Review of Notrack 1*

Basic hostel. About 10min drive out of town. Only one free shuttle each day — 7:45am drop off and 4:00pm pick up. No public transport near hostel but taxis available. Beautiful location but inconvenient unless you've hired a car. Poor check in experience — no orientation to hostel, rules, facilities etc. VERY laid back. Staff are very friendly and helpful when you can find them. Doesn't seem to be any system as to when there are staff around and when there aren't. No keys or lockers for the whole hostel. Very good bedding privacy wise and spacious rooms. Poor heating throughout. Nice fireplace in the common room but the heater in our dorm room was broken. Tried to alert staff to fix or get portable replacement brought up. Staff simply restarted unit and walked off assuming it was fixed — it wasn't. Tried to tell them this which they acknowledged but didn't come back to take another look at fixing or offer us another bed in another room (given that it was quite empty at the time with only one or two people in each 8-10 man dorm). Given that it was — 10 degrees celsius, a little heating would have been nice so that you didn't have to wear a beanie and gloves to bed. Food available for dinner each night (500yen for whatever meal the staff are having that night) and basic breakfast of cereal and bananas provided. Access to kitchen allowed to make you're own meals if you want. Terrible payment system. Cash only. Given the wrong amount (18, 000 yen too much) originally. No receipt, no lodge/accounts book, basically no proof that we had paid. Later they asked us to pay again on checking out because they had no record of us paying the first time and AGAIN, quoted an amount significantly higher than what we owed as per our booking. However, still very friendly throughout debacle. Overall — nice stay but quite a few flaws. Wouldn't be my first choice if I went back.