Around India In 80 Trains

After taking a poor rickshaw driver around Allahabad for over an hour trying to find a cheap hotel that had availability, we ended up at Hotel Tepso - where we had originally started. My gut feeling is that hotels in Allahabad don't like white tourists as they would sneak a peak at Passepartout and then claim they had no room. After the first fifteen "no's" we went back to Tepso.

It's listed in the Lonely Planet so needless to say they have upped their prices and lowered their standards - the picture to the right is a bit deceiving. Rooms are lined up around a central courtyard which is a bit like a rubbish school playground of tarmac and nothing else, and is nothing at all to write home about. The cooling system in the rooms seems to switch itself off at night which is convenient as the main switch is outside the room, and is easy for the management to reduce electricity costs that way. Rooms have tiny tellies, dim lights, pretty hard beds and an attached bathroom with a piddly shower and western toilet. The water heater barely worked and it wasn't the cleanest bathroom we had been in.

The major selling point for Hotel Tepso is that it is around a ten-minute walk to the station and has a huge row of restaurants, bars, internet cafes and a well-known coffee house on the same street. Other than that, it has few redeeming features.

Rooms start at Rs.900 for a double, Rs.200 more than stated in the Lonely Planet.