Da Vinci Hostel

This is quite a nice hotel. We paid R2400 for two days for two. We had the double bed room. It had plenty of room and even too much storage space in old fashioned furniture. I took a look into the dorm rooms and they seemed to have plenty of space for the number of beds. There are two toilets, which never proved to be too few. One was actually, really a bath room. It had the only tub designed as a two-person bath tub I’ve ever seen in a hostel; but bring your own bubble bath. The shower was also big enough for two. There is also a clothes washer in the bath room, which you can use for R100. There is drying balcony where you can hang out your laundry on their racks. They turned on a small electric heater to help the drying along. Even heavy weight stuff was dry in 24 hours. The kitchen table would only seat six, so that is the choke point and there does not appear to be a habit here of rinsing dishes with boiling water; so perhaps you should do that before you use them. Staff are helpful but have only a limited supply of English vocabulary. The biggest problem for DaVinci is with their booking agents. Ours (Agoda) provided insufficient information about how to get in to the hostel. It is located in a Soviet-style apartment block, behind a keyed gate and a keyed door. If you have a Russian SIM card in your phone you could call the hostel for directions but China Mobile saw to it that we could not make one work in ours. Agoda needed to include that the hostel is in Unit 42. That is the code you enter at the gate and the door to get the on duty staff to buzz it open. A friendly Russian student saw we were having trouble and rustled up someone with a local phone to get that information from the staff. All the information you need is on a card DaVinci hands out - it is not on their Russian-language only website. I have uploaded a picture of the card for you so you can see detailed directions on how to get to their building and the unit number for the code boxes. Actually the card is a little misleading too. The trolley (#2) from the train station goes right down Sovietskaya, which is the street on the bottom of the picture. Get off just before ul Gertsena. I’m not sure why they show you getting off from a bus on Prospect Lenina. That is the third time I’ve had problems with Agoda giving wrong or inadequate information. I won’t be using them again. There is a problem with the whole idea of a key box door. The staff seem to be AWOL each morning till after 10 or 11 am. If you go out shopping, for a walk, or forget something and need to come back in, I don’t think there will be anyone there to buzz you in. It is possible it rings a cell phone at home and they can do it remotely; I didn’t have the courage to try that. I’ve down rated them one-star because of this possible problem.