Thrills, and shudders, of recognition

I sometimes get funny feelings when I’m walking around Paris. I’ll be cutting along some little street and suddenly must stop. There’s something strangely familiar about this street I’ve happened on. Then I see the sign for a small budget hotel with a French moniker and understand why deja vu has gripped me. I’ve stayed at the hotel before, on some bygone trip to the City of Light.

If I work at it, maybe peek into the lobby, some things come back to me. But mostly all I recall is whether I was happy there or what a rathole it was and wonder how I stood it.

But I did stand it -- and other budget digs all around the world, whether they were in Beijing or Boston. Finding the best places for the least amount of money to tell readers about was -- and is -- fun and challenging. In Paris, that means two- and three-star hotels, where a double room these days costs $100 to $180. On a visit several years ago, I stayed in 13 of these budget digs in 14 days, on both banks of the Seine and in manifold arrondissements.

One of those was the Hotel du Dragon, on narrow Rue du Dragon near the Church of St.-Germain-des-Pres, which I chanced upon recently and had to investigate for old times’ sake. It’s much the same, though all the rooms have private baths now.

A storefront window looks into a traditional French sitting room, with fake flowers and doilies, meant, I imagine, to make you think the guest rooms are similarly cozy and charming. The lobby has an old wooden front desk, a staircase leading steeply upward and an ancient sign that says “Comfort modern.”

I clearly recall the matron who was stationed there, so dour and unflappable that I thought of her as the dragon. But there were fresh lilacs on the counter, which made the place palatable.

I stayed in a room on an upper floor at the back (priced, at the time, well under $100), with a window overlooking an airshaft. It had ancient, dingy wallpaper, a jury-rigged shower and a sagging three-quarters-width bed crammed into a corner, covered by a spread last laundered during the Third Republic. The toilet was down the hall. And the smell evoked decades of suitcases, dirty clothes, sex and arguments over where to go for dinner.

Classic low-rent Paris. But I liked it, as I recall, and it was affordable.

Would I stay there again? Not if I could help it.

My taste, needs and discretionary income have changed. Like other aging baby boomers who backpacked through Europe during college, I now prefer hotels that have blow dryers and free toiletries.

I still love to tell stories about some of the worst, nuttiest places I’ve stayed: the grass hut I had to get on my hands and knees to enter, on the beach in the Vava’u island group of Tonga; a Sahara desert hostelry in the Libyan oasis town of Ghat, where only cold water trickled from the shower’s ankle-high spigot; and the inimitable YMCA Hotel in New Delhi, where the bed crunched if I shifted and large cockroaches wandered across the screen of my laptop.

Just as unforgettable were those rare budget places so pleasing I wouldn’t have traded them for the Ritz.

I can only hope Las Golondrinas hotel, around a flowery courtyard in Oaxaca, Mexico, is as charming as it was when I stayed there 10 years ago. In the magical Balinese hill town of Ubud, I passed up the Four Seasons for a room at Pringga Juwita Water Garden Cottages. It had a nice big double bed covered with an Indonesian print spread, ceiling fan and adjoining bath, set in a fenced garden where I sat in the tub al fresco.

Finding such places takes beating the pavement, not just luck or even pre-trip research (though a bargain hunter needs to know when it’s high season and accommodations at all price levels are likely to be scant). Whatever my destination, I used to book a room in a reliable, higher-priced place the first night, then go hunting for a good budget hotel to move to for the rest of my stay. This is most fruitfully done around noon, when rooms have been vacated and cleaned and the staff isn’t too busy to show you around.

It’s important to see a room before you take it, not just the lobby and grounds, which can be deceiving. If you’re ready to move in immediately, you’re a bird in hand from the management’s perspective and may be more able to bargain for the best rate.

My mother used to say it didn’t matter where you stayed, because you would be out of the room seeing the sights. I’ve decided this is one of the few things she was ever wrong about. Travel is a fragile high, easily shattered by dingy furnishings, a disagreeable staff, bad beds, windowless rooms or general charmlessness.

There’s a thin line between good budget digs and places that will depress you. Sometimes it’s nothing more than context, as I discovered during a mostly miserable stay in Sofia, Bulgaria, about 10 years ago, shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union. The city was so seedy and joyless that, after sightseeing excursions, I retreated gladly into my shabby room in a private house on a leafy street. Compared with the city, it seemed like paradise.

I’ve embarked on an extended hunt for Paris hotels with two-star rates and three-star style, which I’ll write about at a later time. But all the while, I dream of the day when I might get a funny feeling in front of the lavish Hotel de Crillon, a palace of a place to stay on the Place de la Concorde.

Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at www.latimes.com/susanspano. You may e-mail her at postcards@latimes.com. She cannot respond individually.