It’s midday and I’ve run out of things to do in Monaco
It’s midday and I’ve run out of things to do in Monaco. Sitting in St Martin Gardens overlooking the Mediterranean, the view is impressive but I yearn to be someplace else.
Over the course of the morning, I’ve visited the aquarium and toured the Prince’s palace. I wandered the streets and even contemplated entering a trumped-up used-car showroom to look at the royal collection of automobiles. Now I sit with a bottle of water in the midday sun and ask myself what’s the problem with Monaco?
Put bluntly, it’s monstrously dull. I’ve been to dull places before but this is a different type of dull because beneath its electroplated gold surface lies a place of pure sleaze. Maybe it’s the banality of evil.
It’s touted as a sophisticated playground for the rich and powerful but it’s more like a place where their money goes to lie face down in the gutter in a pool of its own vomit.
It is where drug and arms dealers, Middle-Eastern oil money, occasional despots or Russian oligarchs can indulge in every vice I daren’t even think of ranging from shopping to coke-fuelled sex parties, bestiality and beyond. It makes the Tiger King look classy.
Below this collection of sleaze merchants and grifters sit the sun-scorched tourists who gawp at the depravity in between counting luxury marques and mouthing platitudes about “how the other half lives” to their equally gobsmacked travel companions or families.
It’s an artless, empty construct replete with a depressing casino filled with overweight Euro-trash on package holidays.
Below one of the world’s most uninspiring casinos and out on the water or moored in Port Hercule is a floating all-night truck stop. Sitting at anchor, these garish floating brothels are populated by the look-at-me wealthy with their gold chains, bloated bellies and retinue of high-priced hookers who are paid to pose silently by day and to shriek with artificial pleasure by night.
I once sat in a Turkish bathhouse in Dubai while two former Libyan government officials regaled each other with stories of a week-long Monte Carlo party onboard a super yacht. Apart from lamenting the collapse of the Gaddafi regime they told tales about a member of the former Libyan first family hosting an event which included more than a hundred prostitutes and enough drugs of every persuasion to fuel over a thousand Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas re-enactment package tours.
These bloated pre-waxed simians tried to outdo each with their stories of depravity while acknowledging the whole shebang was paid for by their government. The event was held for one of the Libyan princelings to celebrate his 40th birthday with guests including a collection of other party princelings from a range of other nasty, conservative Middle Eastern regimes.
Looking down on this gulag of avarice is the old town of Monaco itself. Supposedly dripping with history and intrigue, it radiates the charm of the Kingdom of Duloc from the film Shrek minus the duels and a green ogre.
And this is where I sit in the midday sun contemplating how to get out quickly. My only option in this avaricious principality is gluttony so I gorge on four baby tarte Tropéziennes from a local bakery in the old town. Sure they’re associated with St Tropez but these delightful custard and cream-filled brioche generously sprinkled with granulated sugar, lift me away from where I am. Recent memories of the Prince’s palace filled with classic designer furniture knock-offs and paint-by-numbers art start to recede and my mind goes back to the commune of Sète where I’d spent the previous two days.
Aaah Sète, known as the Venice of Languedoc, it had been my happy place just a day before but at that moment in Monaco, I hankered for anywhere else … I even felt homesick for a summer’s day at Sydney’s Manly Beach sitting next to a bin full of baby nappies and prawn heads. Yep, Monaco – nothing to see here.
