Krakatoa, South of Paris (Cont.)

You Are Here:

Home >> Krakatoa, South of Paris (Cont.)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magaine November 2002

Page:

Out There
Krakatoa, South of Paris (Cont.)

FRANCE, IN CASE you haven't heard, isn't feeling très bien about itself these days. Income is down, crime is up, far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen did shockingly well in last spring's presidential primaries, and after September 11, the U.S. government has stopped pretending it cares about France's opinion in world affairs. To top it off, resistance to American-style leisure entertainment continues to weaken.

"Ten years ago it was exactly the opposite of now," says Emmanuel Mongon, the 43-year-old president of Imaginvest, a theme park consulting firm based in Paris. "No one in France used the term 'theme park.' "

French media bludgeoned EuroDisney when it opened its gates in 1992, claiming that American-style schlock had no place in the homeland of Balzac and burgundy. Eisner didn't help the situation, loudly declining to adapt his marketing to French tastes, most famously by refusing to sell wine and stubbornly serving pricey fast food.

EuroDisney lost a million dollars a day during its disastrous first year, but it also attracted nine million customers. In a nation of 58 million whose biggest industry is tourism, nine million bodies— philistines or not—attract attention. Mongon estimates that 300 theme-park projects were slapped onto the drawing boards in France, though only a few were completed—most notably Parc Astérix outside Paris, which celebrates the comic-book exploits of a skinny, two-fisted Gaul who beats up Roman soldiers.

Between 1991 and 2001, annual attendance at French theme parks grew eightfold, from four million to 32 million. EuroDisney, which now sells wine and serves better vittles, is the number one tourist attraction in Europe, pulling in 12 million visitors a year, 56 percent of them from France and Belgium. Disney opened a second Paris park, Walt Disney Studios, last spring. And more is on the way. Parc Végétal, a park devoted to horticulture, opens in 2005, as does Bioscope, near the German border, which will focus on health and wellness.

Wellness? Sure. In today's France, Mongon says, "anything can be a theme park: nature, museums, a castle, a cable car in the mountains."

Driving around the Auvergne, a longtime tourist backwater with storybook villages, gooey peasant-made cheeses, and huge expanses of uncultivated grassland, you wonder if this is the right spot for themedom's next beachhead. It's like rural Wisconsin minus the Tommy Bartlett Water Show—a quiet, friendly, rather boring place, and one of the last in France that doesn't bother overselling its charms to the travel industry. The top employer here is Michelin, the tire maker, which has whittled away half of its 20,000-strong workforce over the last 20 years. Tourism accounts for less than 10 percent of the Auvergne's economy, mostly because the region's natural beauty, while considerable, is overshadowed by alpine provinces to the east and wine country to the south and west.

Traditionally in August, when Paris is empty, the Auvergne has been full, but it's nearly vacant for the other 11 months. Most visitors are French; they come during the five-week summer high season to bike, hike, ride horses, fly-fish, and kayak the glacier-cut lakes and streams. On a typical preseason afternoon last spring, as I tooled around with a local named Jérôme Copack, the only tourists I saw were football-calved cyclists and a few trekkers with huge backpacks. Copack pointed out some sticks on the side of the road, each about as tall as a man.

"In the winter, those are covered by snow," he said. Which might make for great cross-county skiing, if only people could get there. But when snow comes, the roads of the Auvergne, including the winding four-lane highway up from Clermont-Ferrand to Vulcania, are often impassable for weeks at a time.

Page: