Germany's budget ice hotel

Mar 24, 09 | 1:55 am

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By Ian Belcher

Forget its famous - and costly - Nordic equivalent: the Iglu-Dorf is perfect for the lone traveller looking for an ultimate chill-out.

 

It's a swinger's dream. I'm sleeping with two young German couples. We met hours earlier over a white wine and now we have a waterbed, a sheepskin rug and moody lighting.

The perfect Euro-trash scenario, you might think, except that our waterbed is frozen solid and the sheepskin is for insulation, not an aphrodisiac. Oh, yes, we're also zipped into supersized sleeping bags - a row of goose-down mummies in a sub-zero sarcophagus.

Iglu-Dorf is the lone traveller's low-cost answer to Sweden's famous Ice Hotel. While a room in the original Lapland chill-out hotel will hit you for £238 a night - you can cut this by sharing - these German igloos charge the lonely soul only £91. But price isn't the only weapon in Iglu-Dorf's armoury. Like the other five igloo hotels across the peaks of Switzerland and Andorra, it occupies an elegy-inducing location, nuzzling the summit of Germany's highest mountain, the 2,962m (9,718ft) Zugspitze.

My camera is clicking well before I begin the ascent. After exploring the medieval frescoed heart of Garmisch-Partenkirchen - 85 minutes south of Munich by train and much less expensive to reach than Arctic Scandinavia - I climb around the town's new ski jump, a sublime steel and polycarbonate structure that floats above the slopes like a giant apostrophe.

It's mesmerising, yet terrifying. I don't want to leap off a 90m jump - I'm British, for heaven's sake. I prefer sensible thrills on the Zugspitze's cogwheel train. It chugs past petite villages before rising into a steep tunnel, wheezing and groaning like an arthritic jogger. A short hop in a cable car and the panorama explodes into glorious widescreen.

The Ice Hotel's forest and rivers are mesmerising, but this is scenic drama on a different scale. Alongside waves of Bavarian peaks, I can see 200km (125 miles) across Austria to the Italian Dolomites. Turn my head and it's Switzerland's Eastern Alps.

Almost 400m below, on a ridge kissing Germany's only glacial ski piste, is tonight's accommodation. Seen from a distance, Iglu-Dorf resembles a patch of moguls, but as you approach it morphs into Star Wars' planet Tatooine, a rough cluster of white domes with a suntrap alfresco bar.

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Source: Times Online