Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby

Our friend "the purple hotel" in Newcastle

I don't get to stay in amazing hotels. I get to stay in Premier Inns. They're fine - more than fine, in fact - but they don't tend to come with a rooftop infinity pool. And you don't get much foraging for wild partridgeberries outside a Table Table. But that's OK. Needs must. Sometimes, however, it's fun to see how the other half (or much tinier fraction than that) live.

Giles Coren and Monica Galetti are off to explore some of the world's more unusual hotels. Because they work for the BBC, they don't just get to gloat at us from a sunlounger, they're expected to pitch in to cover the cost of their board and lodging. No problem for Monica, deputy chef to Michel Roux Jr and capable of doing a full Haka of facial expressions when overseeing a skills test on Masterchef. But Giles has no apparent talent for anything, apart from winding people up. I would just like to extend a sympathetic hand to his sister Victoria, for managing to do rather well in life despite having such an annoying tit for a brother.

Giles can't take a single task seriously. Expertly feng shui interiors? He deliberately moves objects off diagonals. Help with the laundry cart? He hitches a ride on the back of it. Help with the valet parking? He nearly crashes a Ferrari like a boy racer in a multistorey. (And a valet parking job is a real privilege, since it costs 55,000 dollars to own a car in Singapore, which none of the staff can afford.) And then Giles is useless when he's not even trying. Check in? He can't find the reception desks, he says, though they are clearly in shot behind him. Deliver valets back to reception? He can't work his walkie talkie at the same time as driving a golf buggy. Iron the pool towels? He can't insert them into the machine. But he's full of smart alec comments about it all, as though it's all terribly beneath him. He also wants his mum to take in his trousers for him. Giles, it seems (and this becomes even more apparent in subsequent episodes), is quite the male chauvinist. Monica, on the other hand, soon gets stuck in, rolling up dim sum and enthusing about the chocolate room and the uniform delivery system. Take note, Michel, for she will soon be demanding her chef's whites be sent by conveyor belt direct to her wardrobe.

Their first hotel is the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, which opened in 2010. It consists of three towers with what looks like a giant surfboard perched on top of them. The cathedral-sized lobby is full of Antony Gormleys. The suites have their own karaoke rooms. It's a far cry from Raffles.

The surfboard is actually a rooftop garden and swimming pool, whose water somehow manages to not tip out 55 storeys on to the streets below whenever someone dives in. It's all to do with 500 finely balanced jacks, the architectural plans tell us. In reality, the pool is used as one permanent giant selfie shot, and while the programme is quite to give us lots of hotel statistics (cost to build, room rates, uniform numbers, casino wins, towels laundered, kilos of cauliflower consumed), it doesn't mention how many iPhones get dropped and drowned in its waters. But I'm reckoning on several hundred a year.

The hotel didn't exist when we went to Singapore en route to New Zealand in 2006, not that it would have been within our budget. Our visit there is a bit of a jetlagged blur of sweaty heat, temples and office blocks, colonial mansions and cocktails, expensive shopping malls and wonderful street food, and a cable car and a dolphin show on Sentosa Island. I remember getting off our flight from London and feeling like I'd been punched into a bowl of cloying soup. The humidity left you limp.

Everything was terribly clean and ordered.  If this was Asia, it felt like a terribly sanitised version of it. The Disneyland edition. There were a lot of rules about how to behave on the MRT. No chewing gum, no flammable liquids, no durians. (For more on durians, see Dara O'Briain and Ed Byrne on the Road to Mandalay, broadcast last night.) I don't remember much about our hotel (a Swissotel overlooking Boat Quay) other than the air conditioned bliss of its bedroom. I remember Raffles more, where we called in for the obligatory sling, if only because the floor of the bar was covered in discarded monkey nut shells. Very crunchy.

The rest of it was a strange mix of technology meeting tradition, and distinct cultures and religions (Muslim, Hindu, Chinese, Buddhist), all in a tiny (and literal) melting pot. We spotted the same Victorian floor tiles from our flat in Crouch End used in the Thian Hock Keng temple, a touch of the colonial British that Dara O'Briain also noticed in Penang last night:

We didn't have nearly enough time to explore in our brief sojourn before it was time to catch our onward flight to Auckland. We had even less time in Singapore on our return leg, a mere six hours in orchid-filled Changi airport, which also has a swimming pool. We used the time purely to grab some sleep in the airport hotel, where you can rent a room by the dodgy-sounding hour. It was a blissful interruption - complete with shower - to 29 hours of flying in economy. But even further removed from anything the Marina Bay Sands has to offer. Unless you can rent a sunbed by the infinity pool without paying the extortionate overnight rate.

A Cabbie Abroad: Canada

Mason McQueen is a London cabbie who has taken to gaining the Knowledge in some of the world's most far-flung corners and most treacherous driving conditions. He believes he is well qualified. Not because he has mastered the nuances of the North Circular but simply because, he claims, a London cab driver is "naturally a nosy bastard".

His mantra is "Want the lowdown on a place? Speak to a cab driver." By working and living amongst the locals he can gain access to experiences and information that your average travelogue presenter can't. Last week he was in Cambodia, driving a tuk-tuk, eating tarantulas, learning about the horrors of the Killing Fields for the first time, and bearing witness to the extreme social divides of wealth versus poverty.

This week he is in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, in Canada's Arctic north. Here he also eats local delicacies (frozen whale meat or walrus penis, anyone?) and noodles, and discovers another world of contrasts - the extraordinary intermingling of a boomtown on the edge of oil, metal and mineral excavation and the harsh struggles of its native settlers, the Inuit.

Iqaluit is minus thirty degrees when Mason arrives, and as the sea has frozen over, the only way in is by plane. He is going to work for local cab firm Pai-Pa taxis. Few people own cars this far north and as there is no public transport, nearly everyone goes by taxi. At least in winter, when walking for even a couple of minutes outside can result in frostbite to exposed areas of skin, as Mason's cheeks very quickly discover. ("Makes me look a right boozer!") The taxi company prides itself in being the last off the road during a blizzard, determined not to leave their customers stranded. Taxi drivers come - like Mason - from all over the world to benefit from their necessity. As cabs charge per passenger as well as for distance travelled, it can prove very lucrative.

Craig is Mason's new boss and takes him out to show him the ropes. "Is this a four-wheel drive?" Mason asks of his car. No, is the answer, before he is made to drive up Iqaluit's slipperiest hill, which he simply slides straight back down again, time after time after time. It's too expensive to import salt for gritting the roads. Mason doesn't wear a seatbelt. He also fails to indicate at a junction and drives straight through a stop sign. Typical London cabbie, then.

Iqaluit has no street names, just house numbers and a junction known as Four Corners, which is the busiest intersection in town. It even, Mason's boss tells him, has an occasional "rush minute". Passengers climb in and simply ask to go to a number. ("723, please.") "Er, is that near Four Corners?" Mason usually replies.

Gradually, he starts to find his way around, and meets several interesting characters along the way. Nancy is a Inuit with a baby on her back. She tries to teach Mason throat singing. Zoya is a marine biologist who has shipped up a year's worth of toilet paper from Winnipeg and earns enough money to afford a boat and a Ski-Doo.

The voiceover tells us that Mason has "volunteered" to help at a local soup kitchen. You kind of think "Like hell he has," but there is no doubt that Mason is genuinely moved and troubled by what he finds there. Homelessness in a place like Iqaluit is invisible, since anyone who slept rough on the streets would die instantly. Instead people couch-surf or sleep in rickety shacks, risking carbon monoxide poisoning from a decrepit stove which is their only source of heat. The soup kitchen is open seven days a week and for many of the Inuit who use it, it provides their only meal of the day.

Mason gradually gains more layers of clothing, and a fur hat. By the time he is given a day off to go ice fishing, he is made to wear a sealskin coat and polar bear trousers. This is the full-on Pingu experience, with a snowmobile to drive them there, a power-drill to create a hole in the ice, and lures to dangle into it for hours on end. The Inuit's traditional ways (just like Pingu's) are being stamped out by technology, but they still try to teach Mason some of their stretching and pushing exercises to keep warm.

It is dark in winter for up to 18 hours a day. You wonder if this - as well as the substance abuse and social problems the people face - has anything to do with the worryingly high suicide rate, particularly amongst teenage boys. Mason meets a young lad who has lost his best friend and is totally unable to understand what led him to end his life. As a parent, Mason cannot imagine the pain of having to bury your child at an age when their life should just be truly beginning.

It's a very lonely place, and one you must either love or hate. There is certainly no escape. Mason says he feels totally cut-off from the rest of the world and technically he is, especially when a massive snowstorm shuts the airport. But a sighting of the spectacular Northern Lights shows him a beautiful side to this harsh Arctic wilderness.

I have never ventured so far north, in Canada or anywhere else. I did once experience a few days of winter in Montreal, which at only minus 25 degrees in the windchill would probably seem positively tropical to anyone from Iqaluit. There wasn't much snow on the ground until my last day there, but a stroll around the back of the Oratoire St Joseph one morning showed me what it is like to battle extreme cold. By the time I was back at my lodgings, a hostel run by nuns who knitted slippers for their guests to wear around the house, my cheeks were throbbing and my legs were numb and blue. Stepping out on the pavements from anywhere indoors literally took your breath away. It was like a knife slicing across your face. Thankfully Montreal is kitted out to prevent you from spending much time outside when the elements are at their most brutal. It has a whole heated underground city of malls and eateries, all hooked up to the outskirts by an efficient Metro system.

Le Vieux Port in Montreal. The harbour was frozen. 

Oratoire St Joseph 

These aren't clouds, they are ice particles

Slippers knitted by nuns

Me in the blistering Canadian cold, in December 2000

I have actually managed to see the Northern Lights without needing to venture into the Arctic circle. Or even anywhere that far north. It was in Missoula, Montana, which is on approximately the same latitude as Milan. The regular appearance of the Aurora Borealis was evident, since the locals were as blase about it ("What on earth is that amazing shimmering green cloud hovering above the mountains?" "Oh, that's just the northern lights") as they were about hummingbirds ("What on earth is that amazing shimmering green bird hovering next to me?" "Oh, that's just a hummingbird.") Generally, if you are shimmering, green and amazing, it seems you like to hang out in Missoula, Montana. But I still don't know how the Northern Lights get there.

Anyway, Mason McQueen is a top bloke, and I look forward to seeing him at his next stop, the island of Fiji.