Artificial; Skiing in a desert? Surfing in the snow? The leading 21st century hotspots will be simulated.(Cover story)

Byline: Tara Pepper (With Sarah Schafer in Macau and Vibhuti Patel in Dubai)

Desert sand and temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius might deter some skiers, but not Mickdad and Minhal Bhojani. Whenever they need a downhill fix, the teenage brothers simply head to Ski Dubai, the emirate's new $275 million artificial ski dome, which opened three months ago and features five runs. "Skiing here is different from skiing in the mountains," says their father, local businessman Abbas Bhojani. "[But] it is made to look natural and the ambience is good." The boys practice ski jumps on the slopes and play in the snow, while other observers marvel at the perfectly powdered pistes from behind a thick plate-glass screen that separates them from a shopping mall. A few intrepid visitors in flowing white dishdasha or black higab walk tentatively on the snow in rented boots and parkas, like astronauts setting foot on another planet.

Never mind getting back to nature. Tourists are increasingly able to defy it, thanks to a new crop of man-made, self-contained destinations that cater to every whim. These thoroughly modern wonders may never replace the Earth's crumbling cultural heritage, but they do offer the advantages of versatility. From skiing to surfing, mountain-climbing to moon-walking, visitors can sample new hobbies and environments without being bound by anything as mundane as gravity, oxygen, rain showers or even daylight. "In some ways people are more attracted to the simulated than they are to the real thing," says Scott Forrester of the Department of Recreation & Leisure Studies at Brock University in Ontario.

Improved technology has made these ersatz utopias more realistic and complex than ever, catering to travelers who are increasingly selecting vacation spots based not on locale but on the experiences they offer. "Once, tourism was about exploring different parts of the world. Today, travel is part of the entertainment industry," says Prof. Franz Fischnaller, head designer of Space City, an ambitious gulf-states project set to open in 2011 that will enable visitors to experience the rigors of life in space. As Disney's global growth makes clear, amusement parks are among the most popular of unnatural vacation destinations; in the United States alone, they generated $11.2 billion in revenues in 2005--up from $7.9 billion a decade ago, according to the International Association of Amusement Parks and Recreation.

There's almost nothing that can't be simulated. In addition to the ski slopes, Dubai is building a $6 billion theme park that will host a "Jurassic Park" of life-size mechanical dinosaurs, as well as a series of artificial islands that will include the world's largest man-made diving reef. Such attractions are expected to help boost foreign visitors to Dubai from 5 million in 2003 to an estimated 15 million by 2015. In Macau, the southern Chinese territory that is rapidly emerging as the Las Vegas of the East, developers are planning a billion-dollar resort, dubbed the City of Dreams, that will feature an underwater casino. At Japan's Ocean Dome, on the southern Hitotsuba coast, visitors can surf, swim, build sand castles--even watch a volcano erupt--all without exposing themselves to actual UV rays. The temperature is maintained at a balmy 30 degrees Celsius, and the retractable roof is opened only when the external weather conditions are as perfect as the internal ones. When Space City opens in 2011, it will offer astronaut training facilities, zero-gravity areas and simulated views of the planets from hotel windows.

Plants and animals are also being manipulated to create "natural" environments. Orchids and other exotic plants bloom year-round in the rain forest at Tropical Islands, an indoor beach an hour from Berlin. At Xel-Ha, a water park on the Caribbean side of Mexico's YucatAn peninsula, trainers work regularly with the park's dolphins to ensure that they are docile with the visitors who swim among them "as if they were wild and free," as the Web site puts it. At Florida's Discovery Cove, a 13-hectare water park near Orlando, tourists can swim among shoals of exotic fish, explore an underwater shipwreck with barracuda and sharks in a simulated coral reef, and feed stingrays in the Ray Lagoon. ...