"There has been so much money wasted," said Heike Georges, 34, a cook visiting with her unemployed boyfriend from a small town a few hours' drive from the resort. Not all the visitors seemed to share Au's optimism, but some said that, after the Cargolifter disappointment, anything was worth a shot. Construction workers labored around the clock to finish, and the building site received thousands of visitors from around Brandenburg and Berlin.
Since June of last year, Au has spent more time in a temporary apartment in Brand than with his wife and two children in Singapore. A year and €70 million later - €17.5 million of it his own - Au began construction. He laid out his vision of a tropical paradise. Instead of the 35,000 square meters he had in mind, Au was shown a vast, empty hall of 66,000 square meters, about 710,000 square feet. The former oil man and resort owner was eager to see if the hall would suit an idea he had been toying with for some time. Six months later, in February 2003, Au made his first trip to Brandenburg. Four years after launching their ambitious plan to begin a cargo transportation business based on Zeppelins, Cargolifter filed for bankruptcy, in the summer of 2002. Perhaps the most spectacular was the €150 million, or $197 million, silver dome built in the middle of a former Soviet airfield for the Cargolifter company in 1998. The federal money that has flowed into Brandenburg since German reunification has so far failed to kickstart the economy, and has financed several high-profile ventures that have ended badly. "It will be the perfect weather," Au said. The sand is consistently heated to 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, by water pipes built into the terrace. Behind the sea, a massive screen shows sunrise at 6 a.m. He has brought in botanists to oversee the installation of 500 species of tropical plants on a fake hill that rises in the middle of the hall, a man-made lagoon tucked into it.Īt the foot of the hill, a terraced beach gives way to the "South Sea," where a troupe of 80 Brazilians will perform a big show for the next two months. "They spend money and take their kids with them and want to have the feeling afterwards that they learned something." "See, the Germans are very keen on what I call edutainment," Au said. In the evening, performers put on a Las Vegas-style dinner show to highlight the history and culture of a different tropical region every three months. Musicians from various parts of the Southern Hemisphere give concerts during the day.
Various architects have reconstructed huts from their own cultures - Thailand, Malaysia, Polynesia, Bali, the Congo, the Amazon - in the resort's "village," using materials from those regions. The brainchild of a Malaysian millionaire, the entertainment resort is intended to attract business by bringing sunshine into the wintery backyard of some of its biggest fans. In the dark winter months, when Germans can count the number of daylight hours on one hand, Tropical Islands offers temperatures of 25 degrees Celsius, or 77 degrees Fahrenheit, tropical rainforests and a white sand beach. Under the curved roof of the 107-meter-tall, or 351-foot-tall, hall built six years ago to house a Zeppelin cargo business, visitors compete for towel space on a long curving beach, couples take walks through a tropical forest filled with thousands of plants and families eat dinner in authentic Thai and Malaysian huts. BRAND, Germany - To visitors driving through the flatlands of Brandenburg, south of Berlin, there is perhaps nothing more alien than the sight of a gigantic silver dome rising above the short pine trees just a mile off the Autobahn.
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