to ask a policeman for a recommendation for a hotel, and he suggested Mariluna hotel a few kilometers down the road. When I pulled up to the gate, I realized almost immediately that it was an “auto hotel” – the kind where you cannot see the building for the large wall in front, and each room has a private parking garage. It was too late and too dark to ride any further – it is unwise to ride in Central or South America after sunset.

These hotels are quite clever, actually, and quite clean. When you pull up to the gate they give you a room number. You pull around until you reach your garage, and pull in. While you are locating your garage, someone has already turned on the lights, air conditioning and television in your room, and as soon as you shut your car off another someone comes in and shuts the garage door behind you. Whereas I have found most of Latin America disorganized and slow, this hotel is the model of efficiency.

The hotel room has two entrances, one from the garage, and another from a communal garden in the center patio of the hotel. There is a discreet cubby-like cabinet with an inner and outer door, through which you may order a variety of food, alcoholic drinks and toiletries from a card beside the telephone. A tap on the cubby lets you know your roomservice has arrived, and that you may leave your money in the cubby. The room has a small table with two chairs, an ample and firm bed, room-darkening drapes, and a nice bathroom with a soaker showerhead. All in all, quite serviceable for those renting by the hour, and perfectly suitable for travelers like me who need a secure place to park and a dark, quiet room to get some sleep.

I have not taken the time to do my laundry the past two days, as some days I just don’t feel like doing hand washing in a sink after a long, hard day of riding. So I took advantage of the generous shower and decided to bathe and do my laundry simultaneously. Ironic that I am now padding around a rent-by the-hour room naked since it will be morning before my clothes are dry. I feel somehow decadent eating my aphrodesiac-fruit, in the nude, sitting on a we-know-what-for bed, as if expecting a clandestine lover. I'm just thankful the mangostinos don't seem to have an effect on me – I have four more months before I see him.