The Luxury Travel Bible's parents once booked it into a room at the Raffles as an 18 year-old on its first trip alone to Asia in the hope that it wouldn't get into any trouble there. Clearly they'd forgotten the hotel's history; when the decadent and gin-soaked sat on its white-arched verandahs and discussed all kinds of dubious deeds from opium smuggling to the overthrow of a dictatorship. The authors who propped up the Writers Bar and have suites names after them, such as Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward were hardly paragons of virtue either. When asked whether he had a "gentleman in his room" by one Asian hotel, Coward supposedly quipped, "I don't know I'll ask him". Sadly, Raffles is squeaky clean these days with an arcade of luxury shops and a revolving door of German tourists. Never mind, have a consoling Singapore Sling at the bar and toast the hotel's heady history.