Quirky Guide

Charlotte is founder and editor of Quirky Guide. She is a veteran of Lonely Planet, MSN, World Travel Guide, Wanderlust and MQ Publications, and also goes by the name of Beech. For more information, visit her website, or her Lonely Planet profile.

Chocolates on your pillow? Pah! How about a giant molten-chocolate fountain, chocolate cocktails, and bowlfuls of handmade goodies at every turn?

Fibreglass is for softies and wooden hulls are for wimps. The test of a true sailor is to guide a bundle of soggy cardboard round a 1km racecourse.

Letting a shoal of little wrigglers loose to nibble on your feet is a popular beauty treatment in Asia, but now it’s arrived in London.

Falling asleep at the controls of a jumbo jet would normally be frowned upon. Not so in this unique Swedish hostel.

Every year on Australia Day, the Story Bridge Hotel of Brisbane listens out for the pitter-patter of tiny feet. Really tiny feet.

If the alien cast of Star Trek were to walk through this cult festival in their underwear, nobody would bat an eyelid.

A bizarrely brutal tradition that sees a volunteer humiliated, masked, knocked from his mount, shot at and thrown in the sea.

Need an outlet for your Easter sugar rush? Then join in this peculiar annual melee of bottle kicking in Leicestershire.

Eat crocodile, snake or chocolate-covered scorpion amid mounds of cushions and Buddha-themed décor.

Could this be the world’s most beautiful river?