The Bamboo Treehouse is not the only place to sleep at the Rosalie Forest Eco-Lodge on the Caribbean island-country of Dominica. Guests can also choose to stay in a self contained cottage or in one of several cabins. There’s a secluded area where campers can pitch a tent. The lodge can arrange a local home stay too.
But of all those accommodations options the Bamboo Treehouse is the coolest.
Spending the night in drainage pipe in a public park is a bad thing . . . usually
It’s almost like being homeless
All the charm and safety of a bomb shelter
Our rooms are no longer full of crap
We like to imagine that those were among the tag lines rejected by the Dasparkhotel, the accommodations in a suburb of Linz, Austria where guests spend the night in a recycled drainage pipe.
There’s a soft spot in Spot Cool Stuff’s heart for unusual hotels. In a world where there are so many mediocre motels, unremarkable rooms, indifferent inns and characterless chains we love when a hotelier gets creative and offers an overnight experience that goes beyond the ordinary.
With a new year of unusual hotel exploration nearly upon us it seemed a good time to look back at the most weird, odd and downright bizarre accommodations we visited in 2009.
This being Germany, every treehouse includes a beer-filled mini bar
Ever since we published our selection of places that resemble a Dr. Seuss illustration we’ve regretted leaving certain hotels off our list. Like this one: the funky, arboreal Baumhaus Hotel in Neißeaue, Germany.
Spot Cool Stuff has seen our share of art made from found objects. One of our favorite Caribbean beach bars, Antigua’s Dune Preserve, was constructed largely with beach-scavenged goods. But the Controversy Tram Inn, located in the village of Hoogwoud, Holland, is the only hotel we know of with such a strong focus on recycled objects.
We’re not sure what the antithesis of a freewheeling Caribbean beach experience would be, but a faux European castle has to come close. Yet, somehow, those two opposites successfully come together in the unlikely Blue Cave Castle Resort.
At night you fall asleep listening to the roar of lions and tigers through the canvas walls of your tent. In the morning you wake up to an elephant bringing you your breakfast, carried in a picnic basket he’s holding by his trunk.
It may seem like you are in Africa or in some brought-to-life children’s story. You are not. You are at the Vision Quest Ranch, an unusual B&B in Salinas, California, about an hour south of San Francisco.
Were you to spot the plane from the beach below you could be forgiven for believing it had crash-landed there, like a scene from some Costa Rican version of 'Lost'
At the Stockholm airport there’s a hotel in a refurbished Boeing 747. An airplane hotel at an airport—we can see some logic in that. But what’s a Boeing 727 surrounded by thick jungle, overlooking the Pacific in Costa Rica, doing doubling as a hotel?
