1) You do not need to stay at this place to go to the top of the Teide unless you are: Buy a permit (from the website) and take the cable car (3 months in advance). 2) Pay absolutely nothing and have a good night sleep in your hotel and plan to walk up to the cable car platform before 9am as the staff are there at 9am to stop you if you do not have a permit (which needs to be bought months in advance). This requires some planning and waking up early, but at least you get some sleep (unlike in the refuge) Now, If you do plan to stay in the refuge, make sure that you understand the following: If you take the cable car (this goes to the 3/4 from the base to the top (last one at 3:50pm), then you have to walk down for 45 mins (at least) to the refuge (there are no clear directions to it, just one sign half way through). You arrive around 5pm or so. You hang around the refuge until 7pm when the bedrooms are officially open. It's cold outside, but the noise inside from constant loud talking is challenging the levels of your patience. The people who work there do not ask you to check in when you arrive but do ask you in surprise if you have not yet checked in after watching you sitting there for two hours and catching your eyes a few times. This, apparently important task, is not even mentioned in the two pages of instructions on what you should or should not do there. At 7pm your bed allocations are revealed to you by calling your name, how this is done is a mystery (my suspicion is that non Spanish speakers are put into the big room with 16 beds). You put the mesh bed sheets (that look like the fake Halloween spider webs) on plastic wrapped mattresses and you finally think that you can rest then, but wait. There are lots of Spanish youths talking very loudly and laughing in the hall until midnight. Banging pans in the kitchen next to the bedroom and drinking wine until midnight is the norm, the people who work there seem to enjoy this themselves and take part in the noisy discussions. The idea of an early night before an ascent for the sunrise slowly becomes an unimaginable dream. Finally, the light in the bedroom is switched off at 10pm, the very loud noise of people talking and laughing stops around midnight. Bedrooms doors remain opened until then as nobody understands what the rules are. That's 5 hours of laying there, wishing you were asleep. Now, you wish you had those heavy duty ear plugs, as well as a thick eye mask. The altitude seems to heightened your senses, so the whole experience seems 10 times worse than it should be. Then the heaters are switched on full blast before 10pm, making it unbearable to sleep after an hour or so, so the bedrooms doors are open again as everyone is awake and unable to sleep from the heat. Then, the loud bunk beds squeaking starts and people's phones go off as nobody can sleep (unless you are the lucky one with heavy duty earplugs, snoring very loudly and grew up at high altitude). Why is it so hard to tightened the beds or add some oil to stop them squeaking? Some people here have also mentioned it before. At 4am the coffee machine in the hall (the bedrooms doors are open, remember?) starts off as people realise that spending 2 euros on a crap coffee is the best thing you could do at that time. (And I'm glad I followed them later on to make this hell hole more bearable). 4:50 the bedroom light is switched on. Don't bother setting your alarm! You are lucky if you slept for 5 minutes, so now it's the the time to climb the big mountain, 1,5-2 hours to catch the sunrise, it is definitely worth it and surprisingly not as bad as you think it would be. In the morning (5am or so) you walk back up to the cable car platform (one hour) and then to the top (another 30-45 mins). You have to do this in the dark in the winter, so make sure it's done in full moon (the best) or you have a torch that lasts for two hours. I don't know if this is different for the local Spanish speaking hikers but for me, the idea of a friendly refuge where you can talk to people (we speak 5 languages between me and my partner) and make friends and have a good rest, was in reality a badly managed, very noisy youth hostel with overpriced water, coffee and indifferent stuff who can't follow the basic rules they made up themselves. Even the toilet seats were broken off the hinges. The whole place feels like a complete rip off. A prison is probably the closest that it can be compared to. On a positive note, the 4G reception on top of the mountain was better than what you would get in 95% of the UK.…
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