two year tripWe thought it worthy of a post of its own, this quirky hostel in the Abava valley, 2 hours west of Riga, Latvia.
As its name suggests, it’s a former working hospital. Your first thought is likely as ours – “cool, I wonder if we’ll be able to make out any of the hospital’s original features?”
No problem there – the building looks to have about 8 working bedrooms as of our visit, and is still in the process of being converted into a hostel. All the facilities are done, but you cannot escape the thought that not so long ago this was an abandoned or mothballed hospital. And that thought, especially as Julie and I were the only guests, gave this place a very spooky air..
The main kitchen was obviously the old operating theatre, with its tiled floor, drain holes, electrical cabling coming up through the floor and chains hanging from the ceiling.
The TV room has some heavy duty black-out blinds, and old eye chart (is your Cyrillic alphabet better with your left eye or your right eye?), and there’s a really old velour-covered electric wheelchair. Sadly, the batteries are dead – I wondered what the horn sounded like!
Indeed, there are left-over bits of hospital furniture everywhere we looked: a couple of old wheeled beds, trolleys that would have been used in operations for laying out surgeons implements, and old sinks in almost every room.
I haven’t been able to find out what kind of hospital it was, and perhaps that’s for the best – for the sake of a good nights sleep, we liked to think it was a nice hospital where minor injuries were quickly mended, rather than ‘The Shining’ meets ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’.
Wow. That IS cool.
It’s also a little bit creepy when it’s dark and very quiet…
No come on you two; if you had wanted to sleep in a hospital I could easily have arranged it for you complete with electric beds that actually work. I’m not sure I could stay in a place like that – I would worry that I was sleeping in a bed that someone had died in!!! Uhhhh.
I daren’t think how you would have arranged such an evening’s accommodation. We’ll take our chances in Latvia, thanks all the same ;o)
wow, that’s more Urbex than hostel :D
Isn’t it!
Because we were the only guests, I had a good wander about when the owner left for the afternoon :o)
I found a old library on the top floor and a cellar about the size of our bedroom under the road to the back of the building. As the access to the cellar was off the operating room, originally had a straight staircase, and had its own door to the outside near the top of the stairs, I’ve only just worked out that it might have been a mortuary!