The seaside resort offers visitors a cool drink or tasty meal, a dip in a pool, a karaoke session or an overnight stay, all with a view.
Nothing much new there, you might say — creature comforts such as this are pretty much standard in tropical hotels.
The big difference is that this mini resort is also a moveable island that floats on plastic bottles.
Photo: AFP
Riding on the Ebrie Lagoon in Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s economic hub, the unusual complex floats on a platform made from 700,000 discarded bottles and other buoyant debris.
Its inventor, Frenchman Eric Becker, said his creation is less harmful to seas and coastlines than traditional fixed, concrete resorts.
His “Ile Flottante” — French for “Floating Island” — comprises two thatched bungalows and a restaurant with a bar, two small pools, trees and shrubs, and a circular walkway, spread out over 1,000m2.
Visitors are brought to the moored island by a boat. Water is provided by a pipe from the shore. Electricity is supplied by solar panels, backed by a generator.
The island is bigger than a moored boat and handier than a jetty as it can also be taken to other locations, Becker said.
“It really is an artificial island that floats — you can move it,” he said.
Becker, a former computer entrepreneur, first toyed with the idea of building a catamaran, but it was when he came to Abidjan and saw the lagoon that the vision of a floating, moveable island came into his mind — and he sold everything he owned to achieve it.
The first step was to forage for everything floatable — “plastic bottles, bits of polystyrene, even beach sandals.” Bemused locals gave him the nickname of “Eric Bidon” — a word that has a subtle dual meaning of jerrycan and phoney.
“We bought disused bottles off people, we foraged for them in the lagoon. After a while, we learned to follow the wind and find the places where floating rubbish accumulates,” he said.
ECO BREAK
After living on his island for a number of years, Becker turned it into a hotel last year.
He has about 100 customers a week, mostly curious Ivorians or ecologically friendly tourists.
Others want a relaxing break from the bustling city and to use its swimming pools — taking a dip in the lagoon, fouled by industrial pollution and sewage outflows is an act for the foolhardy.
“When you’re competing with major hotels, you need an original idea like a floating island. It’s become a tourist attraction,” said Mathurin Yao Saky, a friend who has been advising Becker on the scheme.
Charles Moliere, a 28-year-old Frenchman who works in Ivory Coast for a large corporation, read about the resort in a guidebook.
“It’s very original, it’s a very untypical place — I’ve seen nothing like it elsewhere,” he said.
“I think it’s a neat idea to give a second life to plastic like this and to make a kind of small technical breakthrough. I like this place a lot.”
The island charges 15,000 CFA francs (US$25, 70) per person per day, which includes a meal and the ferry, and 60,000 CFA francs for a night.
Hamed Kone, a computer engineer, said he was visiting the complex after discovering it online.
“It’s the ecological qualities which impress me most — these days, people are talking more and more about the environment,” he said.
Becker “has transformed city rubbish into a pleasant place,” Kone said. “It’s an idea whose time has come. I hope it inspires other people.”
Becker says his 200 tonne island could be a prototype for all sorts of projects.
It is ideal for the sheltered waters of lagoons — shallow bodies of water separated from the ocean by narrow reefs or barrier islands.
“People could live [on floating islands] in lagoons that are pollution-free, and live from fish farming,” he said.
GREEN AND GREENER
Anything that involves human activity always carries an environmental cost, and Becker readily acknowledged that his idea was not totally green, but greener.
One concern is that the scheme also adds to the lagoon’s chronic pollution problem.
The city of Abidjan releases untreated effluent into the lagoon — the mini resort does the same right now, although Becker is testing technology intended to turn human waste into compost.
Even clearing the lagoon of all the floating plastic and debris is not enough, Becker said, adding: “What is nice about this concept is that we are taking something negative — plastic bottle pollution — and turning it into something positive. If only all of us could do this on an individual scale.”
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS