Documentary : Checking in at Somalia’s Hotel Hell : Bring your own soap. Tarantulas, roaches and tropical diseases are gratis. And the room is $85 a night.

There’s no charge for the tarantula, Mohammed Jirdeh assured. It comes with the closet. The two-inch flying roaches are free. And so are the meals--camel meat, mostly, or the occasional mysterious entree we call “today’s road kill.”

There is running water a few hours a day, but rarely before midnight. There’s electricity, thanks to the thundering generator in the courtyard. And there are towels, sheets and floor mattresses; this is perhaps the only commercial structure in Somalia that has them. But no room service. No brooms. No soap. No toilet tissue. No maid.

There are a dozen satellite dishes and telephones on the roof that, for a mere $46 a minute, can connect you with any country in the world--except Somalia. There are virtually no other phones left in Somalia to be connected to.

All this, for just $85 a night.

Welcome to the Hotel Sahafi--Arabic for journalist --where the receipts advertise “Comfort, Safety, Luxury for Business or Discreet Weekends . “

The hotel is the brainchild of prominent Somali businessman Jirdeh, a towering and worldly figure who, on the eve of the U.S. Marine landing in a city where almost every structure has been gutted or leveled in two years of punishing civil war, transformed this 58-room shell into, well, a modified 58-room shell. In the heart of anarchy, he didn’t have much to work with, but he has provided security and made the hotel a relative oasis of safety.

It is from here that much of the world press--including Times photographer Bob Carey, fellow Times correspondent Scott Kraft and I--has been covering the United Nations’ extraordinary experiment called Restore Hope, a U.S.-led military intervention that is employing an overwhelming armed force to save a desperate nation from itself.

In many ways, the rawness of the Hotel Sahafi has been an asset for the Western and Asian correspondents descending on Mogadishu, most accustomed to tactical retreats from urban battlefields to the nearest five-star hotels. Jirdeh unwittingly has brought the press corps closer to the roots of the Somali tragedy, the despair, brutality and extortion that have held nearly 1 million Somalis hostage in this capital for two years.

The hotel is an excellent contact point for the diseases that are now more deadly than hunger for a famine-weakened nation. At any moment, half its guests are down with diarrhea, bacterial infections and the early symptoms of malaria.

Just a few feet outside, a Somali woman suspected of cavorting with French Foreign Legion troops was stripped naked and beaten.

Starving children sit empty-eyed every morning in a refugee camp of straw hovels across the street. Preteens mad from war demand cigarettes in the street with the poke of a finger and a gun.

Indeed, several journalists have had their pockets picked or been robbed at gunpoint right outside the hotel gate. Others have been threatened. And all have had to shell out thousands of dollars for free-lance “technicals,” the armed jeeps and pickup trucks that provide a semblance of protection in a city with no law.

Clearly, the madness, mayhem and misery of Mogadishu already have left a profound and lasting personal imprint on the Western media dispatched to record it all. Many of us are veterans of world disasters both natural and man-made, while others are first-timers. Times photographer Bob Carey, for example, who spent the last two weeks tirelessly navigating the guns and framing the pain of both Mogadishu and the starving Somali countryside after a career confined largely to Southern California, had this reaction:

“I will never, ever take civilization for granted again.”

It is, in fact, the totality of the tragedy that makes Somalia so painful. Through a decade of reporting in Africa and Asia, Kraft and I have seen worse one-shot horrors: thousands of Indians gassed to death by a leak at the Union Carbide Corp. plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984; massacres in township violence in South Africa; tens of thousands of bloated bodies floating in Bangladesh’s flood-swollen waters, and Afghanistan’s rapid descent into bloody anarchy when shell-shocked Kabul was carved up by warring rebel factions.

But Somalia offers bits of the worst of all of it on the broadest possible scale--a nation that has destroyed itself piece by piece on every conceivable level. And, after two weeks in a nation where armed thugs had stolen or broken even the last light bulb, wire or vital morsel of grain, where there’s just no line between the guns that guard you and those that will kill, there is the constant sense of living the surreal in a cinematic slice of hell.

“This place,” a CBS-TV producer concluded on a satellite call to New York after a day of death threats and disasters, “is just far too weird for words.”

There are, of course, deeply personal moments that help define the tragedy. For, as the boys outside the Hotel Sahafi prove hour after hour and day after day, the “technicals” are people too--people mired as deeply in the horror as the human stick figures that have become the media’s logo for the Somali story.

“I’m so sorry I am late,” the driver of the Times’ mini-technical apologized one recent morning. “I am just writing you a note. My baby daughter is died last night.”

David Kabierey Iyer, the driver who kept several Times staffers alive with the help of his two teen-age rooftop gunmen, was stone-faced as he delivered the news.

“But David, how did she die?” we asked, incredulous by his delivery and choking back tears of our own.

“She stopped breathing,” he said flatly, later explaining that he could find no antibiotics to treat the 4-month-old girl’s respiratory infection.

“But you’re not sad?” we asked.

“Sure, sad. But what to do? Everyone is dying. My friend, no tears left in Somalia.”

David, of course, was an exception. Most of the press-versus-technical encounters in Mogadishu mirror the bizarre Somali-style commerce that has hounded the U.N. relief agencies--which, until the press arrived en masse, were the only extortable game in town.

Indeed, most of the violence against the foreign press in Somalia has been no more political or logical than that against the international hand trying for months to feed it. With operating costs of tens of thousands of dollars a week and equipment that rivals the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U.S. television networks that blanketed Mogadishu, in particular, set themselves up as instant targets in a city without a cop.

Typical was a tense standoff last week at the gate of the CBS-TV compound a few blocks from the Hotel Sahafi--a compound owned by one of the very few wealthy and powerful Somalis who managed to maintain his little island in hell.

A week or so earlier, one of the network’s “technicals” had intervened to save the life of a CBS soundman named Mitch during a robbery attempt in the street.

“I save Mitch’s life,” the hired gun said. “So now you give me $1,000 more.”

Dumbfounded, the cameraman who greeted him refused, explaining that such heroics were, indeed, his job.

“I save Mitch’s life,” the gunman repeated. “You don’t give me $1,000, I kill him.”

The cameraman then explained that Mitch would be long gone from Somalia in a day or so, and there was nothing the hired gun could do about it.

“OK,” he said. “Then I kill owner of this house.” At which point the owner ran out, waving an ancient .38 police special in the air and, after 15 minutes of screaming, promised that the boy would be paid--something, sometime.

The networks managed such feats as broadcasting the evening news live from Mogadishu by ferrying in everything from generators and a ton of drinking water to satellite ground stations and air conditioners aboard chartered cargo planes from neighboring Kenya.

Still, even for “the nets,” as they’re known, it was a living nightmare. Trucks carrying satellite dishes to Baidoa broke down and died. Precious live shots were lost. Charter planes couldn’t get fuel. Gunmen demanded raises, granted within minutes by battle-hardened, control-freak field producers unaccustomed to losing reins on the bottom line.

And, for everyone in the media mob that descended on Mogadishu, just getting into this country, let alone getting around in its checkerboard of armed-clan roadblocks, takes some doing.

Many fly in with the relief agencies, which generously share spare seats. But amid the press-pack crush that accompanied the U.S. Marines, such seats have become scarce. The alternative: a charter flight from Nairobi.

On one such journey just days before the Marines hit Mogadishu’s beaches, I joined five other journalists in a battered old twin-engine Cessna 402 just after noon. Its main duty was done for the day--ferrying in a shipment of qat, a plant with natural, addictive stimulants that is the Somali national drug.

We had a lot of gear that day, and a British pilot had already rejected it, explaining that, with passenger and cargo, he would be 600 pounds over the legal limit. But the African bush pilot on the qat flight never flinched. His men stuffed our bags into the plane’s nose and wing hatches and filled every bit of cabin space.

We lurched off the runway of Nairobi’s Wilson Airport and plodded for nearly four hours over the Kenyan and Somali bush. But as we made our final approach to a gravel airstrip clearly in the midst of nowhere, all six of us on board began screaming over the engine noise.

“Hey, wait! This is the wrong airport! We’re going to Mogadishu,” voices rang out in unison.

Then the pilot did something no one on board had ever seen before. With the Cessna in a 90-degree bank just 100 feet off the ground, he turned around like a cab driver and said, “Sorry, but this is where you get off.”

Eventually, gunmen showed up. A battered old Land Rover appeared. And, for a few hundred dollars, we were driven the hour or so to the city.

But it was the words of the shriveled up old qat-addict who identified himself as Abu Wajid, chief of security at the remote landing strip, that would resonate through the days to come. “Welcome to Somalia,” he said. “There is nothing here but us.”