Directing the Bayreuth Festival while all the rest of the people apart from Thomas Gottschalk, Angela Merkel and a dozen opera critics are bathing is probably only tempting for descendants of Richard Wagner. But even his great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner recently answered the question of how long she wanted to do this job, something about Spain and the sea and how beautiful it was there.
That’s what everyone always thinks: the beach, that’s paradise. Because nowhere else can you laze away the days more beautifully, under palm trees, in the sun. Every now and then you go into the waves to cool off, and to relax at the beach bar. And then the sunsets over the sea…
But the beach, that’s hell. At least if you look at the reports of the past few days. A beach in the Bahamas threatened by an oil spill. A great white shark washed ashore on Long Island. On Amrum again an already bad-smelling whale carcass. A swimmer was attacked by a monk seal off the coast of Honolulu. At the Baltic Sea: jellyfish. In Bibione: seaweed. And on the beach of De Koog in the Netherlands a dog promptly pooped! And no sign of the owner!! A scandal, a news portal from western Germany was outraged and provided a photo of the beach with a warning red arrow the size of a vacation pilot, so that no one steps into the heap.
Above all, however, there is still man as man’s greatest enemy: Again in Florida, more precisely in Daytona Beach, a motorist who was unable to drive raced his car at breakneck speed across the beach and only came to a halt in the surf, leaving injured sunbathers behind. In Grömitz: repeated cases of vandalism in which beach chairs were destroyed. And as recently the US aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman moored in Palma de Mallorca and the 6,000-man crew went ashore for just under a week, even the civilian drinking tourists complained about the uniformed competition on the beach.
So if you think that adventure is best experienced when traveling during polar expeditions, a bus ride on the Yungas Strait in Bolivia or a crossing of Africa by bike, let me tell you: the real dangers lurk on the beach, and the most death-defying tourists are always the beach vacationers .