Steel dome or balmy beach? Tropical Island Resort is both

Looking around the half-capacity shuttle bus – at the TV screens flashing a promotional video of waterslides and classically beautiful couples clinking wineglasses, and at the damp German tourists escaping the drizzly late-winter weather to chase such canned, clichéd images of "fun in the sun" – my friend turns to me and says, with mock concern: "I hope this is the right bus."

The bus's seats are upholstered in the hot neon green of an underripe banana, filagreed with palm fronds and images of a purplish tropical bird. A parrot? A toucan? A cockatoo? Most likely, it's all and none of these, giving the impression of not one or another breed of tropical bird but of the idea of a tropical bird.

The shuttle rolls along the winding, under-trafficked back roads, beyond campsites and administrative outposts, past the brownish-yellow thickets of withering, skeletal trees clumping up the Brandenburg forest.

Then, on the horizon, it rises like an enormous metal boil festering from under the Earth's crust: Tropical Islands Resort, the self-contained indoor beach vacation destination built inside a free-standing steel dome originally built for the manufacture and storage of CargoLifter-brand zeppelins.

Housed in such an imposing, utterly enormous facility – itself erected on the site of a former Nazi airfield that passed into the hands of the Soviets when the Red Army overran it en route to Berlin in 1945 – Tropical Islands invites easy comparisons. It's like the dome in Logan's Run. Or the dome in The Truman Show. Or the dome in Under the Dome.

It's easy to imagine a scenario in which remnants of civilization scramble inside the Tropical Islands hangar to escape some apocalyptic cataclysm, rebuilding civilization inside its winding warrens of waterslides, dewey rain-forest-like gardens, Samoan-inspired cafés and Astroturfed miniature golf fairways. As with all gargantuan, man-made megaliths, it's tempting to want to praise the dome.

"The idea was to bring the tropics to Europe," says Sandra Nolte, a plucky junior press officer who guides my friend and me through the resort's various themed areas.

Tropical Islands opened in December, 2004, after investors purchased the property from the insolvent CargoLifter, whose dreams of an airborne cargo ship empire never got off the ground. (The facility's legacy endures, pathetically, in the form of tiny inflatable zeppelins sold to children as souvenirs.)

Nolte boasts about the facility's size (if you were to lay the Eiffel Tower on its side, for some reason, it would fit cozily within the building's 360-metre-long expanse) and the carefully calibrated environmental controls. "In Germany, you can never be sure about the weather," she says.

The resort accounts for, then eliminates, that uncertainty. Under the dome, the air temperature is always 26 C, while the humidity hovers between 40 and 60 per cent. It's like a life-sized snow globe. Except with sand. And reams of foil reflecting ultraviolet lights. And a huge overhead banner advertising 104.6 RTL, Berlin's "Hit-Radio."

Before arriving, I had received fair warning about the indoor resort megaplex. A pal living in Berlin was borderline aghast at my designs on the place. He described a tacky horror show, populated by Berlin club-goers looking to dry out after a weekend of non-stop partying. (Nolte assures me that, while Tropical Islands drew this come-down crowd desperate to delay their hangovers when it first opened, it now caters mostly to families and couples.) Other people I met in the city reacted with a mix of amusement and incredulous bafflement, all exclaiming, "That place?"

But, for the most part, Tropical Islands is more-or-less like any tropical holiday I've ever been on.

Here, just 60 kilometres from the capital, children putter around aimlessly, wailing incoherently, their ecstatic happiness indistinguishable from their misery. Bored moms idly leaf through Nicholas Sparks paperbacks (albeit in their Polish translations; about 80 per cent of the resort's guests are German, while the majority of others trek in from nearby Poland), while dads half-doze in lounge chairs, a plastic cup of beer or Long Island Iced Tea dangling precariously in their fingers.

Guests check their personal belongings in lockers – no warily tucking your wallet into the toe of a sneaker here – and pay for everything with bracelets embedded with identifying microchips. Instead of fretting with cash or cards when grabbing a drink or something to eat, you just press your wrist against a pay terminal. "Beep!" a bartender barks at me a little later, pointing to the payment kiosk. With time, all those add-ons add up. A pair of cheapo flip-flops. Beep. A Sex On The Beach cocktail. Beep. A personal pizza and pop. Beep. Zwei bier, bitte. Beep. Beep.

Architecturally, Tropical Islands is a mishmash of recognizably vacation-y (or just warm-seeming) locales – the Caribbean, Thailand, Polynesia, an African quarter near the washrooms – and children's bumper cars, even (maybe most perplexingly, at least to a Canadian) native-American-style tepees for overnights stays. Like that purply, silhouetted bird-thing on the courtesy shuttle bus, Tropical Islands is a vague approximation of a fun-in-the-sun vacation. Not so much the thing as the idea of the thing.

In one way or another, this same paradox defines most typical vacations.

We go in search of some authentic, lived-in, unmediated experience of other cultures or places, only to have that experience carefully curated (and caricatured) for us. Think of the pig roast luaus at Hawaiian resorts, where sunburned tourists in Tommy Bahama linens toast too-sweet piña coladas to the swivelling hips of smiling Polynesian hula dancers; or the Cuban resort peninsula of Varadero, with its man-made lagoons and white-sand beaches; or the countless ski resorts with its perfectly planned base camp villages, complete with roaring fireside bars and imitation chalet roofs. Such places are subtle chicaneries – not so much counterfeits as complete fabrications.

Tropical Islands isn't quite the same thing. In its totalizing fakery, it feels weirdly forthcoming. Every temperature-controlled inch of it is built to approximate not so much the aspiring authenticity of a tropical holiday, but its bogusness.

Visiting as a tourist (that is to say, a North American tourist, someone indulging in a holiday within a holiday) may seem a bit sneering or cynical. In a way, it is. Like knowingly watching a terrible movie, it's the very idea of doing it that's entertaining.

Still, just as it's all too easy to compare it to The Truman Show or a snow globe or Under The Dome, it's temping to twist Tropical Islands into something it is not: a hermetic microcosm of the modern world's aesthetic of trash, an abject illustration of the absence of God in the universe, a sad comment on the supposedly fun things people do again and again and again.

But the water in the indoor lagoon is perfect, the overpriced cocktails are pleasantly syrupy and the labyrinthine sauna and bathing area – where nudity is strictly enforced and my friend and I are brusquely chided in German for wearing swimsuits in the Aztec-inspired steam room – is entirely, un-ironically refreshing.

After just a few minutes of roaming around idly inside Tropical Islands, acclimatizing to the soundtrack of click-clacking wet flip-flops, beeping microchipped wristbands, howling toddlers and giddy, amorous laughter of couples, I see a tropical bird. Maybe it's the same bird outlined on that shuttle bus seat: a toucan or parrot or cockatoo or whatever. It waddles out sluggishly into the middle of the indoor shopping strip and feathers its wings. It appears to be a peacock, rich in Technicolor plumage. And it's out of place as anything is here, smack on the site of a former Soviet airfield in the north of Germany.

I watch as its neck dips down, almost gracefully, to peck at a discarded nacho chip left on the ground. Some beautiful, non-indigenous fauna feasting on a prefab German corn chip. No doubt about it: At Tropical Islands, we're way, way, way far away from "the real thing."

IF YOU GO

Tropical Islands Resort is located in Krausnick-Gross Wasserburg, about 60 kilometres southeast of Berlin. A free shuttle is available from Brand Tropical Islands station on the local commuter train.The cost is €28.50 ($42) to €44 , depending on admission package (the saunas and spas cost extra), and excluding food, drinks etc. Children under 5 enter free. Features include the 14,400-square-foot Tropical Pool, the 4,000-square-foot Bali Lagoon, Europe's largest sauna and spa complex, the world's largest indoor tropical rain forest, smokers tent and mini-putt.

Tropical Islands covered the entrance fee for the writer and his guest. It did not review or approve this article.