Ice Cold in Quebec
The Ice Hotel ("Hotel Du Glace" in French) is just that - a hotel made entirely from ice. Romantic, you say? Romantic my arse. Any notion of romance wears off after about 10 minutes, by which point you have realised you can no longer feel your fingers. Or toes. Or any part of your face.
The Ice Hotel markets itself as "unique and enchanting", both of which are bollocks - there's one in Sweden too so it isn't unique, and it's enchanting up to a point in that ice is very pretty, but becomes less enchanting when you're picking your way to the chemical loo at 3am. What it really is, in fact, is a £200-a-night cross between an igloo and a budget Blackpool guest house. For your £200 you get:
- a small room with nowhere to put your clothes
- a matress with a plastic cover over it in case your bed starts melting in the night, and, to combat the cold:
- a few dead animals to lie on (or at least their furs), which I promise is neither comfortable nor goes very far in helping you forget it is (I kid you not) -10 inside and
- a sleeping bag "suitable for artic temperatures" - the kind you take with you when you're climbing Everest. Except that I'm not climbing Everest, I'm on holiday.
You don't even get your own loo, but have to trek (and believe me in these temperatures that's a trek) through the snow to the nearest portakabin, and dinner, if you've paid extra for it, as a further yomp through a field to a nearby restaurant, where you're greeted by a bloke dressed in red playing an accordian. This is, no doubt, the equivalent of us welcoming the Canadians to the beautiful Lake District then sending them off to a Harvester to be welcomed by Morris Dancers.
There is, however, a bar, where you can drink out of ice glasses that stick to your lips while sitting on ice seats that stick to your bum, and if you're feeling flush you can buy coffee and hot chocolate there too (probably the hotel's most lucrative product.) In addition there's a slightly irrelevent chapel where the only held are extremely expensive weddings - the rest of the time the chapel is packed with Japanese tourists taking each others' pictures sitting on the altar - and a shop, which is always packed, probably because it isn't made of ice, but is another (somewhat unsightly) portakabin, and is therefore warm. There are fires - rather apologetic looking flames inside glass boxes - in the bar area but if you want to sit next to them you are forced to endure the strains of Celine Dion, Quebec's most internationally-renowned export, being piped through loud speakers around you.
We are extremely gullible creatures. Take the Ice Hotel, for example. We flock there because it's "unique", but why is it "unique"? Because if there were lots of them nobody in their right mind would go there. It's freezing cold (on the website the clever marketing bods of the Ice Hotel use Farenheit when proudly telling you that the thick walls of the building act as a "thermos" and therefore the temperature INSIDE the hotel will never drop below 23F. That's -5C. Thermos? How pissed off would you be if you got out your flask on a cold wonter dinnertime and found it was frozen solid?) It's also overpriced - prices start at £200 a night and that's for a tiny room which has a curtain for a door, rather like an NHS hospital cubicle - and you have to crap in a plastic box over a chemical toilet. Who in their right mind would want to go there?
We did.
The Ice Hotel markets itself as "unique and enchanting", both of which are bollocks - there's one in Sweden too so it isn't unique, and it's enchanting up to a point in that ice is very pretty, but becomes less enchanting when you're picking your way to the chemical loo at 3am. What it really is, in fact, is a £200-a-night cross between an igloo and a budget Blackpool guest house. For your £200 you get:
- a small room with nowhere to put your clothes
- a matress with a plastic cover over it in case your bed starts melting in the night, and, to combat the cold:
- a few dead animals to lie on (or at least their furs), which I promise is neither comfortable nor goes very far in helping you forget it is (I kid you not) -10 inside and
- a sleeping bag "suitable for artic temperatures" - the kind you take with you when you're climbing Everest. Except that I'm not climbing Everest, I'm on holiday.
You don't even get your own loo, but have to trek (and believe me in these temperatures that's a trek) through the snow to the nearest portakabin, and dinner, if you've paid extra for it, as a further yomp through a field to a nearby restaurant, where you're greeted by a bloke dressed in red playing an accordian. This is, no doubt, the equivalent of us welcoming the Canadians to the beautiful Lake District then sending them off to a Harvester to be welcomed by Morris Dancers.
There is, however, a bar, where you can drink out of ice glasses that stick to your lips while sitting on ice seats that stick to your bum, and if you're feeling flush you can buy coffee and hot chocolate there too (probably the hotel's most lucrative product.) In addition there's a slightly irrelevent chapel where the only held are extremely expensive weddings - the rest of the time the chapel is packed with Japanese tourists taking each others' pictures sitting on the altar - and a shop, which is always packed, probably because it isn't made of ice, but is another (somewhat unsightly) portakabin, and is therefore warm. There are fires - rather apologetic looking flames inside glass boxes - in the bar area but if you want to sit next to them you are forced to endure the strains of Celine Dion, Quebec's most internationally-renowned export, being piped through loud speakers around you.
We are extremely gullible creatures. Take the Ice Hotel, for example. We flock there because it's "unique", but why is it "unique"? Because if there were lots of them nobody in their right mind would go there. It's freezing cold (on the website the clever marketing bods of the Ice Hotel use Farenheit when proudly telling you that the thick walls of the building act as a "thermos" and therefore the temperature INSIDE the hotel will never drop below 23F. That's -5C. Thermos? How pissed off would you be if you got out your flask on a cold wonter dinnertime and found it was frozen solid?) It's also overpriced - prices start at £200 a night and that's for a tiny room which has a curtain for a door, rather like an NHS hospital cubicle - and you have to crap in a plastic box over a chemical toilet. Who in their right mind would want to go there?
We did.
posted by RLS at 11:23 am
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