Good taste is not always a priority in theme parks. But even by the standards of the genre, Parque Eco Alberto in Mexico is a bit of a challenge. As the name implies, it is primarily an eco-reserve, in which visitors can enjoy such sustainable activities as hiking, rafting, and rock-climbing. But the big draw is its Caminata Nocturna, a four-hour nightly trek in which tourists pretend to be illegal migrants, trying to cross the US border in search of a better life, writes Frank McNally
The park is owned and run by the indigenous Hnahnu people, who are acknowledged experts on the subject. For every Hnahnu still living locally, there are two in the US. Some of the guides on the caminata have crossed the real border repeatedly and are familiar with the dangers involved. But Parque Alberto is a safe 700 miles south of the Rio Grande. So when the "border guards" start shooting - part of the caminata experience - participants can be fairly confident that the bullets are blanks.
According to a New York Times reporter who did the trek earlier this year, it begins with the guide advising participants to "be brave, to remember our ancestors, and to hit the ground if we hear gunshots". Sure enough, a little while into the tour, his group was rumbled by a border patrol. Panic ensued as the "migrants" abandoned the path and fled into the cover of the mesquite tress and cacti. Then a five-year-old boy known as "El Relleno" appeared to lead them through the brush.
The guards taunted them in the darkness and fired a few shots. But of course the participants all lived to tell a tale for which they had paid $18 each. The park guides defended the exercise, saying it was designed both as a homage to real-life migrants and an education for others. Perhaps more to the point, it provides part-time work for some 70 Hnahnus, posing as guides, guards, and fellow migrants.
Alongside the Caminata Nocturna, the soon-to-be-opened Dickens World theme park in Kent is in impeccable taste. Never mind that it promises to replicate the sights, sounds, and smells of Charles Dickens's England, complete with lovingly restored slums, open sewers, and a cast of prostitutes and street urchins. Nor that it celebrates an era in which London - to quote George Orwell on the subject of a different writer - was "a city of drunken puritans, where clothes, architecture and furniture had reached their rock-bottom of ugliness, and where it was almost normal for a working-class family of ten persons to inhabit a single room".
Its creators have spent three decades and £62 million on making the experience as authentic as possible. So for the many people who now find Dickens unreadable, visiting the theme park may at least be a viable alternative to the books. As for his enthusiasts - and there are still many - familiarity with the characters should make Dickens World even more rewarding. And if they enjoy its squalor too much, they can reassure themselves that, after all, everything Dickens wrote made clear his revulsion for the world he lived in.
Mind you, as the same Orwell complained, he never advanced an alternative to it, or indeed suggested that there was anything fundamentally wrong with the system. Even Hard Times, his supposed satire on laissez-faire capitalism, is not so much an attack on capitalism as on human nature. It is in keeping with what Orwell calls the "enormous platitude" at the heart of Dickens's work: "[ that] if men would behave decently the world would be decent".
But getting back to the project in Kent, the point is that Dickens-World-the-reality is now long past, which makes Dickens-World-the-theme-park acceptable. This is not something you can say for the Caminata Nocturna, unfortunately.
Still, the Mexican park gives me an idea for Ireland. Now that the Troubles are fading into history and even the Rev Ian Paisley is prepared to share power with Sinn Féin, maybe the time is ripe for an entertainment experience based on the Irish Border. In fact, I recall that there was a small precursor to this a few years back: an amusing exhibition in Dublin comprising sods of earth taken from each county along the Border and presented in glass cases, as if in the natural history museum.
But what I have in mind is a full-scale cross-border theme park (perhaps part-funded by a cross-border body). Visitors could experience the furtive thrill of hiking along unapproved roads. Business executives could hone their leadership skills on weekend workshops in smuggling or diesel-laundering, while park staff posing as Customs and Excise authorities engaged them in hot pursuit, firing blanks.
School children could enjoy educational field trips, pretending to be British Army units lost in the South due to map-reading errors and trying to find their way back. The students would have to deduce which side of the Border they were on from such clues as that, if the flag of the Republic is flying everywhere, they must be in the North. And so on.
The idea needs a bit of refinement, obviously. But it's the sort of thing that might appeal to American investors. If it there are any of them reading this, I want 10 per cent.