The secret of a great hostel

With the internet’s wonderful ability to distribute our opinions to all and sundry, no matter how ill informed or deluded we may be, maintaining a truly shit hostel has become an almost impossible task. Try hiring a sex pest to work behind the desk or cultivate a family of cockroaches in the bathroom and you’ll tend to find your establishment slipping down the rankings on hostelworld.com fairly quickly. Back in the halcyon days, before even the Lonely Planet had written…

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Telegraph pole art in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Street art with a difference in the Dominican Republic. Once in a while, whilst wandering city streets around the world you come across a great creative idea that could be transplanted almost anywhere to brighten up a cityscape. The decorated buildings of Tirana in Albania or the Soviet apartment blocks of Central Asia were two such examples.  Santo Domingo has used a different canvas: telegraph poles. Few would claim that concrete poles or creoste soaked wooden ones do much to…

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