In the fairly ordinary town of Brand, in eastern Germany, Malaysian developer Colin Au has modified an huge Cold War aircraft hangar to create the Tropical Islands Resort, where it's always 95 degrees (F), and where you can find everything you might look for in Bali or Phuket: beaches, rainforests, romantic walks, restaurants, dancing girls. I heartily recommend Richard Bernstein's serenely damning appreciation of it in Thursday's NYT.
You might want to see it soon, because many of the 40,000 tropical plants are not doing well. Seems they never did the expensive job of modifying the translucent roof to maximize the winter sun. So the place is a little gloomy, like a rainforest in perpetual mist.
Fortunately, most palms take a while to die.
My favorite quote, from the developer's local PR manager:
"He spent time in Germany and he realized that it's so cold, so he had the idea of bringing tropical weather to Germany."
I would love to see a study of the "rich developer as visionary" trope, the assumption that if you're powerful, your every idea is genius. (It's all over the place in development news that I read, often outside the quotation marks.) Then we'll finally understand the real place in history of Mr. Au: the man who first realized that Germany is cold, and did something about it.
which just goes to show, what works in Vegas really only works in Vegas, and then as a mutually agreed to illusion, rather than an attempt at anything real.
Posted by: susurra | 2005.02.07 at 21:53