When you think about it, staying in a hotel is a good idea on so many levels. You get to mess up the bed and someone else makes it, no one complains about you eating in bed and you get to steal lots of little bottles of shampoo you will never use. However, would you still be keen to stay in an utterly bizarre hotel like one of these?

An Ice Hotel

You know what it’s like. You are freezing cold in somewhere like Lapland and all you want to do is enter your hotel room and thaw out your private parts over a radiator while sipping something warm. Then you remember; your hotel is made of freaking ice. Really, who invents this stuff? Make your hotels of some of something warmer like giant blankets or dead polar bears and I might visit your bitterly cold country.

A Salt Hotel

Salt is a great thing in some respects and not so great in others. For example, it makes food taste better. On the other hand, it isn’t really recommended for making hotels out of. This bizarre hotel is located in the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. Apparently there was another one but the authorities blew it up with dynamite. Harsh but fair.

The Dog Hotel

The Dog Bark Park Hotel Inn in Idaho probably seemed like a great idea at the time. After all, we all have wacky ideas at 3 in the morning after a couple of drinks too many. For instance, I once invented the game of Underwater Wrestle Golf while as I was as drunk as a skunk. The big difference is that most of us sober up and realize that it was a stupid idea. Not the designers of this bizarre and slightly scary hotel, though.

The Revolving Hotel

After the ice, the salt and the blooming mutt this hotel actually looks pretty normal. It’s not. It is called the Marmara Antalya and it goes round and round. It is located in Antalya in Turkey and is the world’s first revolving hotel. Apparently it floats in a giant pool of water, which sounds like a sensible idea.

The Sewage Hotel

That revolving hotel actually seems like it was just a welcome shot of sanity in the world of crazy hotel madness. Over in Austria they had the inspired idea of turning some old sewage pipes into hotel rooms. It is called the Das Park Hotel, which I think means Smelly Old Concrete Hotel in Austrian. You will find these pieces of post industrial nonsense beside the banks of the Danube in Linz.

The Coffin Hotel

I have a general rule in life and it goes a bit like this. If I ever turn up to a hotel and they ask me if I want a single or double coffin then I run away from there as fast as I can. This is the Gruft Room in the Propeller Island City Lodge in Berlin and a kind word for it is gothic. A less kind word is insane. Another room in the same hotel has cages and a two way mirror, while another is upside down. It isn’t clear whether they stock those little bottles of shampoo so I’ll give it a miss.

The Elephant Hotel

Our final bizarre hotel involves sleeping inside a fake elephant in a lodge which was built using grass and bits of twigs and which might fall down at any moment. What? It’s in Sri Lanka and is called the Kumbuk River something or other. If you spend the night there and survive let me know.