Lodgings: Gastehaus Uhl

If you’re looking for a medieval city, Rothenburg ob der Tauber (Rothenburg o/T) in Germany is one of the best. Being such a charming historic city, many of the hotels are expensive, but it is possible to stay inside the walls at a very affordable price without sacrificing comfort or services.

My hotel of choice is the Gastehaus Uhl. Located just a five-minute walk from the market square, it is very close to the town’s major attractions, and the view from some of the upper floors is a beautiful scene over the top of the wall through the valley beyond.


Far from being just a place to stay, the Uhl family has run the historic building as a café and bakery for 30 years. At the top of the list for me are schneeballen (snowballs) – basically deep-fried balls of pie crust coated in sugar, chocolate or flavored icings (on the lower-left shelf below).

Aside from the great geographic location and the fact that the building dates to the 1600s, the things that make Gastehaus Uhl the perfect place to stay are the rates and the friendliness of the owners.

In a city where comparable rooms cost 80 euros and above, I stayed at the Gastehaus Uhl in December of 2008 for 55 euros per room.

When I went to Rothenburg in 2006, I had not reserved the room for the first night, thinking I might stay somewhere between Frankfurt and Rothenburg. When I arrived in Rothenburg, I found Gastehaus Uhl full until the following night. Robert Uhl, who somehow manages to work six or seven days per week and remain cheerful, managed to get me a room in a neighboring guesthouse for the same rate, and let me use his parking spot for my car.

The rooms are comfortable, but small – like most in Europe. I’ve always stayed on the fifth floor, and there aren’t any elevators. The whole building is spotlessly clean, which is something of the norm in German lodgings. Both of the top-floor rooms have showers, and one has a view of the street while the other has a view of the countryside and wall. The room with the street view has a tropical mural on the wall, which always makes me laugh.


The café is reasonably priced, and the menu features a wide selection of German favorites. I really, really liked the wiener schnitzel with potatoes. The cookies, pastries and other desserts are excellent, and if you are up early enough, you can probably get them fresh out of the oven (or fryer, in the case of schneeballen). The schneeballen are softball-sized, and the Uhls sell about 25,000 each year.

The Gastehaus Uhl sits on the Plonelien, a street that keeps popping up in postcard shots. The half-timbered buildings with the nearby tower that spans the street make for a good photo, as I tried to capture below. (The building with the light on top that shines at the tower is Gastehaus Uhl).

In my stays at Gastehaus Uhl, I have yet to find any reason to stay anywhere else. With the location, prices and friendliness of the staff, it would really be hard to beat.

The Café and Gasthaus Uhl is located at Am Plonlein 6-8, Rothenburg ob der Tauber 91541, Germany.

Lodgings: The Villa Ludovici

One of the benefits of traveling in India is the fact that the value of the dollar hovers around 40 rupees. If you can avoid the tourist traps and indiscriminate extravagances, you can travel and stay for a bargain.

The Villa Ludovici in Goa is the perfect example of excellent service with low costs.

When I stayed there with a friend of mine in December of 2007, five nights - with omelets, papayas and toast for breakfast each morning included - the stay only set us back $100.

We arrived in Goa at the middle of a long day that started when the sun was rising and involved a four-hour taxi ride (where our driver got cited for speeding) and a flight, with the necessity of arriving at the airport two hours early so we could hop on a flight that lasted less than two hours.

Not having researched Goa very much – at all, to be honest – we didn’t really know where to stay. We asked a bunch of travelers in the airport, and settled on the Siquerim Beach area, since it was close enough to the entertainment at Baga Beach to the north and the capital, Panjim, to the south.

Cruising through the Lonely Planet guidebook, I selected Villa Ludovici for its economy listing. A quick phone call settled the rates and reserved a room, then it was a 45-minute taxi ride through beautiful tropical scenery juxtaposed with poverty-stricken villages to arrive at our home for the next five nights.

We were greeted by the friendly owner of what turned out to be not a hotel, but a house. It was actually the first house built on that section of the coast a few centuries earlier. The plaster walls, elegant wood doorways and interlocking clay tiles on the roof all attested to its age. The antiquated electrical work running through the interior struck me as having been original to the 1940s or so.

After dropping off our bags, Deon and I decided it was time to hit Goa’s legendary beaches. As “our” house was right across the street from the beach, it should have been a short walk.

Only it wasn’t.

Not sure about trespassing laws, we hunted and hunted for public beach access until we decided it didn’t exist, and we just walked through a neighborhood, past a construction site and alongside a trash heap to reach the strand.

Turning around, of course, we saw an easy access route we’d somehow missed, but would have allowed us to avoid the hassle we’d just gone through.

After filling up on 85-cent beers and a dinner of fried prawns for a few bucks at a beach shack run by British expats, we headed back to the room for bed.

The mattress was nice and firm, and the blankets were light enough to cover up with and not get too hot in the absence of air conditioning. That’s right, there was no air conditioning. I wasn’t worried about that, as I’ve stayed in condos in Hawaii without AC, and it never proved necessary. The same was true for Goa.

Breakfast the next morning was excellent. I’d slept like a rock, and with absolutely nothing planned for the day except gorging on prawns and tossing back several bottles of Kingfisher beer, I was in seventh heaven.

Deon, on the other hand, was suffering from a plethora of mosquito bites. I made fun of him, and incurred some bad karma that ended with my lily-white skin turning a distinctly reddish hue after the SPF 20 sunscreen utterly failed me during the day (Seriously, it’s all they seem to sell over there. If you need your extra protection, bring your own).

Not wanting to end up with an army of insects feasting on my already-abused body, we asked for, and got, mosquito netting. By the next morning, Deon’s bites were in recession and my sunburn was healing.

That night, it poured. I groaned, lamenting the fact that I’d remembered being able to see sunlight through the roof tiles during the day. Sitting on the patio reading a novel, I knew I was in for a rough night.

And I was completely wrong.

Somehow, the tiles from generations earlier kept the rain out entirely. The restaurant I worked in at home in California had been built seven years earlier, and leaked like a sieve. This house proved far better at withstanding the tropical rain it sees so often.

For the next few days, while eating breakfast, Bessie the holy cow stopped by the gate, always mooing to get in. Cows are sacred in the Hindu religion, and traffic will stop for them if they lie down in the road, but their sanctity doesn’t guarantee their admittance to breakfast. Each morning, after several minutes of gawking, Bessie left.

Paying the bill at the end of our stay, I still couldn’t believe it had cost us each a measly $10 per night. Part of me felt guilty at getting off so cheap, but my rational side won out, reminding me that if it wasn’t profitable, they wouldn’t be in business.

For great value, a decent location and friendly proprietors, I couldn’t have been happier with the Villa Ludovici.