Tough sheets
I T is an oddity of the hospitality industry that the easiest things to do properly are the ones that hoteliers and B&B owners often don’t.
I have a thing about clean linen and new towels. After many miles of one-star travel in Africa and Asia — not to mention parts of Europe, such as the South of France — I have my own, much-used survival kit. It consists of a tiny, absorbent backpacker’s towel (little more than a really expensive dishcloth, actually); a squash ball for those pesky bathroom basins that don’t have plugs; a heavy-duty nylon groundsheet; a kikoi; and a double silk sleeping bag I bought many years ago in Hanoi.
The kikoi doubles as an extra towel or an emergency pillowcase in places where the linen is less than fresh. The sleeping bag stands in for the sheets. If the bed is really grimy, I sleep on the groundsheet, which provides a solid barrier between me and whatever filth and freeloading critters lurk on the mattress.
I have learned that, even in what passes for the best hotel in some places, the cleanliness of the bed linen will fall considerably short of what is acceptable — something that has happened in many places in which I have had the pleasure of staying. Mozambique after the end of the civil war was chock-full of pensãos like that, chosen because they were marginally safer than sleeping on the streets. Back then, the country and its would-be hoteliers were still finding their feet.
There is, however, in South Africa 2014, no excuse for cruddy linen and threadbare towels. It’s not as if we’ve woken from some grinding war where washing powder has been used to make bombs and cotton has been rationed to make uniforms.
And yet, the manky towels persist in B&Bs across the land, and the sheets in far too many hotels bear the greasy patina of long, feverish nights.
Friends of mine have a beach house in Sri Lanka that they rent out as a self-catering cottage. Every couple of months or so, they stuff a holdall full of thick towels and new sheets and make the long trek via Dubai to Colombo and when they get there, the old linen gets turfed.
Few B&B owners in this land need to go to such lengths. Will changing the linen often cost money? You bet. It is, however, an easy — and important — thing to get right. There is nothing that says “professional” louder than a new fluffy towel and crisp bedsheets.
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