Welcome back, dear readers. I missed a few days there, my apologies. Still reckoning with doing this daily and keeping up the rest of what I do. I took a few days off because I went on a short vacation with the kids to celebrate my son’s 10th birthday. We went to a very, very strange place for our vacation. It’s called Tropical Island and it’s an indoor beach which is in a retrofitted zeppelin dome sixty kilometers outside Berlin. If you want to get a taste for what life might be like if Elon Musk ever makes good on his plans to terraform Mars, this is a vacation-y version of it.
The dome itself was built as one of the largest self-supporting halls in the world, by a company called Cargolifter AG. They were trying to build a huge airship designed to ship heavy loads. The airship itself was never built, and the company went bankrupt in 2002, after having built the hangar at the former Brand-Briesen airfield outside Berlin. The airfield itself was originally built by the Nazi Luftwaffe, then occupied and used by the Soviet Army during the Cold War. The airfield went back into the hands of the reunified German federal government, and then was sold to Cargolifter, and finally to a Malaysian concern called Tanjong, who built Tropical Island. Like many things in Germany, it’s a site of fascinating and strange layered history. On the bus ride in you drive through a fairly severe landscape, past the decommissioned Hardened Air Shelters and toward this giant dome.
The inside of the dome is continually heated year round to 27 degrees celsius, creating the requisite tropical environment. The environment is cleverly designed with winding paths and complex sight lines in order to make the enclosed space feel larger than it is. There’s definitely an interesting level-design lesson there about compact space for video game designers. The park is filled with water slides, pools and restaurants and you can rent a tent or hotel room for the night in order to sleep in the dome. We did this and it was very strange, but fun. Unlike what one would find in America, there is also a very nicely appointed sauna facility with steam, dry heat and ice baths, which I loved. As an American, you may be surprised to find that it’s co-ed and naked. If you find yourself in the north of Germany in winter, and are looking for a taste of the tropics along with a taste of surreal, retrofitted post-modern history, I recommend it.
