VISIT REALITY PARK ROMANIA AND ENJOY DRACULALAND! For Western visitors Romania offers a variety of shocking, almost extraterrestrial experiences. Situated on the border of geographic Europe it invites us to make a hallucinatory trip to a 'reality park'. Unlike the fantasy parks, like EuroDisney near Paris, which are merely intensified extensions of the media spectacle, the reality park provides us with much stronger images, which do not stimulate the senses, but deregulate our imagination through reality overload. If we exclude the primordial analyses of the professional Eastern Europe watchers, all the travelogues can easily be interpreted as touristic survival expeditions to a strange, exotic, horrific, fascinating region. It remains a mystery why so many Western mediawatchers did not forget the images of the so-called Romanian Television Revolution of december 1989. These 'events' forced many Eurocitizens to take action. The collection of typewriters, hospital beds, food, books, toys, church organs and Bibles started in hundreds of towns and small villages and has not yet stopped 3´ years later. The travel stories of the amazed do-gooders essentially do not differ from the reports made by the many journalists, photographers and television crews. All of them are shocked by the mere fact that Romania still has a real old-fashioned border where one can easily wait 24 hours for the honour to bribe the border policemen. It is the rite de passage where initiation takes place: after everyone is waiting in line for hours and hours the catastrophe slowly takes possesion of the tourists/time economists. The visitors of Reality Park Romania are from the very first moment overwhelmed by visual overkill and have therefore no time to understand the nature of the existing conflicts. This leads to the general impression that everyone in Romania is a innocent victim of the communist past and the current situation. Of course it's no contradiction to say that at the same time everyone is out to take advantage of you. These first impressions are very strong and require so much energy as to prevent one's beginning a dialogue with Romanians. The storage of images with dusty streets, unfinished appartment blocks and claims enormous amounts of space on one's personal hard disk. Before getting into dialogue, we need to know a fair bit about the other's backgrounds and ideas and take the time for conversation. But the busy Western visitor is only used to thinking in terms of communication. And communication problems can only be solved in technical terms. The obsession with improving the infrastructure therefore forecloses a better understanding of the historical myths, rumours, fairy tales and other mysteries the Western visitor faces during his stay. The only thing left for the reality park visitor to do is to record and reproduce the already existing images, like any other tourist would do on a sightseeing trip. From the European delegations we get the usual reports of horse-drawn vehicles on the streets, the black market in charity goods, subhuman conditions in hospitals and orphanages, empty shops and uncivilized peasant-like behavior in queues, child vagrants and the lack of cooperative executives, the consumer rubbish dumped by the Middle East and the incredible noxious black coating of the polluted Copsa Mica, hush money and embezzled goods, highly unproductive workers and the still extant invisible hand of the Securitate. For the Dutch audience there are domestic items like illegal adoption and child trading and the so-called economic refugees from Romania. It would be logical to recoil from such a litany of horrifying stories. But this is apparently not the case. Media users are worried about the fact that Romania is no longer on the agenda of the international media and now is classified as being a 'non item'. Instead we are forced to pay attention to Albania (a no.1 miniaturized and concentrated version of Romania) and the civil war next door in the former Yugoslavia. For Romania, not remaining a reality park is only a matter of image-building and public relations. A 'no news is good news' attitude towards negative attention in the Western press can only encourage the writing off of Romania as an economic desert. Non- coverage of tragic and sensational issues will not enhance our understanding. Well-researched bad press is better than no press at all. Visitors to Romania are either enchanted by the sub-human level of basic comforts available, or they will leave again on the next flight. This makes Romania (by historical accident) a naturally occurring reality park rather than a relax-zone for tired executives. Romania is thus very competive in the up and coming market for those tourists who are bored and have a passion for accident. This is a rising trend in Western tourism, as most tourists lead a mundane day to day existance all the year round and are therefore no longer in search of quiet beaches or tennis courts which they saw in previous year's holidays. Fin de siecle Western tourists are sick of all-in packaged and planned excitement in their holidays. Tour operator holidays have been marginalized, but action holidays have been in the lift. These are both examples of tourism where the infrastructure to welcome the holidaymaker at the destination has been provided and in many cases is purpose built. Once at the destination the tourist is immediately swallowed by suffocating comfort and a sheer stalinist programme of activities. For the enlightened travellers for whom these kind of holidays are unsatisfying, Romania offers an exciting range of mail functions and non events. Tourism of the nineties will look for non- programmable events rather than over-styled over-excited arrangements which have become transparent. Romania is well poised to take advantage of this coming trend and offers a gamut of new possibilities like the concept of Draculaland. Within the rising interest for catastrophic environments there is the an even stronger current fascination for evil (SadoMaso, serial killers, mass religious suicides). Dracula embodies all these cultural aspects and many more and provides a ready made reference frame for horror as leisure. Thanks to Hollywood's mythology this has lead to optimal product familiarity worldwide. The idea behind Draculaland is that the Romanians should now benefit from the unholy mix of the historical ally of church and empire, Vlad the Impaler, on the one hand and Stoker's "God-hating, crucifix-fearing, bloodsucking beast of the night" on the other. The time is now ripe to bring Count Dracula home to Transsylvania. The Romanian government is now continuing Francis Ford Coppola's vision to fuse fact and fiction and welcomes all who follow the Dracula trail to take a part in the movie; which is fully experienced on location in a reality park and not on a set. Where Coppola shot his film entirely on a Hollywood set and compensated the lack of mysterious Transsylvanian scenes with masterly high-tech special effects, Romania offers real live action in Draculaland, where the travelling spectator becomes an actor. Draculaland is a 3-D interactive environment where the visitor can enjoy the Dracula paradigm they ingested at home. Draculaland is a focal point of 15th century history, 19th century gothic romantic mythology, 20th century mass culture and present late communism. Assets within this view are the many castles which lie on the Dracula trail. We start at the newly rebuilt Castle Bistrita (after negotiating the tricky Borgo Pass), model of Stoker's castle, which was destroyed by the German population of the city at the end of the 15th century. After this first staging post the Dracula trail branches out into a network of possibilities. One could visit the medieval town Sigisoara, site of Dracula's extant birthhouse. Or one could follow Dracula's journey to Budapest and Solomon's Tower at Visegrad, where he was a guest for 12 years and married a Hungarian princess. Another branch for the discerning tourist is a quest all the way down to the Black Sea, to find Ottenita, Silistria, Rasova, Cerna-Voda, Hirsova and Ostrov. Less virtual are the excursions to the beautifully preserved castle Bran with its famous secret passageway and Castle Hunedoara of the Hungarian King John Hunyadi, which Count Dracula visited several times. The impregnable city of Sibiu is a must for the Dracula hunter. Near river Arges we find his own home, which is now undergoing a complete reconstruction. Tirgoviste, Brasov, his grave in Snagov: in short a surfeit of experiences. For those who are unable to leave Bucharest we recommend Madame Tussaud's World of Dracula, where we meet Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Max Schreck together with Frankenstein, the Ceausescu family and Anthony Hopkins. Due to the many bureaucratic possibilities the international heliport at Borgo Pass is still in planning consultations, and so is Draculaland, part of Reality Park Romania. In search of exotica one finds true horror. Like Dracula, Romania seems to be beyond decay, while still functioning. The castles are irrepairably improved, all new things are out of order, stuck in a mysterious state of undeath which has covered the country since 1989. This is the magic of Draculaland. The foundation for the advancement of illegal knowledge (ADILKNO) is based in Amsterdam, Holland and writes for Mediamatic magazine and Andere Sinema. Autonomedia, New York published the first English book translation, Cracking Movement, squatting beyond the media. More German translations are avialable under the author's name Agentur Bilwet.