Being a Tourist : Finding Meaning in Pleasure Travel [1 ed.] 9780774850391, 9780774809771

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Being a Tourist B

O

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Finding Meaning in Pleasure Travel Julia Harrison

UBC Press • Vancouver • Toronto

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For J.W. I travelled the globe imagining home; you wandered far less. We found the same place. © UBC Press 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), www.cancopy.com. 09 08 07 06 05 04 03

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Printed in Canada on acid-free paper. ∞ National Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Harrison, Julia D. (Julia Diane), 1953Being a tourist Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7748-0977-9 1. Travelers – Psychology. 2. Travel – Psychological aspects. I. Title. g156.h37 2002 910′.01′9 c2002-910736-9

UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the Wnancial support for our publishing program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens Set in Granjon and Bernhard Design: Neil and Brenda West, BN Typographics West Copy editor: Sarah Wight Proofreader: Judy Phillips Indexer: Noeline Bridge UBC Press The University of British Columbia 2029 West Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 604-822-5959 / Fax: 604-822-6083 www.ubcpress.ca

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Contents

Acknowledgments / vii 1. Being a Tourist / 3 2. Making Connections / 43 3. The Tourist Aesthetic / 92 4. Journeying Home / 139 5. Colouring the World’s Map / 164 6. Coming Back / 205 Travellers’ Biographies / 214 Notes / 233 References Cited / 243 Index / 255

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Acknowledgments

The research and preparation of this work has been one of the richest and most enjoyable journeys of my life. My greatest debt of thanks goes to the thirty-three people who welcomed me into their homes and vicariously took me on so many of their travels. Every encounter I had with these people was nothing but enjoyable and engaging. I thank you all for giving me such treasured memories. I owe a special debt of thanks to Kendra Adema, who so meticulously and thoughtfully transcribed my interview tapes but also gave far more to the project than many hours at the computer. Because of her own intellectual interest in the subject and her own travel experiences, she engaged me in valuable conversation about what she thought about what she heard on tape. Her reading of the manuscript during its development was also crucial, as was her conWrmation that I had, as she said, been true to those I had interviewed. Melanie McArthur also read the manuscript at an important juncture. Drawing on her work for inspiration at times, I deeply valued her commentary and input. Her caring and nurturing encouragement always came at those moments when completion seemed very distant. I wish every graduate supervisor had the opportunity to receive so much in return from a former student. Anne Meneley and Jackie Solway, my colleagues in the Anthropology Department at Trent, deserve special mention as examples of the high professional standard I wanted to emulate. They also deserve special mention for the value they place as good anthropologists on the sharing of stories, which inspired me to remember always that the travel enthusiasts I met wanted most of all to share their stories. The good humour vii

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peppering so many of the exchanges the three of us shared helped me immensely in the writing process. My students over the years in the various iterations of my Anthropology of Tourism courses must not be forgotten for their questioning commentary, which helped to shape my thinking on the subject. It is important to acknowledge the funding that I received for this work. The internal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council committee at Trent and the Symons Trust for Canadian Studies provided the necessary Wnancial resources. I also received a Trent Research Fellowship that allowed me to complete the manuscript in a timely manner. The Aid to Scholarly Publications program of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada assisted with the publication of the manuscript. Professor Nelson Graburn, UCLA, encouraged my research from the beginning, and helped very directly with the letters he wrote in support of it. I would also like to thank Professor David Howes, Concordia University, for the same assistance. The study of tourism and tourists is still considered by some an unusual subject for anthropology. I would hope that the conservative nature of national funding bodies may Wnd a way in the future to support such “new” topics. Emily Andrew, senior editor at UBC Press, quietly gave me the conWdence early on that this was a project worthy of my energies and of interest to her. Camilla Jenkins was my patient and attentive project editor. Various anonymous readers, but especially those for UBC Press and the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, gave me important input. I thank them for all that they had to say about the manuscript. Much abbreviated earlier conference versions of parts of Chapters 2, 3, and 4 have been published elsewhere, and have beneWted from the input of the anonymous readers for the journals and edited volumes where they appeared. They appeared respectively as: “Capturing Memories: The Tourist Experience,” in Modern Organisations and Emerging Conundrums: Exploring the Postindustrial Subculture of the Third Millennium, ed. R. Goodman (New York: Lexington Books, 1999), 176-83; “Thinking about Tourists,” International Sociology 16, 2 (2001): 159-72; and “Journeying Home,” Journeys 2, 2 (2002): 29-49. My family is and always has been part of every journey that I have taken, no matter where. I know I carry with me the unfailing love and support of my mother, Gladys, and my sisters, Christine and Rosamund Harrison. Their encouragement has provided me the courage to venture to many new and exciting places. As always, the memory of my father

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never lets me doubt that I should trust my ability to do what I consider worthy. He never doubted that I could accomplish it all. Thanks to Oliver for all of his efforts to help. His mark is on just about every page of the manuscript. I dedicate this book to my husband and soulmate, John Wadland. There is no journey that I have taken that compares with the joy that I know is our life together.

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chapter 1

Being a Tourist Tourism is very much about our culture, not about their culture or our desire to learn about it. –j.m. thurot and g. thurot, “The Ideology of Class and Tourism”

I think my life is totally established by travelling. –olivia, travel enthusiast

T

his book is about being a tourist. More speciWcally, it explores what gives meaning to the travels of a small group of Canadians for whom there is always another trip to be contemplated, planned, imagined, or organized. For these travel enthusiasts, as I have called them, there is always a new journey to take, a new place to explore, or something exciting to experience in some place far from home. They make what some might see as compromises in other aspects of their lives to have the time, the energy, and the resources for their next trip. They are a group of people who cannot readily be classiWed by age, gender, or ethnic background, by type, length, or purpose of their trips, or by economic understandings of class. They share similar educational and professional backgrounds and some parallel aspects in their family histories. They all have a curiosity about the world. All are passionate about the idea of travel and what the experience encompasses. Like the British literary travellers of the 1920s and 1930s, Robert Byron, Graham Greene, and Peter Fleming, who set out to explore the “oddity and exoticism of the world outside” (Fussell 1982, v), they demonstrate an obsession for travel. Their family and friends describe them as well travelled. They love, when they can Wnd willing listeners, to share stories of the experiences, adventures, encounters, and epiphanies that form the fabric of their travels. 3

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They are, however, not to be imagined to exemplify the generic tourist. I wish to emphasize the variation in the touristic experience (for other examples of this, see Cohen 1979a, 1979b; Bruner 1994; Perkins and Thorns 2001). What the following pages say about the meaning of the travel experience for these Canadians reXects my interpretation of the travel narratives that they shared with me. The reasons these experiences are meaningful to these people may hold true for others who love to travel, but I make no presumption of that here. Several of those I interviewed read the manuscript in its various stages, some giving it very careful and attentive review. No one disputed what I said about their motivations for their travels. I had deconstructed their reXections more thoroughly than some thought possible, but none found this troubling. Some did marvel that their travels could be of such interest to academics; others found my commentaries provoked them to think about their love of travel in new ways. As one of those I interviewed said, “Little do we know of the impact these trips make on our own psyche, and on the destinations themselves.” Some had hoped that this long-awaited book would enlighten them on these points. I do not presume to have accomplished this task in its entirety, but I have conWdence that my interpretation of what I was told about why these people love to travel is congruent with their own understanding of what fuels their desire for the next journey. Based on the growth of the tourism industry in recent decades, it appears many in the Western world want to travel. The experience is seen to offer adventure, an opportunity to relax, or the thrill of seeing new places and encountering people and cultures in far-off lands. Yet popular discourse suggests that nobody really wants to be a tourist. Many express disdain for the hackneyed image of the camera-toting, garishly dressed, vociferous, culturally insensitive tourist, who is disconnectedly shunted, sheep-like, from destination to destination on a package tour. Those who leave home for purposes of leisure prefer to be seen as travellers, guests, visitors, adventurers, possibly even explorers. Some will quietly acknowledge that they really are only tourists while away from home, as they stay only very brieXy in any one location, are generally separated from the reality of the local community, and limit their excursions to the sites prescribed in guidebooks or by tour guides. Even those who make this acknowledgment want, however, to avoid being seen as boorish intruders, as voyeurs, or as disruptive to local life in any way.1 All those who travel for pleasure, no matter what name they apply to

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themselves, wish to be welcomed wherever they go, and they unfailingly want to gather valuable and enduring memories. TA L K I N G TO TO U R I S TS

Talking to tourists can be difWcult. I Wrst discovered this several years ago when I tried to talk to tourists in Hawaii about the various presentations and exhibitions of Native Hawaiian culture that they visited while in the islands. Although it was antithetical to my anthropological training and my commitment to qualitative research, in order to gather any systematic information from tourists about these experiences, I had to resort to questionnaires. Moreover, my questionnaire had to be one that could be completed within about Wfteen seconds, the length of time that most tourists were willing to be distracted from their holiday pursuits and activities in this island paradise to assist a struggling anthropologist. I was granted longer engagements only when I happened to locate men hovering outside souvenir shops at cultural attractions, patiently waiting for their female companions to Wnish shopping! I later mused that once tourists returned home from distant places, they would be more willing to take the time to talk to me about their travels. In contemplating this approach, I Wrst had to confront the fact that I would be gathering details on travel memories – something that recent research indicates are the result of very creative processes (Terdiman 1993; Melion and Kuchler 1991; Connerton 1994; Antze and Lambek 1997). On the other hand, by talking to tourists upon their return, I could gain some understanding as to how people who regularly travelled internationally integrated their travel memories into their ongoing lives. What did these experiences mean to them once they returned to their prosaic lives at home? I would not get, however, information on how such people actually experienced their travels. I would not see Wrsthand how they acted as tourists while away, nor how they dealt with the emotional, psychological, and physical highs and lows that travel and cross-cultural contact brings. Such observations would require travelling with them, which I had neither resources nor invitation to do. Instead I would have access only to what they remembered, prompted by the mnemonic aid of their photographs, slides, videos, journals, and souvenirs. This information, I felt, was valid in its own right: it could shed light on the meaning of the travel experience to these people, for it was these memories that spurred them on to plan their next trip.

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But how was I to Wnd tourists who would want to talk to me? Given Urry’s (1995) suggestion that we are all tourists all the time, there were almost too many subjects for me to pick from. To narrow down the numbers, to Wnd people who were enthusiastically committed to the travel experience, and to identify people who were willing to spend time talking to me, I placed an advertisement in one Saturday night edition of a national newspaper, and in two monthly issues of a small local information-sharing magazine called Travel Scoop. This narrowed the Weld somewhat, as these two publications have basically the same readership demographics. Those who responded were predictably typical of these demographics, as I will discuss below. The ad read as follows: research project: Thinking about Tourists I am a Trent University professor who would like to talk to you about your experiences as a tourist with a focus on the photographs (or slides or videos) that you take, the souvenirs that you collect, and the postcards that you send. This will involve a preliminary interview and then two to three lengthy interviews. I am looking for people who have travelled internationally in the past and have at least one trip planned out of the country in the next twelve months. WHO RESPONDED

I received eighty-two replies to these ads and sent a general questionnaire to every respondent. Fifty-two completed ones were returned to me: twenty-four from single women, thirteen from single men, and Wfteen from heterosexual couples. In the end I selected thirty-three people who agreed to share at length with me, on several different occasions, much about themselves and their travels. I treated the experience and voice of each individual as a distinct and a discrete contribution to our conversations, even in the case of couples. The biographies at the end of the book include overviews of their individual travel histories – what I call their travelographies – along with some basic personal details. The qualitative methodology that I used to conduct this research is further discussed at the end of this chapter. At this point, I simply want to introduce the travel enthusiasts in very broad terms, giving some idea of what kind of travels they undertook, and a few general characteristics of the group. All names are pseudonyms. It should be noted that no one kind of travel experience characterized

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the trips these people took. Beth and Rachel, for example, took package tours, Robert and Annelise travelled completely independently, and Sandra and Albert would do both of these things, depending on where and when they wanted to go, and what they wanted to get out of a trip to a particular region. Richard and Gladys travelled with a carefully planned itinerary, but Gwen shunned any such structuring. Olivia would not go away for less than six or seven weeks, while Harold felt that three weeks away from home at one stretch was his limit. Monica and Lawrence could Wnd only one week a year to be away – a week around which much of the rest of the year revolved – but talked of having more time for travel in the future. For Elaine and Benjamin, where they went and what they would be doing determined the length of any one trip. Frances was happy to spend eighteen months to two years planning her next journey; Michael was off on a new trip every two to three months. Jennifer concentrated her travels in one country, or region, until she felt she had “done” it; Donna and Samuel wanted to visit as many places in the world as they could at least once in their lifetime, even if some stops were only for a few hours. Susan and Fred categorized their travels as cultural tours, nature tours, or trips for rest and relaxation – such as a week at a beach resort – and sometimes they simply travelled to see whatever a place had to offer, or how it might differ from other places they had been. Jackie and Damien varied their travel budgets from year to year, allowing them to splurge periodically on a particular trip. To Tony, the journey itself was crucial to his travels, rather than what he might see at his Wnal destination. Leslie organized her tours around opportunities to reconnect with friends and family; Linda and Neil went to see “history,” Xagging particular regions of the world as being richer in this than others. All those I spoke with were fully cognizant of the limits of what they learned about a people, a place, or a culture that they visited. Judith and Henry talked about “grazing,” just “Xoating along” in a place. Harold suggested that what he got through his travels was “a vision of something that’s different. The people – I keep harping on the people. I guess just looking at the people go by and see how they live: see the sort of life they lead, the sort of social customs they have, the sort of dress they have, the things they eat. I suppose it’s rather superWcial.” All of these travellers, however, were passionate about their travels, eager to talk about them, and desirous to do more. All were “skilled and knowledgeable” about their favoured “leisure practice” (Rojek 1985, 180),

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even if some had to limit the time they spent doing it, or had even stopped for a couple of years due to personal or family reasons. Frances said she was “taking a break right now, but do not worry, I will start again as soon as I can.” She, like the others, could not imagine losing her interest in travel. The travel enthusiasts I spoke with ranged in age from thirty to over seventy-Wve. About one-third were retired. Roughly half were married; some were divorced, often from partners who failed to share their love of travel. Some, though married, frequently travelled alone as their partners did not enjoy travelling to the same extent. A few had chosen never to marry; still others imagined they might do so one day, ideally to someone who also had a passion for travel. Those who had children did not, as a rule, travel with them, because their children were often adults themselves, or at least older adolescents. Only Monica and Lawrence had relatively young children. Those who had families had taken some trips together, but these trips were often more localized than the international travels in which I was most interested. The annual incomes of the travel enthusiasts ranged from about $20,000 to well over $180,000. Most had some postsecondary education, and several had two or three degrees. Some who had not formally pursued their education in the university or college system described themselves as “well read and interested in the world.” The majority read one newspaper daily, often the national Globe and Mail, which was noted by many to have the best travel section of any Canadian newspaper – a section that was thoroughly clipped and Wled for future reference. Many subscribed to news magazines such as Time or Maclean’s, and in some cases, the Economist and Travel and Leisure. Many were, or had been, fans of National Geographic (many admitted to not reading much of the text but all were fascinated with the images). Most listened to CBC radio, and watched at least one edition of the national CBC, CTV, or Global television news daily as their schedules permitted. Many were keen watchers of such television channels as Discovery, A&E, the History Network, and the Learning Channel. My most recent communications with almost all of these people have been via e-mail, as many have become avid users of the Internet. Even though their travels were central to their identity, the travel enthusiasts all saw themselves as being more than their travels. Several expressed sentiments like Monica’s: “I like art and books and music and theatre.” They read a wide range of Wction including the work of

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Canadian authors, mysteries, and science Wction. A few of them did extensive volunteer work, others were avid gardeners or golfers, while four or Wve were keen photographers, even aside from travel photography. The individuals and couples owned a widely disparate range of material commodities and assets: some owned a vehicle – proudly announcing that it was never a new one – and others owned two, but some had never owned one and had no plans to. Some owned their houses (often something relatively modest), others owned both a house and a recreational cottage (and all the attendant boats and equipment), and others rented basic apartments. Some bought souvenirs on every trip, while others shunned the acquisition of possessions as a burden to their lives. Almost all in the group were working or had worked at a professional or managerial job. Their occupational Welds included business, law, graphic design, urban planning, teaching, nursing, and engineering. They were small business owners and corporate executives, middle managers in the federal civil service, a director for an NGO, computer technicians, and systems analysts. Some had very stable employment histories, while others chose to work only on contract or in short-term positions in order to have the Xexibility to travel. All were either Canadian citizens or landed immigrants. Most had had some opportunity to travel as children with their families, even if this travel had been fairly limited in scope. These early family excursions were often to a cottage or camping trips. Even those who had immigrated from other countries commented that they had travelled as children more than others they knew. Some juggled their travels around family responsibilities, a few sometimes taking their children with them; others waited until their families matured. One thing they all shared was that they wanted every trip to be a learning experience in some way, as well as enjoyable. One characteristic of this small group was that the vast majority were the children of immigrants, married to immigrants, or immigrants themselves. Such connections or experiences seem to have nurtured the knowledge that there exists somewhere else besides the place they call home. This somewhere else had a tangible, if somewhat mythical, reality.2 As we shall see in Chapter 4, such discourse is not only important to deWning “home,” but also keeps the idea of “away” alive. There is always another place that one might want to visit, a place vaguely known, a place to which one has a tenuous connection. Such knowledge potentially strengthens the “cultural conWdence” one needs to venture out from home, and feeds one’s desire to become a tourist (Graburn 1983).

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While those with whom I talked are a fairly disparate group of individuals, they can be seen as representative in many ways of the “new middle class,” a class that authors such as Featherstone (1991), Betz (1992), and Bourdieu (1984) have argued has emerged in the postmodern era, a process frequently cultivated, at least in part, by the kinds of touristic experiences my tourists sought (Lash and Urry 1987; Munt 1994).3 The travel enthusiasts clearly reXected the education levels, occupational categories, and generally the postmaterialist views of this new middle class. All of them took pride in the degree of antimaterialism generally reXected by their mode of travel. They managed to travel extensively without spending beyond their means and without subjecting themselves to unwanted hardships. Further, they emphasized the experiential dimension of their travels. The aestheticization of the travel experience was part of what made it meaningful to this group (see Featherstone 1996, 286-7; see also Chapter 3). Resources were spent by these individuals in seeing the world, in what Munt (1994, 108-9) calls the new middle class’s “obsessional quest for the authentication of . . . an expression of taste,” a quest he notes is pursued by this class with an intensity unparalleled in Western history. According to Bourdieu’s rather ironic turn of phrase in this context, these individuals “dream of a sort of social Xying, [in] a desperate effort to defy the gravity of the social Weld” (1984, 370, emphasis added), particularly the Weld that conWned and deWned them at home. Munt (1994, 119) claims that their style of travel, and I would add its frequency, “signals a cultural or social reaction of the new middle classes to the crassness which they perceive as tourism, and their craving for social and spatial distinction from the ‘hordes.’” Ehrenreich, in her book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, begins from the premise that the middle class, no matter how difWcult to neatly describe, does have a “class consciousness” that has emerged in the last thirty years. It is characterized by an “awareness of being a class among others, and ultimately of being an elite above others” (1990, 11, emphasis in original; see also Munt 1994; Errington and Gewertz 1989; Bourdieu 1984). Travel experiences allowed these tourists to move away from those below them on the social scale. This metaphorical movement was accomplished with the same artfulness they used to plan their real travels. The travel enthusiasts were able to travel repeatedly and explore the world, and by doing so, to escape some of the social expectations that worked

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to hold them in their middle-class place. They also continued, in some measure, to build cultural capital and thus escape a central concern of the middle class: falling back down the social ladder (Ehrenreich 1990, 12-15). Ehrenreich notes that the elite classes have the security of signiWcant economic capital that will always buy them cultural capital. The middle class has to work at gaining this capital through such things as education, maintenance of an income level that allows a certain lifestyle, and expressions of particular tastes. The travel enthusiasts tailored their travels to express their taste for experiences beyond those offered by any generic package tour. Their continued travels, and in some cases their exotic or adventuresome travels, gained them the much desired cultural capital. This helped to position them securely, in the middle, if not upper-middle, class. The frequency and the variety of the travels they took was imagined at one time to fall only within the grasp of the upper classes, those of established, moneyed backgrounds (see Veblen [1899] 1998).4 For some of the travel enthusiasts, their ability even in retirement to bite at the heels of those in the social strata above them was the source of many a wry smile. As Neil said, “We are living proof that you do not have to be rich to travel.” Munt (1994; cf. Errington and Gewertz 1989; Bourdieu 1984) sees the taste for travel demonstrated by these tourists as only one of several strategies by which this new middle class seeks to differentiate itself from the classes below. In its strategizing to “establish social differentiation” in the postmodern process of “self creation” (Betz 1992, 110), the travel of the new middle class has four characteristics: it is beyond “sheer relaxation” and is an intellectual opportunity to “study and learn”; it is a professional activity, organized and managed by professionals (both at home and away) who understand and supply the traveller’s needs and wishes; it involves a discourse that imagines the tourist as “adventurous, broad-minded, discerning, energetic, experienced, keen, imaginative, independent, intrepid, ‘modern,’ real and true” (Munt 1994, 116); and it is motivated by a desire to visit areas of the world ahead of mass tourism development (110-19). These criteria also describe the travels of the travel enthusiasts I interviewed. Seen in this way, travel for the new middle class is part of the “modern quest for self-understanding” (Betz 1992, 110), and to some degree is imagined as an act of “personal transition” (Nash 1996; see also Graburn 1983). Bruner (1991, 239) has argued, however, that this kind of travel fosters no real process of self-transformation

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for the tourist. Rather, the tourist “self” remains very much the same after travel. In coherence with this conclusion, the travel enthusiasts were quite aware of the “front and centredness” of their own selves in their travels. Their travels were a signiWcant part of their self-identity (Desforges 2000), but the travel enthusiasts were not looking necessarily for the “transformation of self” as promoted in the tourism literature (Bruner 1991). I will return to the dialectic constructed by these two positions later in this chapter. Munt’s characteristics, however, do not satisfactorily address the question of why these individuals repeatedly invest signiWcant Wnancial, emotional, and psychological resources in the experience of travel. They do not tell me what “social inXuences act on individual actors” (Bruner 1994, 409) to motivate them to make such a commitment to keep travelling. They do not explain how these tourists constructed meaning from the “social context” of their travel experiences, particularly considering the very marginal relationship they had to the places they visited and the people that they met (Bruner 1994, 409-10). Yet, travel was clearly a meaningful experience for them. In light of Monica’s remark, “It takes more than a pretty beach to make a holiday,” in the following chapters I postulate what travel is, at least in part, for the travel enthusiasts. I take my lead from Janice Radway (1984, 11), who demonstrated that to understand the popularity of the romance novel among certain groups of women, it was necessary to understand what the romance novel “is for the woman who buys and reads it.” In the following chapters I outline four conceptual themes that make travel meaningful for these individuals. Although these are not the only things that give the experience meaning, I believe these themes do offer some insight into the “why” of their touristic travels. The themes relate to four views of the touristic experience: as an opportunity for human connection and even intimacy; as an expression of a personal aesthetic; as a way to understand both “home” and, relatedly, Canada; and as an aid to the construction of a personalized landscape in the confusion of the globalized world that we are now all told we live in. To set the stage fully for my discussion of these themes, I Wrst want at least brieXy to situate the contemporary travel experience in its social, political, and moral context, to give an overview of what other social scientists have said about the meaning of the touristic experience, and Wnally, to say something about the process of my research.

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T H E C O N T E X T O F T H E TO U R I S T I C EXPERIENCE

Global tourism dramatically increased in the second half of the last century. In 1960 the World Tourism Organization recorded 70 million annual international arrivals, by the year 2000 that Wgure had risen to 750 million, and it is predicted that by 2010 1 billion people will make an annual trip abroad (Graburn 1995a, 161). Tourism development in the post-Second World War era was sanctioned and directly supported by such organizations as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations, and its various agencies including UNESCO, UNCTAD, the IMF, the World Bank, and the ILO (Lanfant, Allcock, and Bruner 1995, 29). The UN declared 1967 to be International Tourism Year. One could argue that these ofWcial bodies intended to help emerging postcolonial states gain Wnancial stability as they threw off the yoke of colonialism. Tourism for these nations was assumed to be a relatively neutral option for development, because “it relied largely on natural resources already in place – e.g., sand, sun, friendly people” (Crick 1989, 315). Tourism development was supported by local governments who frequently looked to offshore corporations to provide the resources and expertise to develop the necessary infrastructure and tourist markets. Slowly, however, the real impact of this putatively neutral development began to be felt. The promised economic stability frequently did not materialize due to the vagaries of the tourist market: places fall in and out of favour, recessions come and go, the cost of travel goes up and down in relation to factors such as the price of oil, and there is often signiWcant leakage of proWts back to those offshore companies that made the initial investment. Consequently, former colonies that opened themselves up for tourism development often continued to exist in what many have called a neo-colonial relationship with various First World states and corporations. As Crick has said, tourism simply puts a “hedonistic face [on] neo-colonialism” (1989, 322). In the last two decades voices from indigenous communities began to decry tourism, cataloguing the social, environmental, cultural, and moral devastation that it often unleashed. For example, Native Hawaiian activist and scholar HaunaniKay Trask suggests that her island home has been historically marketed as the soft, fragrant, submissive “she,” ready and waiting to make herself

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available to the tourist, someone largely conWgured as “he.” As she says, the “latest afXiction of colonialism – corporate tourism – has meant [an] . . . insidious form of cultural prostitution” for Hawaii. Both Native Hawaiians themselves and their cultural expressions such as the hula have become nothing more than “decorations in hotels,” causing a “collective humiliation” of her people in the eyes of the First World (1991-2, 24; see also Helu-Thaman 1993). Jamaica Kincaid (1988), writing of her native Antigua, speaks of the anger, frustration, humiliation, and sense of deprivation generated by the presence of tourists in her home community. She sees tourists as individuals who are rude, arrogant, and insensitive to the reality of their impact in Antigua, a point supported by authors such as anthropologist Edward Bruner (1995, 238), who maintains many tourists “accept no moral or political responsibility for the people they visit.” Tourists are not, contrary to the title of Valene Smith’s (1977) book on the subject, Hosts and Guests, guests at all, as they are not part of the moral fabric of the visited community (Crick 1989, 331). Instead they exhibit what Rosaldo calls an “innocent yearning” that serves “to conceal its complicity with [the] often brutal domination” of the communities that they visit (1989, 69-70; see also Kaplan 1996, 34; Hutnyk 1999, 103-4). The loss of important cultural sites to hotel development; the devastation of food-producing marine habitats due to toxic run-off from golf courses intended for the exclusive use of tourists; employment opportunities restricted to the lowest-paying jobs; the artiWcial inXation of housing prices by offshore purchases of land for seasonal vacation properties; the creation of touristic parks and game preserves that prohibit hunting, trapping, or herding of animals central to a people’s survival; the invasive behaviour of the travellers who always “want to get to know the local people” – these are just some of the ugly realities of life in many tourist communities (Crick 1989, 317). One of the most tragic developments is the Xourishing sex trade, catering almost exclusively to foreigners, found in many tourist communities in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe. It is difWcult to estimate precisely how many women, children, and homosexual men work in the sex trade, due to its illegal status in most countries. But by the mid-1980s, there were thought to be between 500,000 and 1 million prostitutes serving largely foreign visitors in Thailand alone. This represents a signiWcant increase from the 20,000 prostitutes who were thought to practise their trade in the country in 1957

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(Hall 1992). The sex industry in Thailand grew rapidly during the Vietnam War, as many American military personnel passed through the country on their tour of duty. Following the war, specialized travel agencies (and more covertly some reputable companies), particularly in Japan and Australia, began to sell sex tours to places such as Thailand, Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan. The popularity of such tours has now spread to many other tourist-generating countries. By the mid 1970s four-Wfths of the Japanese tourists to Thailand, or 74,000 men, travelled there for the purpose of sex, a trend that showed little sign of abating (Taylor 1984, 14). The majority of those who are involved in the sex industry are forced into it and encounter their Wrst client in conditions that most would call rape. They often end up living as virtual slaves. The poor economic conditions of many rural areas, class distinctions, and the relatively poor wages offered by other forms of employment in the tourist sector drive people into the sex trade, or drive their families to sell them to pimps.5 Working as prostitutes, girls and women often quickly become the major Wnancial support for their families. Various church agencies, NGOs, and advocacy groups such as Tourism Concern and Cultural Survival have, in recent decades, joined a growing number of voices in the academy who have decried the so-called virtues of tourism development.6 It would be wrong, however, to represent every encounter of a local with a tourist as a completely negative, exploitative, victimizing experience. It is true, as Britton points out, that “international tourism is a product of metropolitan capitalist enterprises” (1982, 331). Such enterprises are based in what Wallerstein (1974; see also Turner and Ash 1975) would call the ”core,” and many international tourism destinations are found in what he would call the “periphery” – a position of implicit marginalization, which often inhibits any real ability to assert control over tourism development. But despite this imbalanced structural relationship, there are many examples of resistance to the dominance that the core/periphery model would imply. This resistance leads many sectors in touristed communities to feel that an inXux of tourists has been a positive development. Contrary to Trask’s comments quoted above, some in Hawaii argue that the tourism industry is central to the economic survival of many Native Hawaiians and responsible for the preservation of their cultural traditions throughout much of the twentieth century. Those who take this view cite the example of the Kodak Hula Show, a popular attraction.

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A biweekly free presentation of hula dancing sponsored by Kodak, it was designed to provide tourists an opportunity to get “good photographs” of hula dancers.7 Some claim the show kept the hula tradition alive prior to the renaissance of Native Hawaiian traditions that began in the 1970s (Kanahele 1982). In a similar vein, some Tsuu T’ina (formerly called the Sarcee) who have participated in the staged Indian Village at the annual Calgary Stampede for several decades would say that the dance and craft demonstrations, and the life they lived in the teepee camp on the fairgrounds for ten days every year, played an important role in preserving aspects of Native tradition during a period of signiWcant cultural loss (Bruce Starlight, personal communication, 1989). Mary Crain (1996, 136) documents how a group of Quimseña women in Ecuador framed their staging of “indigenous women’s cultural authenticity” speciWcally to satisfy the images of their culture of those who ran a major hotel in Quito. But the women also manipulated the understandings that these presentations generated to beneWt their own lives, as the values and attitudes they communicated allowed them to “gain privileged access to positions in upper-class homes in Quiteno society.” Toby Volkman (1990) and Kathleen Adams (1984, 1995) both discuss how, in different ways, the Toraja peoples of Sulawesi manipulated the tourist and anthropological interest in local funerary and other cultural traditions within the context of their own complex relationship with the Indonesian state, to serve their own purposes of cultural autonomy. Others have noted that new, more equalizing (by Western standards) social relations can develop for certain groups through tourism development. Women on the Greek islands of Lesvos and Chios, who were encouraged to develop homestay programs, improved their economic position within the community (Richter 1995). Artists, artisans, and craftspeople gain new resources when their work is sold to tourists, who often pay high prices for objects that can be produced relatively rapidly, as Jules-Rosette (1984) documented for some West African carvers, and Swain (1993) documented for other artisans. In a non-economic example, Sweet suggests that the Pueblo practice of burlesquing tourists in public performances reminds the Pueblo “that they are Pueblo” and to some degree neutralizes “the other” as “harmless, meaningful and part of the Pueblo world” (1989, 73). As such the economic beneWts of the tourist invasion can be reaped in Pueblo communities, while its presence is made more tolerable.8 These responses in many cases cohere with what Picard identiWes as a process of “touristiWcation of a society” (1995, 46;

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emphasis in original). In his analysis of the heavily touristed island of Bali, this process “proceeds from within,” driven by a local desire to understand culture not as something classiWed and commodiWed but as something that bonds local residents together in the contemporary world as it did in their past (46, 60). The manifestation of such processes “from within” provide fertile ground for reXection on often-essentialized understandings of culture and tradition. Scholarship in recent years, confronted with the realities of the postcolonial and postmodern world, has begun (in retrospect, somewhat belatedly) to comprehend culture as something enormously resilient, always contingent and emergent. Dialogue and multivocality are concepts that have become central to understanding culture. Local community response to tourism development has emerged as one arena where the often-assumed thing-like quality of culture is challenged, provoking further questioning of the presumption that cultural distinctiveness is real only if its expression is static. Culture and tradition, it has become clear, must not be imagined as perennially hovering on the edge of oblivion. However, this dynamism now seen by some to be implicit has only infrequently taken hold in the discourse of tourist promotion, and consequently in the understandings of many who choose to travel as tourists. I will return to this disjuncture at several points in later chapters.9 One key factor in situations that allow for a more positive fallout from tourism is a degree of local autonomy over tourism development or participation. In the later years of the twentieth century, local control has been seen as a fundamental principle at the heart of what has been called variously alternative, indigenous, cultural, and eco-tourism, all of which are part of the discourse of sustainable tourism (see for example Butler 1992). According to the World Tourism Organization (2001b), sustainable tourism development should meet “the needs of present tourists and host regions while protecting and enhancing opportunities for the future. It is envisaged as leading to management of all resources in such a way that economic, social, and aesthetic needs can be fulWlled while maintaining cultural integrity, essential ecological processes, biological diversity, and life support systems.” Cohen (1995, 14) has proposed that sustainability is a “dynamic concept” needing “two sets of changes, [one] in the destination, [the other] in the motivation of tourists,” two things that realistically may not always be susceptible to change. But Butler (1992, 43-6) doubts alternative tourism’s

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potential to replace mass tourism. He suggests that mass tourism generally develops where alternative tourism would not survive. He claims indigenous tourism, for example, will never replace mass tourism. Cultural camps, one form of indigenous tourism recently developed by various Canadian Aboriginal groups, provide economic opportunities for local people, allow tourists to learn more about Aboriginal culture, and strengthen pride and knowledge of cultural traditions within local communities. Shawenequanape Kipichewin, one such development by Wve Anishinabe groups in central Manitoba (Gillett 2001), offers opportunities for tourists to live in teepees, to learn about the teachings of the Anishinabe peoples, and to understand the role of Aboriginal people in contemporary Canadian society. But such intensive experiences are not what many visitors to the region want. Their interest in Aboriginal culture is shallow, and on their afternoon visit to Shawenequanape Kipichewin they want to see what they understand as the markers of Aboriginality: dancing, drumming, and feathers. They often leave disappointed if they fail to see these things. Such responses threaten the ability of such programs to ameliorate the politically, culturally, and socially marginalized position of Aboriginal people within Canada (see also Butler and Hinch 1996). But one has to wonder, if a large number of tourists did Xock to these camps, and to other forms of alternative tourism that have developed around the world in recent years, would their sustainability be challenged? The answer to this question in many circumstances is “yes.” As Crick (1989, 338) has pointed out, tourism, like capitalism, has within it the seeds of its own destruction. Tourism clearly has both positive and negative aspects. As such, it cannot be seen as a politically, ideologically, or morally neutral phenomenon. As a university professor who has taught a course on the anthropology of tourism for several years, I have encountered many students who, like many contemporary Western youth, plan to travel extensively after their undergraduate education. I provocatively raise with them the violence of every photo that they might take (Sontag 1978), the exploited position of every chambermaid who might clean their hotel rooms, the moral indignation of the local people who live near every beach where they might lie half-naked, and the commodiWed nature of every souvenir they might purchase. I attempt to get them to the point of seriously contemplating not making their trip as they ponder the power imbalances embedded in their privilege as middle-class Canadian youth, while similar populations in other countries have only the opportunity to serve

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their needs as tourists or travellers. The moral and social consequences of their travel causes some to reXect, at least Xeetingly, upon the complex symbolic nature of the trips they are about to undertake. At that point, I suggest that they had better pack their bags and buy their plane tickets, as entire local economies have been rearranged in anticipation of their visit. Better yet, they ought to plan on going more than once, to ensure that these economic adjustments prove successful for the local population over the long term. And despite their often antimaterialist postures and their assumptions that their mode of travel will not be that of stereotypical tourists, I tell them to buy souvenirs, pay well for all of their meals and accommodation, and tip taxi and rickshaw drivers handsomely – because real human beings in distant lands depend on such gestures for their very survival. Even the most naïve, idealistic, and nobly intentioned student traveller cannot escape the conXicting realities of the world of the tourist. In my role as a university researcher, I did not, however, engage the travel enthusiasts whom I interviewed in such provocative conversations. At most, I pursued these themes in general questions about the kind of places that they would choose not to travel to, letting them, if they wanted, raise any moral or political considerations they may have weighed in choosing a destination, or any concerns that may have been raised by a particular trip. It was clear that political and moral issues, beyond the most generalized reXections, were not in the forefront of their thinking about their travels. Rachel’s comments, while very thoughtful on this subject, were something of an exception: Nowhere in Africa was there green grass except for in the Mount Kenya Safari Club. And everyone who I’ve shown the pictures to says, “Oh, is this a golf course?” It wasn’t, it was just the lawns in this place, and they just stole the water from the people! What amazes me is there were people [who] just never caught on that this was not Africa. There are whole families vacationing in this place . . . They’re very rich people with their kids. They stay in little bungalows scattered over these grounds and go home and say they were in Africa, but they weren’t in Africa! I [knew I] was just in the 1 percent of Africa. I just found that appalling. And then going to some of the places where the rivers had dried up, but I still had a Xushing toilet. Five gallons shooting down that thing every time [I Xushed it] . . . And they had these big water holes in the river bed [in the park] so the animals would stay [there], because there was just no water. It was a drought. This part of my

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Leslie had some moral compunction about where she would travel, as well as feeling that there was some moral value to her travels, if only in the form of sharing her wealth. She said, “There are some places I just won’t go, Jamaica for example. I don’t want to be supporting that government. [I also feel that] people need our money. I feel obligated somehow to try to spread it around in the islands. They don’t live well there. We [also] try to go somewhere ecologically friendly.” Jackie wrestled with the question of whether she would continue to travel to Third World countries. She concluded that any such future travel would have to make her feel that she was “going to contribute or make things better in some tiny, minuscule way . . . or at least it was not going to make things worse.” She experienced great ambivalence about buying any souvenirs as she knew that “I can afford to buy all kinds of good stuff which I know I can only afford because it’s on the backs of these people that aren’t getting paid [a decent wage].” Outside these reXections – none of which stopped these individuals from travelling, although Rachel assiduously avoided any further luxury experiences – the travel enthusiasts demonstrated an innocence about many of these issues, despite their broad general knowledge of the world and their level of education. They were simply operating under several assumptions validated by Canadian, if not Western, thinking: 1 Travel, while certainly enjoyable, is also an educational experience. 2 It is a “free world,” and they should be able to travel it if they have

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the means to do so (what Price [1989, 79] termed the “world is ours” principle of Western thinking). 3 Transcultural understanding is possible, at a modest level, through the tourist experience, and these individuals were open-minded enough to understand other cultures, even if only at a very basic level. 4 The human experience is essentially parallel wherever one encounters it (Price 1989, 6, 26). It is the varied expression of the human experience throughout history and in distant lands that makes it a curiosity, something of interest and worth travelling to see (in Chapter 3 I call this the appeal of the “aesthetic of difference”). Travel could further be a morally uplifting experience; for example, Robert felt it “had made me [more] intolerant of intolerance.” As Monica said, “I’ve always had a natural curiosity about the world around me. I think we’re just living on such a small part of the globe. And I know more is out there. There [are] more people; there are other things that I can learn. There are other things I can see, other foods I can taste, and dances I can learn.” The travel enthusiasts’ world view in many ways parallels that of the readers of National Geographic interviewed by Lutz and Collins (1993, 236-41, passim). (In fact many of those whom I interviewed were also National Geographic readers.) Sally Price (1989) found a similar outlook among those who write about, purchase, or admire primitive art. Gewertz and Errington (1991) also noted parallel sentiments among the tourists they encountered in Papua New Guinea. All of these individuals implicitly assumed that human social and cultural evolution was embedded in a unilinear evolutionary paradigm. Such a viewpoint structured the way these people saw themselves in relation to other cultures, races, and in some cases, ethnicities. Such evolutionary ideas, rejected years ago by the academic world, have an amazing popular, if not political and economic, resilience, leading George Stocking (1987, 329, emphasis in original) to suggest that these ideas will not “soon be reduced to merely historical signiWcance” in most contexts. With their reinforcement in so much of Western discourse, including the tourism promotional literature of particular relevance here, it is not surprising that they remain so prevalent (cf. Lutz and Collins 1993, 240).10 As Bourdieu (1984, 60) and Sahlins (1985, 146) would have us acknowledge, little innocence inheres in the gaze of the travel enthusiasts; there exists nowhere “immaculate perception” (ibid.). In Chapter 3

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I extend this reality into a description of tourism as an act of symbolic violence, one that can in some contexts be extrapolated to a metaphorical act of rape, if viewed from the perspective of the local community. At its most basic level, to be a tourist is to penetrate a place, to assert implicitly your right to be there, even if the locals do not always welcome your arrival. Ironically, local desire not to have tourists present is often skilfully masked, implying that the residents, as Trask (1991-2) claimed for Native Hawaiians, must prostitute and humiliate themselves simply for economic survival. Such conceptualizations would not be obvious to those I interviewed, but this does not mean that they do not have some currency. The tourists’ naïveté, combined with their assumed right to travel to learn about others, has links to what Pratt (1992, 7) called the “anti-conquest” strategies of representation of the early travel writers of the mid-1700 to 1800s. She maintains that these writers used “strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects [sought] to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert[ed] European hegemony . . . These strategies of innocence [were] constituted in relation to older imperial rhetorics of conquest associated with the absolutist era. The main protagonist of the anti-conquest is a Wgure . . . call[ed] the ‘seeing-man’ . . . whose imperial eyes look out and possess.” (I will return to this idea of possession in Chapter 5.) Pratt (1992, ch. 3 and 4) derives her concept of “anti-conquest” from the selected writings of individuals who ventured out to discover the world championing an array of notions, including the value of scientiWc exploration, the virtues of natural history classiWcation, and the superiority, if not purity, of the white man. More purely commercial interests overtook these motivations as exploration of the globe proceeded throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and later journeys were proWt-driven ventures by nations, corporations, and individuals. This shift clouded the earlier innocent perceptions of anti-conquest. Contemporary touristic global exploration cannot be divorced from a related, but not identical, commercial framework. Some I spoke with did see their travels as one way of sharing their First World wealth. But none sought to make a proWt from their travels, something that separates them from many of those who travelled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They are also distinguished from the explorers of earlier eras simply by the fact that travel enthusiasts have been exposed to a much greater array of knowledge and images of the places that they choose to visit in such things as travel brochures, Web-based travel promotion,

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television programs, and guidebooks. Few of these representations attempt to discourage tourists from choosing somewhere as a destination; in fact, the majority explicitly encourage them to proceed with their travel plans. And despite any negative feedback tourists may receive about a chosen destination, the welcome they can expect there, or their impact on the local community, they, like these early explorers, want to “see for innocence,” as Shelby Steele (1988) put it. Steele describes this process as “a form of seeing that has more to do with one’s hidden need for innocence than to do with the people [or in this case, place] one is looking at . . . ‘Seeing for innocence’ is . . . the use of others as a means to our own goodness and superiority” (47-8). The meaning-making processes of the travel enthusiasts I describe in this book foster this desire for innocence, and consequently they willingly accept, and at times truly believe, that they have transcended the realities of commodiWcation, consumption, and commercialization that implicitly infuse their travels. There were, however, hints of reXection among some of the travel enthusiasts that ameliorated their “seeing for innocence,” as Rachel’s comments above indicate. The absence of more such hints among those I spoke with was at times troubling to me as I listened to their many travel stories. But in some ways this naïveté was completely understandable, and it could be argued desirable, if what I suggest to my students is true about the moral obligation that we in the Western world have to keep on travelling to support the economies that have readjusted to accommodate our expected arrival. These people and places cannot simply go back to pretourist economies and social environments if we do not show up. They can, one can only hope, gain greater autonomy over their participation in the tourism industry, securing in the process their own cultural and moral integrity, and the integrity of the physical environment in which they live, as well as gaining access to more of the economic beneWts that can Xow from tourism development. These are the ultimate objectives of the discourse of sustainable tourism. Clearly any discussion of the social and political context of tourism leads to questions about the morality of being a tourist. In the Aristotelian sense, the tourists clearly see their travels as “striving for human good” (Lambek 2000, 313).11 Their moral thinking is grounded in a desire to fulWll their obligations to others, to show respect for others, to live a “full life,” and to conduct their lives with dignity (Taylor 1988, 15, after Lambek 2000, 313). The assumed goodness of their moral position is often blind to its disjuncture with the lived social, cultural, political,

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and economic reality of local people, who van den Berghe (1994) calls the “tourees.” I do not, in what follows, release any tourist from engagement with this disjuncture, or condone the anti-conquest posture. Quite the opposite: there is an imperative to reXect (and ultimately act) on this disjuncture. But it is also important to remember that the tourists’ reasons for travel do not lie in an intention to exploit any place or people they chose to visit. They, like my students mentioned above, do not travel maliciously. Several saw travel as a way to share their wealth with peoples around the globe; some wanted to send the message to people around the world that they recognized that we all have to share what this planet has to offer; some desired to educate themselves more about the world; some desired to come to know the world better and to be able to make more sense of it; some desired to marvel at the scale and scope of human accomplishment through time and space, and by doing so, to bring more happiness to their lives, and hopefully to the lives of those they visited. In short, they desired to do the “right thing” and to live a “full life.” If provoked to think about the moral disjunctures of their travels, would they stop travelling? I suggested above that stopping might have serious detrimental effects and might prompt another set of moral dilemmas. Ameliorating the moral pitfalls of travel will not be easy, and is a much larger issue than the thirty-three people I interviewed could deal with independently. But a better understanding of what grounds the actions of those who desire to keep on travelling is a small step towards grappling with this dilemma. As I shall outline in the following chapters, the travels taken by the tourists with whom I spoke, when stripped bare, expose only their most fundamental human qualities, things that they share with all those they encountered in their travels, regardless of cultural, racial, gender, age, or class differences. Certainly there has to be something noble in such a pursuit. B E I N G A TO U R I S T: W H AT OT H E R S H AV E SA I D

In one of the Wrst pieces of social science writing on the idea of touring and the tourist, Sutton (1967) clearly identiWed that there were both positive and negative aspects to tourism development. Other writings took a much less neutral view, generally lamenting the death of the “art of travel” as exempliWed by those who partook of the eighteenth-century

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“grand tour” (Boorstin 1973; Turner and Ash 1975). Kracauer (1995, 66) maintained that modern travel, in contrast to travel of an earlier era, “has been reduced to a pure experience of space.” Sites “become staging posts on a journey. One no longer embraces them with one’s soul. Rather the tourist uses them to give shape to the passion of travel which would otherwise be shapeless” (Rojek and Urry 1997, 6). Such writings generally characterize the contemporary tourist as a “superWcial nit-wit” who travels around in an “environmental bubble” that offers “only a slight contact with, and even a slighter understanding of, [the] surroundings” (Cohen 1979b, 19; cf. Boorstin 1973; Turner and Ash 1975). In the 1970s, a few key works began, following Sutton’s lead, to reXect more objectively on the nature of tourism development and the tourist. Important examples are the writings of Erik Cohen (1972, 1974, 1979a, 1979b), Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1999, Wrst published in 1976), and Valene Smith’s Hosts and Guests (1977). These works reXect two distinct themes: one exploring the idea of the tourist; the other a political economy analysis of the sociocultural impact of tourists and tourism development on small, localized communities outside the Western world. The former gained some attention in sociology and social psychology, while the latter was the focus of the few anthropologists who wrote about tourists and tourism development. Many anthropologists clearly tried to ignore the presence of tourists within their place of research (Gewertz and Errington 1991; Crick 1989).12 While it was more indirect in the political economy analysis, both of these bodies of research shared the same general skeptical tone, suggesting that the tourist experience was rather tragic, somehow vaguely pathetic in its character. The tourist, according to MacCannell, was out searching the world for the real, the true, or the authentic to compensate for the alienated state of his or her own life. The result of this search, however, was the “staged authentic,” which of course was not authentic at all, but a commodity created for the tourist’s beneWt (1999, 91-107; cf. Bruner 1994). Applying Goffman’s (1959; see also MacCannell 1999) concepts of “front” and “back” regions, the “staged authentic” is at most a constructed “back,” screening the real “back” from the prying eyes of the tourist. Thus the modern tourist’s desire to Wnd the real is implicitly frustrated, even if he or she is often blindly unaware of this failure. In the same lamenting tone, Rosaldo’s (1989, 69) phrase “imperialist nostalgia,” the “mourning for what one has destroyed,” is applicable to the

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tourist’s pursuit. In addition, tourist sites, according to MacCannell, go through a transformative process of sacralization that, in the end, often result in the marker for the site taking on more meaning than what it marked (see MacCannell 1999, 109-33; Urry 1990). Such processes, and those where elements of traditional culture are simpliWed, modiWed, condensed, or in other words commodiWed for the tourist’s consumption, bring into question the idea of the authentic. Such cynical views do not accurately reXect the human ability to adapt to dynamic situations, and erroneously assume culture to be a static phenomenon (Cohen 1988, 372; Greenwood 1977, 1982, 1989). Furthermore, as I will argue later, postmodern tourists would take pleasure in the playful attempts to convince them that they are actually seeing the “real back,” or that the marker of a tourist site is not important (see also Bruner 1994, 410-11). Those writing about the impact of tourism continued in this mournful tone, despite the ironic posture of many contemporary tourists. They lamented that tradition was metaphorically castrated when commodiWed for the tourist audience (see Greenwood 1977 for a classic discussion of such a situation). Such commodiWcation deeply concerned many, particularly anthropologists, who came to see their subjects of study becoming tarnished by such changes. This response is rather perplexing since many of the peoples studied by anthropologists, and some of the studies themselves, had focused on the fact that the traditions of their subjects had been radically altered over the last several centuries by more overt colonizing forces.13 Regardless, some anthropologists began to worry about separating real tradition (the thing they wanted to study) from something commodiWed for the tourists. Their imperialist and nostalgic angst was exacerbated by the disinterest in this distinction by local people (Bruner 1995, 239). This led some anthropologists to reXect on, and ultimately defend, what it was that distinguished their activities from those of the tourist (see for example Crick 1985, 1995; Errington and Gewertz 1989; Harkin 1995). The travels of both the tourist and the anthropologist are tied to the idea of the journey, the metaphor of voyage, the idiom of exploration, and the separation of home from away. These concepts are embedded in much of what is fundamental to Western thinking (van den Abbeele 1980; cf. Game 1998; Rojek 1993). But this foundation can account for only a small part of the explosion in the second half of the twentieth century of the idea of travel as a meaningful way to spend one’s leisure time. Veblen (1998, Wrst published 1899), in some of the Wrst writing on related

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themes, noted conspicuous consumption of leisure as an important status marker. But as in Veblen’s era, there are many ways to conspicuously consume leisure. Why choose to travel, often waiting interminably in airports to board agonizingly long Xights, just to encounter the ofWciousness of border personnel? Upon arrival the traveller has to struggle with bodily disorientation from time changes, to eat strange new foods, and to endure being silenced or embarrassed due to language and cultural barriers. Are Westerners so seduced by advertising and the other media that insinuate that they can Wnd true paradise only on a remote tropical isle, or real history in the castles and on the battleWelds of Europe? Do they really believe that the primitive exotic – who is precipitously hovering on the edge of modernization – is eagerly waiting to greet them in the remotest parts of Africa before he (somehow it is never “she” who is about to become modern) takes his Wnal leap to modernity? Or that the landscape of faraway destinations is always more breathtaking and pristine than that at home? Are travellers so gullible that they will quietly endure the discomforts, the disruptions, the potential embarrassments, and the disorientation of travel to mindlessly chase what someone tells them will give some meaning to their lives? The ever-increasing numbers of Western tourists could indicate that they are. On the other hand, tourists, as I and many postmodernists argue, are active participants in determining the texture of their lives. It must be recognized that they can make their touristic adventures meaningful for themselves in ways that may bear no relationship to what the tourism industry suggests will generate “treasured memories” (cf. Thurot and Thurot 1983; Bruner 1991, 1995). In subsequent chapters I hope to demonstrate how travel experiences are made personally meaningful for a small group of tourists. Due to the expansion of the global tourism infrastructure in the latter part of the last century, contemporary tourists can travel to nearly every corner of the globe and Wnd facilities to accommodate them with relative ease. And as the number of tourists increases, and they become practised and experienced in the art of travel, the range of experiences offered by the tourism industry steadily expands (Adler 1989; see also Chapter 3). Many tourists have become more sophisticated in their expectations of the travel experience: simply getting away from home for a break is not enough. Tourists want intellectual, physical, even spiritual stimulation from their travels. The last twenty years in particular have therefore seen a rapid segmentation of the tourism market, which now offers a broad

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variety of experiences and opportunities. For example, as a tourist one can cruise the world’s oceans on luxury ships or working freighters; participate in a range of adventures in distant lands such as whitewater rafting, bungee jumping, hiking, and cycling; watch birds or whales or penguins; go on a camel or yak trek; tour disaster sites, both human and environmental; volunteer one’s labour on archaeology digs, tree-planting sites, or other types of local development projects; relive moments in Western history by touring famous battleWelds; or simply relax in decadent luxury at Wve-star beach resorts. Such segmentation accounts in part for the proliferation of the categorization of tourists, while at the same time it highlights the pitfalls inherent in trying to characterize any generic tourist experience.14 As increasing tourist numbers made them an important global economic and social force, and despite earlier efforts to ignore or even to ridicule those who travel for pleasure, in recent decades sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and social psychologists have posited various ideas and theories about what is so appealing to so many about the touristic experience. It has become clear that people become tourists for many complex reasons. Those who responded to my ads told me that they wanted “to experience, not [simply] see other cultures,” “to meet people,” “to understand the world better,” “to Wnd my true self,” “to see something different,” “to Wnd my sense of adventure,” and “to experience something similar to Canadian immigrants.” These individuals, like most upper-middle-class Westerners, have more leisure time and more resources available to them than similar classes have known at any other time in history. Those who have written about tourists never deny that these are two very important factors in an individual’s desire to travel, but these factors do not always nurture a passionate commitment to travel. ReXection on touristic motivations must go beyond these fundamentally functionalist interpretations, as there are many other ways people could spend their extra time and money. Some have argued that touristic motivation is a complex dialectic between the “push” factors (the desire for a break from routine, for example) that motivate people to travel, and the “pull” factors (such as an opportunity to see a historic site) that lead them to particular destinations (Nash 1996, 66; see also Dann 1981; Pearce 1993; Iso-Ahola 1982; MansWeld 1992). But such distinctions beg the question of what exactly pushes or pulls people in particular directions, and why some people respond to these forces while others do not. Travel prompted by

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an individual’s need for a break or a desire to escape, or by the wish to see family and friends, can be seen to satisfy Maslow’s hierarchy of individual psychological needs – survival, safety, belonging, esteem, and selfactualization – as well as satisfying the need to know, understand, or experience something at an aesthetic level (Mill and Morrison 1992, 19-20). But many of these needs can be satisWed at home in other ways. Such reasoning also downplays the social nature of travel. It does not address the explosion of travel by people to places where they have no family or friends. What of the emphasis that many tourists place on the people they meet along the way? What of those who repeatedly put themselves in situations while travelling that often take more concentration and energy than many aspects of their daily lives, such as the activities that fall under the contemporary rubric of adventure tourism? In addition, these “needs” are those identiWed for Western populations, and do not necessarily speak to the motivations of travellers from outside the Western world (cf. Graburn 1995b; Moeran 1983; Beauregard 1999; Creighton 1997). Other work on the motivations of tourists focuses on the question of what people did while they were away, without addressing why they chose to go away in the Wrst place. In this vein, various classiWcation systems for tourists have been proposed. The criteria for these categorizations include such things as the length of time that tourists stay away on any one trip; what kinds of activities they participate in while away; whether they are interested in seeing historic or cultural sites, or simply want to explore local landscapes and environments; whether they stay long in any one place or they keep on the move, focusing their experience on the journey; whether they travel alone or in a group; whether they want to experience luxury and indulgence or challenge themselves with new physical adventures or Spartan living conditions; whether they seek spiritual, physical, or intellectual stimulation while travelling; and whether they want to remain somewhat isolated from local life, or wish to immerse themselves in the world of the local residents (see for example Cohen 1979a, 1979b; Pearce 1982, 1991; Pearce 1993; Plog 1991; Gray 1970; Iso-Ahola 1980, 1982). Such categorizations ultimately reveal little about the meaning of the touristic experience, and they assume a narrow rigidity in what constitutes any one travel experience. In fact, many travellers ultimately could be slotted into several categories simultaneously. As more people began to travel for pleasure regularly, it became clear that these journeys were undertaken for more than a desire to accumulate

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social status by becoming known as someone who is well travelled. As many of the travel enthusiasts discovered, at some point a threshold was crossed in the minds of their friends and family, when they became known as well travelled – a designation that in much Western discourse connotes increased social prestige and worldliness. But this designation was not necessarily enhanced by continued travels and adventures far from home. To begin these journeys, Graburn (1983) suggests, people require a certain degree of “cultural conWdence,” in knowing who and what they are – a characteristic vitally important in the initial decision to travel. Though such conWdence does speak to issues of class difference in travel motivation, it does not account for the ongoing commitment that some individuals make to the experience.15 A fundamental distinction is championed by some between the tourist (variously deWned as someone who stays in hotels, takes package tours, and never travels alone) and the traveller (variously deWned as someone who tries to stay with local residents, does not carry a camera, and takes only local transportation), suggesting that these two groups imagine themselves as having categorically different experiences and objectives.16 This distinction is a very Xuid one at best and I will not adhere to it in the following chapters. But the problems of this conceptualization are something that I will return to in the concluding chapter. Another problematic conception in much of what is written about tourist motivation is complicit with an unquestioned assumption of a natural curiosity about people and places away from home, among all those in the Western world. Could it be that not everyone has an insatiable curiosity to know more about faraway people and places? The travel enthusiasts clearly did manifest this curiosity, and satiated it, at least in part, by their travel. During the course of my research, I came to understand that this curiosity is a dynamic and relative phenomenon. In fact, it became clear to me that any assumptions about the nature of this curiosity need to be thoroughly explored and critiqued, but this is not the project that I undertook here. Urry (1990, 1992, 1995) has argued that travel allows Western tourists opportunities to “gaze” on the people and the material constructions of the culture of distant Others. These sights, according to Urry, are “of importance to the tourist because they are located within a distinctive visual environment” (1992, 172). He does not restrict the touristic experience to the visual, nor is it a “simple and straightforward process” (ibid.). The validity of Urry’s idea of the “gaze” would be recognized by

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the travel enthusiasts, who did talk a great deal about what they “saw,” about the “signs” they collected. But this phrasing, while accurate in some measure, should really only be read as a shorthand form of articulating the complex nature of what they encountered while travelling.17 There are other complexities of the “gaze” that I will return to later, but I will note three points here. Central to the idea of the “tourist gaze” is the recognition that those gazed upon are not passive visual subjects, as might be initially assumed. Second, all touristic “gazing,” whether one sees it as restricted to ocularity or not, is embedded in a network of power relations that enables some to assert their right to gaze upon the Other. And third, those in such dominant positions gaze upon – and thus frequently see – only what they want to see, only what is in the mind’s eye, rather than what is often really there.18 An important early work that grappled with the tourist experience as a social phenomenon was Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1999, Wrst published 1976). Its central theme, as I have stated, is that the modern tourist was seeking the authentic due to her/his alienation from her/his daily life. A book much critiqued, both positively and negatively, MacCannell’s work was seminal in launching the idea that the tourist was a complex phenomenon that should be taken seriously as a subject of study. Subsequently many other authors have explored a range of ideas about why tourists travel: to Wnd themselves through an encounter with the Other (Featherstone 1991, 147; Hannerz 1990; Rojek 1993); to construct a “representation of the exotic, of the cultural other” (Harkin 1995, 667); to escape the social ills of their own world (Nash 1996, 73); to separate from the profane and ordinary, and to connect with the sacred (Graburn 1977b); to simply escape familiarity (Cohen 1973); and to indulge in play or ludic behaviour (Cohen 1985), as opposed to work – some I spoke with strongly agreed with this motivation (see also Urry 1990). As Frances emphatically stated, “I do not want to go some place to work, I want to go some place to visit.” Touristic journeys have been described as pilgrimages and rites of passage (Graburn 1977b; Cohen 1992; Turner and Turner 1978), with tourists entering a state of liminality, or in-betweenness, while away, which frees them from the existing structures that encumber their normal lives.19 Selwyn (1996) calls tourists myth-makers, supporting the idea that “myth and fantasy play an unusually large role in the construction [by the tourist] of all travel and tourist sights” (Rojek 1997, 53; Barthes 1979). As tourists we detail and mediate our experience of the beauty of the

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landscape, the primitiveness of the exotic, the drama of the history, and the idea of paradise, based on mythological imaginings of these places and people, and upon constructions deeply rooted in our own cultural worlds (Rojek 1997, 70). Lofgren (1999, 7) sees the world of “vacationing” as a place where tourists are able “to use the important cultural skills of daydreaming and mindtraveling . . . [in] an arena in which fantasy [is] an important social practice.” A possible model for those I interviewed can be extrapolated from the young men of the upper classes who undertook a “grand tour” in the late eighteenth century. Like the grand tourists, the travel enthusiasts expressed a desire to be educated through their travels, to learn of other places and people, to experience the sites of history, to meet local people, and to be seen as well travelled and worldly. There are, however, several key distinguishing factors between this early group and those with whom I spoke. The eighteenth-century grand tourists were exclusively young men from an elite, who sought to connect with others of parallel classes, often for future career and social connections. Those I interviewed, on the other hand, were both men and women of varying ages who, as I have mentioned, could be described as part of the new middle class. Furthermore, the travel enthusiasts, unlike the grand tourists, desired to meet a range of people across the social spectrum from the places they visited, and saw little opportunity for career advancement in such encounters. The eighteenth-century touristic interest in history also varied from that of those I interviewed. Most of those on the grand tour wished eventually to visit Greece and Rome, places seen as the source of all that was sophisticated and valuable about the world in which they lived. Some of those I interviewed were deWnitely interested in seeing places from which their forebears had come. Others deWned the history that piqued their interest more broadly, often including a sense of the history of the human race in general, not a history that they could trace a direct lineage to, except in the broadest sense of the term. Another somewhat useful model that has been proposed for the tourist is that of the Xâneur, who in the nineteenth century was a “new kind of public person . . . with the leisure to wander, watch and browse . . . simply looking at the urban spectacle. He is a gentleman, he has some private wealth and stands wholly outside the productive process” (Wearing and Wearing 1996, 232; see also Urry 1992, 178). This model, like the grand tourist, implies the tourist as male. It was nineteenth-century men who stepped out from the private domestic space, who by their very

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posture objectiWed the touristic site, (visually) gazing on it only from a distance. But as several have argued, the model of the Xâneur is accurate in only some touristic situations. A more interactive, performative, if not feminized, model of the tourist is that of the choraster. This is someone “who engages with the ‘chora’ of tourist space so that the self is involved” (Wearing and Wearing 1996, 240; see also Perkins and Thorns 2001). Wearing and Wearing (1996, 233) note that the “‘chora,’ Plato’s space between being and becoming . . . suggests a space to be occupied and given meaning by the people who made use of the space. The space gives birth to the living experiences of human beings[;] it is open to many possibilities.” If the tourist experience is one of interaction, it is not always best described by the posture of the Xâneur and ideas of the “gaze”; the choraster seems to be a more useful model. But to avoid further gender stereotyping, I would suggest that both men and women can travel as chorasters, or at times as Xâneurs, depending on the circumstances of their travel. Some have argued that the tourist could be called a thoroughly modern man (MacCannell 1999, 1; see also Morgan and Pritchard 1998). MacCannell in 1976 called tourists “the best model for modern-man in general” (1). He saw tourists moving en masse around the globe seeking to afWrm their social differentiation from those who manifest for them the authentic, or the Other. He called tourism a ritual “performed to the differentiation of society” (13). Schudson (1979, 1253), on the other hand, argued that tourists were trying to “transcend social differentiation,” and incidentally, are not worried about locating the authentic as MacCannell claimed. By 1989 MacCannell had altered his position slightly, saying that perhaps “the tourist was really an early postmodern Wgure” (1999, x). For some, tourism is the quintessential postmodern experience (Urry 1990; Munt 1994). In the early years of the twenty-Wrst century there are the ironic, playful “post-tourists” (Feifer 1985; see also Urry 1990; Rojek 1993) circling the globe, happily engaged in the consumption of images, the hyperreal, signs, and signiWcations, or as Baudrillard (1981) would say, simulacra (see also Eco 1983; Culler 1981). But as I will show in what follows, the postmodern tourism experience is more than simply a “preference for simulacra” (Bruner 1989, 438). Munt (1994, 102, 119) also sees the actions of the tourist as seeking to afWrm social differentiation, but he situates this ritual in the postmodern world, as an activity particularly cogent for the new middle class. If the act of travel by people such as the travel enthusiasts is emblematic of a process of taste deWnition, of an

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ability to personally process and integrate signs, the hyperreal, and the mythic, it would ironically have links to MacCannell’s search for the authentic. But in this understanding the search is, in fact, for the authentic self rather than for the authentic Other. As one of the epigraphs to this chapter points out, the travel of the new middle class, that is, those whom the travel enthusiasts exemplify, is very much about us, not about a desire to Wnd the Other. Urry argues that in this postmodern era of “disorganized capitalism” everyone is a tourist, all the time, now that “tourism is nowhere yet everywhere” (1995, 148, 150; cf. Lash and Urry 1994). Such a perspective thwarts any effort to categorize the tourist experience as either modern or postmodern. This distinction assumes a homogeneity and a periodization in the human experience that is likely to have more reality for those who imagine it than for those who experience it (Ritzer and Liska 1997, 102-3; cf. Kaplan 1996). This is not to deny, however, that ideas about modernity and postmodernity have something to offer any reXection on the tourism experience. What the travel enthusiasts told me indicates that they, like thousands of others, are engaged at different times both in the modernist mass movement and in the post-tourist, postmodern, individualized, ironic touristic experience (MacCannell 1999; see also Rojek 1997, 61-2, 70). Moving beyond these broad generalizations, the point has more recently been made that we have to think more about who actually travels for pleasure. Greater attention is being paid to gender, age, class, ethnic, and national distinctions among tourists (see for example Martinez 1996; Graburn 1995a; McArthur 1999). It is also important to note that many tourists or travellers have “travel careers” in which “people start at different levels . . . [but] are likely to change levels in their life-cycle” (Pearce 1993, 125). Travel, as a form of leisure practice, is, as Rojek (1985, 180) argues, “an accomplishment of skilled and knowledgeable actors.” Different people are at different stages in their careers, and have different skill sets and knowledge of the practices of travel. In addition, as Veijola and Jokinen (1994; see also Desmond 1999) remind us, it is gendered, sexual, cultured, abled, relatively aged, racialized, ethnic, classist bodies that move around the globe partaking of what the tourism industry has to offer. But these are also thinking subjective bodies, not mere passive receptors (Dumont 1984). Such embodied tourists experience, remember, and reimagine their travel experiences in complex ways (cf. Arnould and Price 1993).

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Departing from these more abstract comparative conceptualizations of what the tourist is about, some take a much more negative and cynical view of tourists, calling them avaricious consumers (Urry 1990; Bruner 1989), members of an unseemly and destructive “golden horde” (Turner and Ash 1975), imperialists and neocolonialists (Crick 1994; Trask 1991-2), outdated unilinear evolutionary thinkers who seek the primitive to afWrm their own superiority and progress (Errington and Gewertz 1989; Gewertz and Errington 1991), or simply superWcial, naïve, and unsophisticated (Boorstin 1973; Kracauer 1995, 65-73). In sum, to these authors, tourists are a highly destructive force in the world, tragically unaware of the skewed power relations through which they move (Morgan and Pritchard 1998; Cheong and Miller 2000; Bruner 1995). These more negative perspectives of the travel experience are a shadow that looms over any discussion of touristic travel. Those who move around the globe in a touristic dance could be perceived to have joined the ranks of the millions who have been on the move as exiles, immigrants, or refugees throughout much of the twentieth century and continue to do so as the new century begins. I link all of these latter groups under the term “transnationals.” Such groups challenge any idea of the Wxedness of any culture to a particular place, and infuse the metaphors of travel, movement, and mobility into all contemporary discourse of culture (Clifford 1992). bell hooks would argue, however, that travel is an inappropriate concept to describe the displacement of these transnationals. They have moved only in response to, or as victims of, capitalist expansion as driven by the Western centre of social and political power (hooks 1992, 173). The expansion in recent decades of the infrastructure to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand for tourist facilities can be seen as a continuation of this long-established Western imperialist, capitalist project. Tourists have a home to which they can readily return; refugees, exiles, and, at times, immigrants do not. Knowing that one can return to a safe place called “home” is something Rojek maintains is central to the “enjoyable tourist experience” (1997, 70; see also Chapter 4). Tourists such as those I interviewed therefore experience their movement through time and space very differently than the transnationals. However, the mobility of both tourists and transnationals poses important questions about the intersection of the local and the global, and the situatedness of culture and identity. Work in various disciplines has attempted to grasp the transnational identity. How does one imagine

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national identity in the context of the ever-increasing movements of peoples around the globe, and the concomitant proliferation of diasporas – communities with often complex relationships to their homeland and the places to which they immigrated (I say “places” because individuals, if not larger groups, have often emigrated more than once in their search for a new home [Davidson 2001]). Even if a satisfactory new home is found, people may move back and forth between their country of cultural origin and their new home for periods of weeks, months, sometimes years, depending on Wnancial, political, or personal circumstances. If individuals do not (or in many cases cannot) physically move back and forth, links to their ancestral homeland and to their families who remain there are maintained by ever-improving communication, including e-mail and the Internet. These factors, combined with increased incidence of interracial and interethnic marriages, underlie the complexities of transnational identities, conWrming ideas of mobility, liminality, and often ambiguity as integral to these peoples’ lives. Clifford (1992, 36) suggests that such people are “dwelling-in-travel.” As I sifted through all the interviews and other communications that I had with my tourists, thinking about their comments on Canada and their ideas of home, I wondered where to situate their sense of identity along this trajectory of mobile existence, so central to the identities of other moving populations in the world today. Is there anything transnational in these tourists’ identities? I will return to this discussion in Chapter 4. Clearly the travelling undertaken by the travel enthusiasts is distinguished in at least two ways from that of transnationals. First, their mobility was prompted by their own free will and desire for a pleasurable experience. Second, the tourists always moved with a secure knowledge that they would be returning home in a relatively short period of time, barring unforeseen calamities. Like the transnationals, however, the tourists did move regularly, repeatedly investing large amounts of emotional energy and resources in the expectation and adventure that each trip might offer. Thus, at its most basic, the travel of the two groups did share something: very simply, they all regularly crossed borders as part of their ongoing lived experience. Borders, so central to Canadian identity (Angus 1997, 128), are something that Simmel (1994; Game 1998, 45) argued in fact “produce movement.” He saw two structures as facilitating such movement: bridges and doors, things that in his view have much to say about borders. These structures also highlight a difference in the movement undertaken by tourists and by transnationals,

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a difference that frames fundamental variations in their emotional and psychological responses to the mobile experience. In Simmel’s analysis, bridges connect rather than separate, while doors both separate and connect, for a door, unlike a bridge, can be either opened or closed. However Simmel’s metaphorical use of such structures must be qualiWed. Not all bridges connect in the straightforward way he implies. Many bridges open and close to let ships pass; some, such as the famous Glienicker Brücke in Berlin, separated rather than connected; and the Pont d’Avignon does not connect for only half of it exists. Bridges often are points of control, as immigration ofWcials and toll collectors positioned at them have the authority to determine who crosses and who does not.20 But if one takes the bridge simply as it is deWned in the Oxford English Dictionary, as “a structure providing a way across something,” it can be a useful metaphor in thinking about the movement of tourists, particularly in comparison with transnationals. I suggest that the tourists who I spoke with are crossing borders on Simmel’s bridges. The transnational, on the other hand, is crossing the border by going through a metaphorical door (or several) (see Game 1998, 46-7; Simmel 1994, 5-10). By staying on the bridge, a linear, openended structure, the tourist is guaranteed an enjoyable experience, for a “return to familiarity and order of everyday life” at home is implicit (Rojek 1997, 70). Home is always visible at the end of the bridge, and therefore remains a relatively unambiguous concept. The transnational, in contrast, cannot necessarily see home through doors that are opening and closing. By staying on the bridge the tourist always remains a spectator, able to “gaze” forward to the next destination and back towards home (Unnerz 1990, 242; Urry 1990). Rojek (1997, 71) sees “the tourist experience . . . as [perpetually] developing towards a condition of pure mobility [where] velocity is Wnally more important a priority than arriving.” I would modify this statement based on the comments of those I spoke with, from “pure mobility” to “frequent or regular mobility.” This mobile position, however qualiWed, facilitates Urry’s (1990, 1992) “tourist gaze,” particularly from the high point on the bridge, from which difference may be observed and admired (discussed in Chapter 3 as the “aesthetic of difference,” which the travel enthusiasts found so engaging). However, thinking of the transnationals as moving through doors, as opposed to across bridges, constructs their paths as less linear, less obvious, more fragmented. They are often forced to pause, if only long enough to open the next door or to return through those they have

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closed behind them, all the while hoping that none of the doors are locked. By now, it is obvious that there is nothing simple or clear cut about the tourist experience. Few grand, totalizing statements can be made. My focus here was on a select group of tourists. But even with this small group, it is essential to remember that the tourist experience is at the least a three-way conversation among the tourist, the local citizen, and the site or place visited (Selwyn as quoted in Jules-Rosette and Bruner 1994, 404). This experience “must be considered as a moving border zone, a zone of creativity and emergency [that] . . . is less monolithic, more dialogical, more layered, more complex, more divergent, more processual, more experimental” (404, 406) than it has been generally imagined to be. Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone,” which she used in her discussion of early colonial encounters, mirrors these sentiments: “I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination” (1992, 7). Similarly, the zone in which contemporary tourists, locals, and places meet “constitute[s] an important challenge to sociological [and anthropological] theory” (Jules-Rosette and Bruner 1994, 406), forcing researchers to utilize a range of intellectual paradigms in their writings on the tourist.21 I draw largely on a social constructivist perspective for much of my interpretation, trying to remain true to how those whom I interviewed understood their travel experiences. Constructivism is based in the idea that the researcher is looking to understand the lived reality of those who are the subject of reXection, to Wnd out what is meaningful to the actors (Schwandt 1994). It does not preclude, however, comment and reXection about what makes things meaningful to one’s subjects, viewed from perspectives beyond their own. Social constructivism has been used by other studies of tourism, speciWcally those looking at the impacts of tourism (e.g., Picard 1995 on Bali, and Black 1996 on Malta) and at how meaning is constructed at tourist sites (e.g., Handler and Gable 1993, 1997 on colonial Williamsburg, Virginia). Of particular note here is Edward Bruner’s (1993, 1994) work on the reconstructed historic site at New Salem, Illinois.22 He explores the subjective quality of visitor understanding of the site and its famous, albeit brief, resident, Abraham Lincoln. This book builds on this constructivist work, looking at the touristic experience more broadly, seeking to understand how meaning is made across a broad range of travel experiences for those I have called travel enthusiasts.23

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Recognizing that “understanding what motivates tourists to travel . . . is at the heart of understanding tourism” (Burns 1999, 51), there is a growing theoretical literature on tourism and the tourist, with a comparative sparseness of qualitative empirical studies against which to weigh these more abstract analyses (Rojek 1997, 62; see also Riley and Love 2000; Henderson 1991; Walle 1997). When writers have turned their attention to more empirical data, they have either drawn on quantiWed survey data, or used qualitative data taken from travel writing, travel promotional brochures and other materials, guidebooks, historical records, photographs and souvenirs, and the writings of other theorists as the basis for their musings on the nature of tourist experience. Ironically, much of what has been written about tourists is based only very inconsistently on what tourists actually have to say about their own experiences. Exceptions to this include McArthur 1999, Steward 1998, Errington and Gewertz 1989, Gewertz and Errington 1991, Abram, Waldren, and Macleod 1997, Dann 1996, Gottleib 1982, and Desforges 2000. Others mention that they did talk to tourists as participant observers (MacCannell 1999, 1992), but they do not give details as to who these individuals were. Some acted as tour guides (Bruner 1995), and engaged tourists in conversations, but this ofWcial role ultimately played a signiWcant part in shaping the tourist experience (see also Geva and Goldman 1991; Cohen 1985). Others appear to have derived their ideas through autoethnography, reXecting on their own experiences as a tourist (Urry 1990). Several writers have argued for the need for more qualitative research strategies (Wearing and Wearing 1996, 240; Graburn, personal communication 1998; Taylor 2001), and for more attention to the actual lived experience of tourism (Veijola and Jokinen 1994; Featherstone 1988, 200), in which researchers actually talk to tourists about what they think, feel, and understand about their experiences. Desmond (1999, 258) argues for studies broken down by class, race, or gender. This work is a small contribution to this large project. METHODOLOGY

As I noted earlier, I sent a questionnaire that required narrative responses to all those who responded to my advertisements in 1995. The questionnaire covered basic demographic information, the scale, frequency, and kind of travel undertaken, identiWcation of “a memorable travel experience,” and details about how the respondents recorded their travels: did

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they keep journals, take photos, or collect souvenirs, and if so, what did they do with them? There were also questions about why they liked to travel, how they selected the places that they went, and what kinds of activities they participated in while they were away. From the Wfty-two completed questionnaires I identiWed twelve respondents to include in the Wrst phase of the project. I selected these people on the basis of what I perceived as their commitment to travel over several years for the sake of the experience (these individuals spent anywhere from 8 to 20 percent of their annual income on travel), their ability – based on their written responses – to reXect articulately on these experiences, their accessibility to me, and their willingness to maintain contact with me about their upcoming travels. They were also individuals who stated that they travelled for a variety of reasons, but were not travelling to pursue a hobby such as bird-watching, genealogy, or a speciWc recreational activity such as golf or kayaking. Following an initial interview that lasted anywhere from four to eight hours, they kept me informed of their travel plans in the subsequent twenty-four months. I interviewed them all again in at least one three-hour interview following one speciWc trip that they took in that period. Many sent me postcards, small tokens from their travels, and copies of their travel journals. A few wrote short articles for the journal Travel Scoop, which relies largely on readership submissions. Many put me on their Christmas card lists, allowing me to read the synoptic review of their annual travels that they communicated to their close friends and family. I kept in touch with all of those I spoke with through periodic newsletters, and more personalized communications with those who chose to maintain more direct contact with me. I have sent those who were interested copies of what I have written based on my conversations and communications with them, and have tried to incorporate their feedback. Over a few years, I maintained periodic contact with many of these people about their travels, visiting some of them several times to chat about travelling and life in general. When I began, however, to actually review the information that I collected from these twelve initial subjects, I concluded that the richest information came from the Wrst interview that I did with them, when we reviewed their travel histories and personal backgrounds. I wanted to expand the number of tourists I was in communication with, so in 1998 I ran another ad in the same section of the Globe and Mail. I received far fewer responses to this second ad, only ten in total. When I investigated the reasons behind this, it emerged that

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the section in which I ran the ad, while a new addition to the paper when the original ad ran, had become largely a page for the lovelorn in the intervening years, and concomitantly the readership had dramatically diminished. In fact, the paper changed the format of the page to address this shift shortly after I ran the second ad. I selected another seven respondents from the second round of replies that I received, and drew on several others from my original 1995 responses. I had these people complete the same questionnaire and conducted one lengthy interview with each of the respondents. With many of these people, I have maintained ongoing contact since my initial interview, collecting anecdotal information about their most recent travels. I interviewed three more people I contacted through personal connections. These three had demographic proWles similar to those of previous interviewees. I kept personal notes on my visits to these people, recording information that I observed or gathered from our conversations outside the context of the taped interviews. Almost all of the interviews took place in people’s homes, and were often accompanied by the sharing of a meal. Only one interview happened in a restaurant, following which we returned to the subject’s home to look at her photographs and souvenirs. All the people I interviewed were very generous in receiving me into their homes. I had never met any of them (with one exception) before our Wrst interview, and yet many offered me meals and a very warm welcome on our Wrst and subsequent meetings. They demonstrated a keen interest in talking to anyone who wanted to hear about their love of travel and who was anxious to hear their stories – a rare opportunity, I learned, for many of them. My interview technique was very open ended. I began the initial interview with some questions about personal background: family history, education, working or professional background, early travel experiences. I then asked them to select one trip to tell me about. At this point, some people chose to turn to their photographs or slides; others were happy to talk about their trip without any visual aids. But in all cases, we ended up looking at some photographs, slides, or souvenirs. Our conversations about one trip always widened, often for comparative or contrastive purposes, to talk about other trips. Before the interview was over, we had always talked about several trips that they had taken, their feelings about Canada in the context of their travels, their future travel plans, other loves and passions in their lives, and if appropriate, the travel interests of their siblings or children. For those with whom I did a second (and

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sometimes a third and fourth) taped interview, we talked almost exclusively about a recent particular trip. I learned other details of their lives through ongoing contact or periodic communications, and in some cases, subsequent speciWc questioning. For those I interviewed formally only once, conversations were somewhat more structured, as I worked to cover as many of the details of their lives outside their travels as possible. All of the interviews were transcribed by a research assistant. I initially intended to focus more of my study on the tourists’ souvenirs and photographs than I actually did. But in keeping with this original intention, I videotaped all of our conversations while looking through photograph albums, or while examining souvenirs. It quickly became clear to me, however, that the photographs served largely as mnemonic aids for the narratives they wished to tell, as we rarely, if ever, talked about speciWc details of the images (see Stewart 1993, 135-9; Lofgren 1999, 86-8). As I will discuss in Chapters 2 and 3 the construction of photograph albums was often a very elaborate process.24 Some people had special shelves, even rooms, where their photographs were on exhibit, or where their albums were stored. Souvenirs, for many, served the same mnemonic purpose. Some individuals were not really clear about what they had collected where and when. Several had trouble recalling what they had bought as souvenirs, many of which they either gave away, or consumed (such as rum, hot sauces, or cigars). Other less perishable things had eventually drifted into the ephemera of the household. A few did decorate their homes liberally with the things they collected on their travels and saw them as some of their most valued possessions. Following several thorough readings of all the material that I had gathered, I coded the interviews, journal entries, postcard notes, published articles, and my notes, using HyperRESEARCH, a software coding program for qualitative texts. The codes I used were ones that had begun to emerge loosely as categories from my less systematic reading of the materials. Other codes emerged in this more methodological coding process. The thirty-three people I met in the course of this research are described brieXy in the travellers’ biographies (pp. 214-32).

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chapter 2

Making Connections All sociability is but a symbol of life, as it shows itself in the Xow of a lightly amusing play . . . If sociability cuts off completely the threads which bind it to real life and out of which it spins its admittedly stylized web, it turns from play to empty farce, to a lifeless schematization proud of its woodenness.

–georg simmel, “Sociability”

T

he sentiments that underlie the clichéd saying, “No man is an island” identify one factor that gives the touristic experience meaning. Individual human beings rarely survive in complete isolation from others. Instead, as humans we form myriad groups and associations to satisfy a range of purposes under what Georg Simmel ([1910] 1971b) called the “sociability impulse.” At its most particular, an expression of this impulse is one of intimacy. In this chapter I will explore how the desire for both sociability and intimacy play a role in giving meaning to the travels and touristic experiences of the travel enthusiasts. Writing in the early twentieth century, Simmel ([1910] 1971b, 137) suggested that “the life of the individual is but a means for the ends of the whole, the life of the whole but an instrument for the purposes of the individual.” This observation identiWes the dialectical struggle between the individual and the group as one of the issues that grounds much social theory. Simmel, like many others who followed him, asks the question, why do individuals form social groups? He maintains that beyond the beneWts of association in promoting the basic survival of individuals, such action is driven by the sociability impulse, that artistic and playful desire to form associations. Sociability “distils . . . out of the realities of social life the pure essence of association . . . the associative process as a value and a satisfaction” (128). The associations that humans form, 43

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whether long-lasting societies or social groups, or more ephemeral, playful phenomena such as a casual conversation between passengers on a train, all clearly satisfy a human need. Ephemeral interactions, it could be said, have a relationship to the more formal associations of our everyday lives “rather like that of art to reality” (Craib 1997, 160). What transpires between the passengers on the train embodies what Simmel calls the “social ideal,” wherein the temporary nature of the association frees either party “of bondage and ongoing attachment” ([1910] 1971b, 131, 138). Victor Turner (1967, 1969) echoed these ideas in his notion of “edenic” communitas.1 Many of the travel enthusiasts reXected that their travels were characterized by such “ideal” or “edenic” experiences. As Michael said, “I always Wnd it fascinating because you travel for several weeks with a small group; you become very good friends. Well, good friends in a sense, like you are a little family. You get to know them. You’re supportive of each other. If somebody’s having a bit of an off day, you try to help out. So, you have this little group but you may come from all over the world. In reality, you don’t often stay in touch.” Richard and Gladys described a train ride in Taiwan: richard: We’d known that on some trains people don’t always show up for their reserved seats. So, we got on the train. Nobody on the train. We sat down, hung up our coats, and thought, if nobody shows up, we’ll keep these seats. Then it started to Wll up. We weren’t allowed to stand. A complete family group had booked [our] seats. They wouldn’t allow us to stand. They insisted on squeezing up with their children so that we could sit the whole way. gladys: And they were big children, they were teenaged children. richard: It wasn’t like babes in arms. And then it Wlled up. gladys: Because it was so full that you couldn’t move. richard: The trip was four and a half hours. Our car was apparently the girls’ car. It looked like, you know, just “natural selection” of teens. gladys: Very typical. richard: Giggling and gaggling. gladys: Just the same as teens here. Full of life. Teasing each other. It was a fantastic trip because they just were trying to [speak a few] words of English. They would try them out [on us]. richard: The other thing was that we’d got on the train and thought, we’ll eat when we get there. No, apparently, if you’re going on a trip like this, you should be carrying a bag of fruit.

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gladys: Fruit and goodies. richard: Goodies. gladys: In a plastic bag. We didn’t have one. richard: When this family saw that we didn’t have a bag of [goodies]. gladys: Everybody fed us! richard: The girls too. They had all kinds of goodies. Dates. gladys: Prunes. richard: Prunes individually wrapped. gladys: Little candies and – richard: Taiwanese junk food sort of kind. gladys: Well, we had to try everything [laughter]. So, it was very good! richard: A very nice trip. gladys: And when we got there, we went to our hotel. richard: But before that, as soon as we got off, the girls insisted that we take a photograph of them. Olivia spoke of a similar connection: When I travel, I’m not the Wrst person to approach somebody else and say something like, “Isn’t the weather beautiful.” I’m shy in that respect. But once, on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, I had my own food. I’d bought food and so on because I’d been told that the food is not very interesting in the dining car. I had bought butter, cheese, and bread, and I had also a half a bottle of vodka. I got it out and I had this little wooden lacquered cup and I said, “Let’s have a little drink.” “Oh, no, no,” they said, “no.” I said, “Oh, come on.” They said no again. And then they said no again. The fourth time, they said yes. I mean the third time was already a bit weaker. You have to ask four times before they say yes. I didn’t know that. Somewhere else maybe I just would have stopped at three, because three, saying it really heartfelt, seems enough. Then they closed the door. And they said, yes, yes, yes. So we each had a little drop of vodka. I could not even eat my own food after that. They all gave me food, and wanted to give me more. They gave me a little doily and they gave me jam, tea. They shared everything. It was lovely. At Wrst, I thought nobody spoke English. It turned out that, when I stood up and looked at something we were passing and said, “It’s a cathedral,” then one young man actually said, in English, that [it was a cathedral]. And I said, “Oh, you speak English!” It turned out he spoke very deliberate, very Wne English. He

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Making Connections was very interested in [my travels]. [Later] he sent me a Russian book about Russian America. I can show it to you. I treasure it, and it had the most beautiful stamps [on the envelope]. I think I sent him coffee or tea.

Her encounter was transient, lasting only a few hours on a train journey in northern Russia, but Olivia deeply treasured the memories and mementoes of that experience. I believe that the sociability impulse, the desire to have some association with others, lay near the root of what many of my tourists suggested gave meaning to their touristic experiences. They desired to either afWrm or experience anew some form of human connection across time, space, or cultural difference. Such connections were imagined as free of the “‘serious’ contents of everyday life”; they could reach across gender, age, race, class, and other social realities if need be (Craib 1997, 160). These desired connections were simply ends in themselves. The sociability impulse for the travel enthusiasts took on its “speciWc force and weight,” whatever the nature of the communication or association, by the encounter’s “particular context and situation” (Dentith 1995, 3) – as a rule, they understood this to be a context in which they were open to new exchanges and encounters. Bakhtinian principles suggest that “artistic form and meaning emerge between people”; it is “dialogic relationships” that give encounters meaning (Dentith 1995, 13, emphasis in original).2 In situations where extended verbal communication is not possible, and uncomprehended cultural differences exist, the “dialogic” nature of such communication becomes a fertile arena for multiple understandings (and misunderstandings). What was communicated between a tourist and a local person through a few words, gesture, body language, laughter, or even an exchange of services or commodities may in fact have nothing to do with what was intended to be communicated. Such details hardly matter if all the tourist is interested in is the perception that some form of positive connection was made. On the other hand, forms of understanding shared between travelling companions about some important moment in a distant land are likely to be much more congruent about what was experienced. The situatedness of the meaning to the tourist in any of these encounters or moments of communication, whether it was a purely social connection or a more intimate encounter with a companion, is framed by several things. The tourists’ understanding about local codes of interaction, which can be quite different from their own, becomes central. The

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expectations of each party as to what the experience should entail, the immediate circumstances of the communication, and the willingness of both parties to engage in some form of connection further deWne the nature of any encounter. Any retelling of their experiences to friends or family at home is affected by these factors plus the obvious fact that the other participant(s) in the dialogue, whether a local person or other members of a tour group, will in most cases be absent. Such absences account for some of the difWculty the tourists experienced in translating the meaning of some of their travel adventures to those at home. It was often impossible to express the sense of linkage, the emotional weight of such moments, out of context. As I was often told, “You had to be there.” Encounters and connections experienced by these tourists also afWrmed dimensions of their basic identity as human beings. Tourists, when travelling outside their known world, can potentially be reduced to creatures seeking to satisfy universal physical needs. The biological imperatives of Wnding a place to sleep in, food to eat, water to drink, and a place to relieve oneself at times overwhelm the emotional, spiritual, cerebral, and social needs that also constitute the traveller. The travel enthusiasts wanted to connect with others on the level of these nonbiological needs to reafWrm a fuller sense of their individual humanity. This desire became particularly acute when people were removed from contexts that implicitly did this, that is, from those at home. Elaine made this point well when, early on in my conversations with her, she lamented the fact that through so many of her travels with her husband, she had had little opportunity to talk to women. It was nearly always men with whom she and Benjamin interacted. Men ran the hotels and hostels where they stayed, drove the rickshaws and taxis that they took, or were the tour guides they hired. It was also mainly single men, generally much younger, whom they encountered as fellow tourists. She noted that they were often seen as “strange creatures”: a North American couple in their Wfties “travelling on their own . . . on rickety buses with the seats falling off . . . staying at the youth hostels or at the $12 cheap hotels.” This perception of them, coupled with the fact that there was little to afWrm Elaine’s sense of herself as a woman when she was far removed from her own habitus, where she implicitly knew all the codes that established her gendered social identity, led her to reXect on how women were understood locally.3 What was it that afWrmed a female identity in the places they were visiting? Did her own sense of what a

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woman was coalesce with what Indian women understood themselves to be? Would her femaleness allow a level of connection with these women, and would it be something different from what she experienced in her encounters with local men? The desire to talk to women, to share stories of the agonies and the joys of family and children, even if through limited verbal communication, to discover whether women see and experience their worlds differently from men, no matter what culture they live in, all took on particular importance to Elaine in the course of their extended travels through South Asia. The connections the tourists described to me manifested themselves in many forms, ranging from the most tangential linkage to experiences of unquestioned intimacy.4 Connectedness was experienced in myriad forms, all remembered and valued by the travel enthusiasts: to the human family at its broadest level, to a particular cultural lineage or heritage, to those who lived in the past but had walked the same ground, to famous people who touched their lives, to segments of the visited community (both within and without the tourist industry), to fellow tourists, to relatives and friends visited, to those left behind at home, to all travellers through time, to travelling companions, to partners and spouses, and to oneself. Before exploring further the nature of these varied connections, I want to say a little more about sociability and intimacy. S O C I A B I L I T Y A N D I N T I M AC Y

In my discussions below I understand sociability as closely linked with intimacy. As such, sociability assumes no Wxed expression or experience of intimacy; rather, it is manifest somewhat differently in different contexts. At the most basic level, sociability and intimacy both mean sharing something, communicating in some recognizable manner. To be sociable means connecting with others at a much more generalized, some might say superWcial, level, or as Sennett (1978) would put it, in a “public” way. In contrast, Berlant (1998, 281) notes that “eloquence and brevity” characterize intimacy. She sees intimacy as being a more focused, nuanced, subtler engagement, expressed in a more private way. Gesture and body language are potent communication strategies in intimate relations. While not devoid of these elements, sociability assumes a much broader sense of connection. Both, I maintain, hinge on what Berlant labelled “an aspiration for a narrative about something shared” (ibid.). In the case of intimacy, the narrative is often much more complex, at times more

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elusive, and generally, but not exclusively, is understood to be imbued with eroticism and an intensity of desire. Intimacy, however, no matter how private certain aspects of its expression, does share with sociability a public dimension (ibid.). In the Western world, two people who identify as a couple publicly acknowledge the intimacy of their relationship by inhabiting the same physical space, the same bed, and by such physical gestures as hand holding, hugging, kissing, and, if they are married, the wearing of wedding rings. Berlant notes that in the contemporary Western world really “no one knows how to do intimacy . . . and that the mass fascination with the aggression, incoherence, vulnerability, and ambivalence at the scene of desire somehow escalates the demand for the traditional promise of intimate happiness to be fulWlled in everyone’s everyday life” (1998, 282, emphasis added). I suggest that in travel many of the tourists with whom I spoke were searching, not necessarily consciously or exclusively, for a way “to do intimacy.” And they often found it in their vulnerability as a tourist. As strangers in foreign places, they depended on those around them, be they travelling companions or local residents, to assist them to Wnd their way around. Uncertainty and heightened awareness often surrounded their encounters, and in such situations they often fell back upon intuition and faith in humanity. Such feelings ultimately brought people close together, if only Xeetingly. At the other end of the spectrum, often their personal interactions while travelling manifest sociability. Frequently it was possible for them to interact in only a very transitory manner with a limited number of the local population. Yet no matter how brief these touristic encounters were, they left lasting impressions in the tourists’ minds. People in places far from home became something other than complete strangers. Boym, in her discussion of “diasporic intimacy,” develops the idea that intimacy need not necessarily be attached to the idea of home and to assumptions of transparency, authenticity, and ultimate belonging (1998, 499).5 She explores how immigrants construct intimacy in the places they Wnd themselves living. Recalling my discussion in Chapter 1 of the differences between transnationals and tourists, it is to be expected that the intimacy experienced by some of the travel enthusiasts does not fully parallel the diasporic intimacy of which Boym writes. Touristic intimacy is not embedded in the same sense of loss, disruption, alienation, tragedy, and horror that often characterizes the transnational experience. But what I am calling “touristic intimacy” does “thrive on unpredictable

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chance encounters, [and] on hope for human understanding,” like diasporic intimacy (ibid.). Furthermore, like the immigrant, the tourist “can afford the luxury of leisurely reXections” (502). Boym points out that after the period of resettlement is over, immigrants may have the majority of their lifetime to reXect on the events that led them to leave the country of their birth (ibid.). For many of the travel enthusiasts, such leisurely reXections were embodied in lovingly constructed photograph albums, which were elaborated with personal written narratives, small ephemeral souvenirs such as dried Xowers, paper napkins, business cards, or matchbook covers, and newspaper and magazine stories about places visited. As with the immigrant, the “enchantment” of my tourists with their experiences and adventures had “a touch of lightness about it” (Simmel [1910] 1971b, 139), the same playful and artistic qualities that Simmel attributed to modern sociability. (These ideas will emerge again in my discussions of the aesthetic dimension of the touristic experience in Chapter 3.) But such lightness “does not mean being detached from reality [and] cleansing it from its gravity, looking at it obliquely but not necessarily less profoundly” (Calvino as quoted in Boym 1998, 502). Leslie enjoyed her photograph albums of her travels, but she was also clearly aware of the deeper meanings that they had for her. Far from light, they were central to her life: “I’m going to be sitting in some old age home, alone, in a wheelchair. I have no kids. Who’s gonna come to visit me? I’m going to have my albums. I just hope I just don’t get Alzheimer’s, because then you might as well take the pills. Give me the injection. I mean, if you don’t have your memory, I think it might be pretty sad, or if I couldn’t read it would be pretty sad, but I’ll have these albums and I’ll have my life to look at and re-experience, in all those places.” She went on to say that when she died her albums would all be thrown away, for they meant nothing to anyone else. For the immigrant, Boym (1998, 502) suggests that it is the “common experience of dislocation that makes intimacy possible.” Although touristic dislocation is only a temporary experience, its effect has some parallels with the experience of the immigrant. As Louise said, when she travels, “Everything is new, everything is open; there is no given.” While dislocated from home, even if only temporarily, awareness and arousal are heightened. And as with the immigrant, the “common experience” of fellow tourists builds bonds of intimacy among them. In Illouz’s (1997b, 141) discussion of romantic love, she notes that travel “is likely to induce

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feelings of uncertainty . . . and excitement.” The physiological arousal provoked by such excitement can increase the intensity of the bond with a lover (or other companion/travel partner) who shares the same travel experiences (ibid.; see also MacCannell 1999; Jakle 1985). To Hannah Arendt, modern expressions of intimacy are a “retreat from worldliness . . . that bind us to a community . . . to home and homeland rather than the world” (as quoted in Boym 1998, 500). Rather than retreating from worldliness, the travel enthusiasts seek intimacy through worldliness. Through travel they want to connect, to Wnd some kind of intimate if temporary bond with broader humanity. They do so by willingly displacing themselves from the privacy of their home, the place in the Western world that historically has been the locus of intimate expression (Ranum 1989).6 Touristic intimacy as expressed by the travel enthusiasts does not manifest the assumptions of intimacy that Sennett (1978) argues pervade American (and in this era of globalization and the ubiquitousness of American advertising, frequently Canadian) ideas of modern life. In fact such intimacy epitomizes what Sennett calls “impersonal” or “public” relationships, as well as, at least in some circumstances, the intimacy of what he would call “private” relations. Sennett argues against a fear of the “impersonal life, the mold in which diversity and complexity of persons, interests, and tastes become available [to all] as a social experience” (339). These impersonal, “public” relations, which had many beneWts, largely parallel the social relations engaged in by the travel enthusiasts. Sennett saw such relations as characteristic of American urban life in the past. In their understood limitations, they laid bare the power dimensions of any public encounter. Sennett champions this openness, as it entails less pretension and a more honest recognition of what such relations could and should be. The current American pursuit of “frankness and mutual openness,” which implies warm, close relations in every encounter, defeats much of the fundamental sociability that grounds any relationship (338). It overburdens every circumstance. The American promise or assumed “entitlement” to everything in “slick fresh breath advertisements of family values [or] informal support groups and minority communities” are ideas of intimacy that are nothing more than “a fulWlment of the dominant cultural ideology” (337-40). Seeking to invest every social relationship with the “warm and fuzzies,” he maintains, undermines any balance between public and private life.7 Although “it may be trite to describe [Canadians] as a more respectful

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and gentler society,” it can be said that their “social conventions are more conservative” than those of Americans (Taras 1993, 338-9). Consequently the tourists with whom I spoke may not so vigorously pursue the “frank and open relationships” that Sennett described for contemporary Americans, despite their bombardment with much of the American popular discourse that says that they should. I argue that the more conservative Canadian travel enthusiasts neither imagined nor sought intimacy in this broad Americanized hegemonic sense. I characterize what they sought in their cross-cultural encounters as the more impersonal, public social relationship that Sennett laments has been lost in contemporary America. D E C E N T R I N G I N T I M AC Y / D I F F E R E N C E A S C O M M U N I CAT I O N

The word “intimacy” in general usage evokes ideas of an intense, affectionate, loving, sexual relationship imbued with eroticism and desire, centred on two individuals. Trust, vulnerability, and openness are seen ideally to lie at its heart (Giddens 1991, 94-5). Relationships characterized by these three qualities also exist outside the context of erotic association or sexual expression. The relations between parents and children, between other members of a kin group such as grandparents and grandchildren, and between close friends can manifest these qualities.8 Since the 1960s, Illouz (1997a, 48) suggests, intimacy has come to be seen as a “need” that could be met by “sophisticated emotional work,” initially within the home and family, and by the 1970s within one’s place of work. Corporations and organizations were permeated by the idea that individuals should be able to Wnd their real selves and achieve emotional well-being within them. Subsequently, however, and particularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when most of the travelling by the tourists I spoke with was done, many individuals abandoned the idea that “eudaimonia (happiness, well-being)” was something that a corporation or organization could nurture and stimulate (53). In this same period, Illouz argues, the ideal of intimacy, along with ideas of the family, has grown to be an essential grounding for modern identity, as “capitalism and the liberal state have increasingly eroded the connections between the family and associative life . . . and . . . the individual’s biography has become increasingly deWned by the double nexus of the state and the market” (54; cf. Ranum 1989; Fisher and Stricker 1982). Seeking

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such an ideal of intimacy is vital to achieving “socially situated forms of eudaimonia” (Illouz 1997a, 54). Intimacy, to Illouz, compensates for the loss of “moral resources entailed by late capitalism” and facilitates the articulation of “a narrative of personal identity” (ibid.). Following Illouz, I suggest that the tourists with whom I spoke, in their intense desire to travel, and in their actual experience of that travel, were constructing narratives of personal identity through a search for human connections across time, space, and cultural difference. At the very least, in this pursuit they satisWed a desire for sociability; at the very pinnacle they became enmeshed in new, or afWrmed existing, intimate relationships and associations. Beyond the establishment of such relations, matters of intimacy also incorporate “the localising of human experience [making paramount] the immediate circumstance[s] of life” (Sennett 1978, 338). The travel enthusiasts, in fact, frequently spent a lot of time attending to such “immediate circumstances” when they were away. Booked and prepaid accommodations did not free them completely from such concerns. Such accommodations still had to be located in strange cities, and acknowledgment of reservations secured.9 Bus tours and cruises eliminated many of these worries, but all of those I interviewed travelled at least in some measure independently. The successful meeting of one’s immediate needs in a foreign country where norms, expectations, and often language are unknown can be a signiWcant achievement, and fostered much personal pleasure and a sense of accomplishment among these tourists. The search for a comfortable place to sleep, a restaurant with food acceptable to one’s palate, and a toilet or like facility that is even minimally acceptable to one’s standards of hygiene can take much time and energy and in the process strip away pretentiousness. They had to be honest about their bodily needs, and often make themselves vulnerable in the process. Toilets – their varying styles, quality, availability, and measure of privacy offered – were a common motif in the conversations that I had. Albert and Sandra have an entire slide collection of the toilets that they encountered on their travels. Sandra found this useful in teaching her adolescent high school geography students how cultural difference manifests itself at a basic level. The “localizing of the human experience” in the attention to one’s most basic bodily functions with one other person, with a group of fellow travellers, or with a group of local residents, fosters a notion of intimacy. As they said,

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albert: If you want to travel and you want to see things, one of the ways sometimes you have to do it is put up with tenting and cooking and a loss of privacy [laughter]. [On the Mongolian plateau] the road is very Xat, there are no rocks, no trees: nothing, nothing, nothing. There’s one side of the road and the other side of the road. [On the bus the rule was to] hit the buzzer, two buzzers, beep, beep, that’s a washroom break. [gesturing] Women to that side, men to that side. There is no privacy, forget that [laughter]. sandra: The Mongolian truckers had [all the sights to see]! albert: They would come whipping by, because the trucks are going by, whoooom. They all hooooooot on their horns [laughter]. Those I spoke with acknowledged that the connections they made to the others with whom they were travelling in such circumstances were very speciWcally situated (where else would a Canadian agree to squat down in broad daylight, in the middle of an open plain in full view of passing trafWc, to urinate and defecate with a group?) but quite real, and at their core, brutally honest. Once having shared this eliminatory experience with others with whom one is also travelling, eating, cooking, sleeping, and continually encountering new landscapes and peoples, new levels of trust, vulnerability, and openness are established. In addition, in the case of the group of tourists with whom Sandra and Albert were travelling, they revealed to the Mongolian truckers their most basic human needs. One has to ask if Mongolian truckers would ever agree to expose themselves en masse on the plains; such exposure by the tourists may just afWrm to them how different tourists are. These revelatory moments brieXy cut across, and yet at the same time highlight, vast differences of language, culture, and ideas of appropriate behaviour. Giddens (1991, 195-6) says, “Difference can become a means of communication,” a phenomenon that he feels fuels relations both in the personal sphere and in the global political arena. He advocates that global relations should be grounded in “principled negotiations” in an effort to “discover each other’s underlying concerns and interests” and to be ultimately “supportive of and respectful towards the other party,” rather than “positional bargaining,” which he equates “with a personal relationship in which intimacy is lacking” and which begins from an “extreme stance.” Most of the tourists with whom I spoke, at a phenomenological level understood themselves to be engaged in, or at least attempting, “principled negotiations” in the course of the connections

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that they made in their travels. They would support Giddens’s claim if they were ever to encounter it. If difference can be a vehicle of communication at the level of global relations, why not at the level of the traveller’s sociable encounter or potential intimate engagement? In the following sections, I present the range of connections that the tourists felt they made in the course of their travels, beginning with the broadest level of human sociability the travel enthusiasts desired to engage with. I then examine their sense of connection with those locals they actually do talk to, with other travellers, and with their immediate companions. Finally I explore the connection they make with themselves as part of their travel experience. I will return at the end of this chapter to discuss these encounters and engagements and reXect on the meaning of these connections.

BEING SOCIABLE

With Humanity At the most sweeping level the tourists whom I talked to sought to remind themselves in their travels that they were part of the broad spectrum of the human experience, both as it is currently lived out and as it had been experienced in previous generations or millennia. They wanted to know that they were following in the footsteps of those who had travelled as explorers and adventurers in centuries past, though they did not want to follow in the footsteps of too many late-twentieth-century tourists! They desired to traverse the landscapes of peoples of distant places and ancient worlds. As Monica said, they were all trying to achieve “an appreciation of the way other people who are sharing this planet with you live, and what they are enjoying, and how simple their life is versus ours. [It makes you think that] maybe there is something different to the way we’re doing [it], the way we are carrying out our lives.” Louise expressed similar sentiments, saying that travel allowed you to see that there “is more than one approach to everything”; there is no one way to be human. Others circumscribed their sense of connection spatially, conWning it to particular geographic areas of the globe. Jackie felt that she would never belong in Thailand, but was comfortable in parts of Southern Africa. She felt a physical parallel with southern Africans: they were “big and awkward, like me. I never felt the lovely elegance of the people of Thailand; I could never share that.” She particularly felt the intensity

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of a connection with the place and its people at a wedding dance of a family she knew there. She said, as she showed me a photograph “taken at a dinner dance. [This] is one of the highlights of my life. Got to dance a night to African music, a southern African band, it was wonderful. I was ready to die right then. Could have struck me down dead!” Such moments, as I will discuss in the next chapter, exemplify Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996) experience of “Xow,” when one transcends self and fully connects with the events of the moment.10 Jackie deWnitely felt that she could make her home in southern Africa. Failing that, she would take every opportunity to return there. Robert articulated similar feelings about what he was looking for in his travels. Being an adopted child and never knowing anyone who shared his genes until his daughter was born had a profound effect on how he deWned himself. As he said, it inXuenced his sense of connection to the world both spatially and temporally. It determined “what things offer me solace and comfort. The afWnity that I’ve always felt for history, I think, is my way of forging a connection between myself and my cultural or racial or genetic lineage. I’m English and Scottish by genes and French by marriage; I suppose French by proxy [laughter]. And as a result my interest has always been [in visiting] Western European, Mediterranean, British, Celtic, that kind of thing. I have to have some kind of connection to [a place] or be able to at least temporarily create one.” Sandra and Albert extended their sense of human connection by walking, rather than taking the bus, up to the Inca site Machu Picchu in Peru. They did this despite an intense fear of heights, particularly on Albert’s part. It was the “challenge of actually hiking up and following the trail where [ancient] people went before” that inspired them to do this. Others among the travel enthusiasts simply wanted to feel connected to the segment of humanity that inhabited the place they visited. As a result some of their favoured activities were to go to public squares and market areas, or to just walk the streets, where they could watch and rub shoulders with ordinary people. Engaging individuals in some form of direct communication during these meanders was not always necessary. Most were content to watch the Xow of life, to feel in some small way part of the human experience in the place that they had come to. Watching people led some to construct imaginary narratives about the lives of those who passed before them. Such constructions allowed those who watched to metaphorically slot those whom they were watching into the

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narrative of the world as they knew it, with all of its joys and pathos. As Frances said of her time spent in a park in Santa Monica, “I sat in a park just overlooking the cliff, overlooking the beach. It was half tourists and half homeless people. I was just sort of making up stories for them but some of them were running around muttering to themselves. Some of them seemed to me like they could have been Vietnam vets.” Gazing upon humanity, however, no matter how enjoyable at one level, did not substitute for more direct contact with local people. Most wanted in some way to come to understand through direct contact, no matter how brief, who the locals were as real people.

On the Front Lines We got to this place [in Czechoslovakia] by late afternoon, early nightfall. We went to a hotel. The manager, [who] spoke English, fortunately, said, “I don’t have room in my hotel, but I have a friend with a hotel. He’ll put you up and lock your car in a compound so that all your camping gear is safe.” [After] he arranged that, he said, “Come back and have dinner at my hotel.” So, we did. He had been a diplomat in the Czech foreign service before the Communists took over. He was a wonderful guy and spoke excellent English. He had travelled in his former position. He kept asking us questions, because it was a very closed society and country. But he was so pleasant and we didn’t mind. It was fun talking about his experiences. He gave us Pilsner beer with a wonderful Czech meal. The Czech food is good. So I said, at the end of the meal, “How much do I owe you?” “Nothing, it’s on me. I’m just so glad to talk to some foreigners Wrst-hand from the free world.” He said, “I will ask you one thing. Would you send me a postcard from [Canada]?” I said, “Sure.” So I got his address, and then we left.

This meeting, in 1960, was one of Bruce’s adventures en route to the USSR. He was enticed to make this trip by an ad in a London newspaper that suggested it was possible to camp across Russia. This camping trip was an exploratory journey to see if he could accomplish his longheld dream of driving from London to Toronto, for which he acknowledged that he might have to ship his car across some of the Bering Sea. Bruce and his Wrst wife, Sarah, spent much of their time on this trip Wnding their way through the quagmire of bureaucracy at border crossings in the Eastern bloc countries, no simple task for a Western tourist at the

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height of the Cold War. Finding gas, designated campgrounds, and enough food were the other main preoccupations of their trip. Places such as the Hermitage in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) were bypassed simply due to the exhaustion of the journey. In the context of these adventures, the encounter with the gracious Czechoslovakian hotel owner was a deeply treasured moment, so much so that nearly thirty-Wve years later Bruce returned to the Czech Republic, simply to try to locate this man. Unfortunately he was unable to Wnd him. When asked why it was so important to make this search, he replied, He was so so helpful, but it was a mutually beneWcial thing, which is the best arrangement for any of us. He was so glad to talk to someone from the outside for the Wrst time. It was a little glimpse of personal contact. As we’ve said with all our travels, all over, now and then and in the future, it’s the personal touch. So, there’s a sentimental connection, and [we were] grateful too, because he really was a friend in a time of need. We had battled to get to that point, to get across the border, so it was really a relief to have someone warm and friendly. And I really felt for him. Someone who was well educated and had travelled, then had it taken away from him. It was very hard. So I’m still determined. And if by any chance he’s dead, I can tell the experience to his family, if he hadn’t told them. It’s possible he hadn’t, he may have, who knows. I had the print made of the picture [taken in 1960]. I took the prints to Prague, but it was disappointing. But, you know, that’s life. And we just keep on, and I will keep on with this one. [emphasis added]

Bruce is honest in his reXection that this event may have meant more to him than to the Czech hotelier; he recognizes that the hotelier may not even have told his family about their meeting. But based on the conversations that I had with Bruce, I believe that there was some ambivalence in this honesty. Might the hotelier have not told his family for political reasons, given that in the 1960s, encounters with those from the West were discouraged? Or might he have not told them because it was just another encounter that happened in the course of his day, one that lacked the importance that it held for Bruce after his struggles in the previous two days with closed roads, expired visas, and inhospitable border guards? Bruce would have preferred to believe that if the hotelier was silent about their meeting, it was for political reasons. This story embodied what Bruce sought in his travels, the “personal touch,” as he called it.

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He hoped that the importance of this brief engagement in 1960 went both ways, but nonetheless it held signiWcant meaning for him.11 People such as the Czech hotelier who work in the travel industry are generally the Wrst local residents with whom the tourists have the chance to be sociable. Guides, hotel staff, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and employees at tourist attractions become important points of connection. Due to their position on the front line, the genuineness of their friendship and openness of these encounters were, at times, of concern to these tourists. Would these workers be jaded in their responses? Would they engage in conversations that a tourist had a personal interest in, or would they discuss only ofWcially sanctioned topics? Would they reveal themselves as individuals with distinct personalities? Would the encounter be a real one, suggesting that their guide or hotelkeeper was an authentic local, not someone acting out a scripted performance? Judith and Henry certainly felt that their encounters with tour guides in China were positive and authentic. Michael, who had the same questions about the local Vietnamese guide assigned to his cycle trip, felt that he was able to communicate with her openly and get a sense of who she was as a real person as they travelled around Vietnam. He had wondered, “Are we going to hear all kinds of propaganda? Are they going to steer us? You have to go here. You have to go there. [But it was] open, open, open. Talk about anything. Talk about women’s issues, communism, economics, students, the poor, anything you wanted to talk about. She’d talk most openly. We exchanged our values and ideas and so forth. It was very good. She was a funny person. She was delightful to talk with. Very open.” Other contacts with locals who worked in the tourism industry developed to the point that some tourists were invited home to dinner to meet the families of those with whom they had established a friendship. Gwen had such experiences with a driver she hired and a travel agent she used during her extended trip to India. She reciprocated the generosity of these people upon her return to Canada by sending gifts of clothing, books, and other items she observed would help their modest circumstances. Furthermore she, like several others, kept in touch with these people and others whom she met through letters, cards, or e-mail. Gaining some insight into the personal lives of the people they met was meaningful to several of the tourists. Fred and Susan, after one night in a bed and breakfast in a tiny village in the Czech Republic, were invited to look at photo albums of the life and travels of their landlady. They learned of her earlier experiences as a basketball player and the

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camping holidays that she and her former team mates still took annually, many years after they had retired from active play. Fred and Susan warmly remembered this opportunity to get some sense of who this woman was outside of her role as a landlady. They came to see her as a distinctive person, with family responsibilities and a particular life history. She took on an individual identity for them. Such small moments of engagement begin to indicate the potential for intimacy even in Xeeting touristic encounters. These local residents made themselves somewhat vulnerable by revealing aspects of their private lives and personal stories to people from a distant place. Just as Bruce will probably never know what the Czech hotelier thought of his encounter with him, Susan and Fred will never know what their conversations with their Czech landlady meant to her. Nor will Gwen really know what the Indian driver or travel agent thought of their time together. But to Bruce, Susan, Fred, and Gwen, these were genuine moments of friendship and human connection. Jennifer emphatically stated that she did not travel to England “for the weather,” but rather she went “to see the people.” Tony echoed these sentiments. Whether he was travelling on the back roads of the United States, trekking in Nepal, or cycling in Vietnam, if he did not have a chance to meet the local people, he was not seeing the “real place.” Tony, Jennifer, Bruce, and many others with whom I spoke wanted to see such real places. The absence of opportunity to make any personal connection was a great source of frustration. For example, Monica’s comments about their trip to Cuba reveal her sense of isolation and disappointment at being unable to befriend any of the hotel staff and at being unable to “meet the people”: The [hotel staff ] were extremely guarded. You could leave anything spread out but they would not touch it. If you left change spilled out on the dresser, they would dust around it. None of your personal effects would be touched. Even your soap: they wouldn’t lift up the soap to wipe, or close or shift your shampoo bottle. Everything was left exactly in the room as you left it, with the exception of the beds being made and the Xoor swept. But, if you left your running shoes askew on the Xoor, they would be in exactly the same spot. They must have dusted around them! They were polite, but it was all very superWcial. You felt like an intruder. They’re so frightened, so guarded, so secretive. They would rarely smile or say good morning.

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Rather than frustration with poor housekeeping, Monica’s tone reXected her disappointment that the guard against any personal contact with foreigners was so entrenched among the Cuban housekeeping staff that they would not so much as touch her personal belongings nor return greetings when passed in the hallway. Contact, verbal, physical, and particularly emotional, was kept to an absolute minimum. Ignoring the power relationships embedded in the tourist encounter, or the broader political matrix in which the staff were potentially entangled, but unabashedly honest in her grand vision of what the meeting of tourists and local residents could mean for both of them, Monica summed up her experiences by saying, “I did not feel that there was any cultural exchange. We were trying to break down the barriers to communication and yet, where I chose to make my holiday, the barriers are still there and no matter what we tried to do – by chatting up the natives, being friendly, trying to bolster their economy with our tourism dollars. They just either are not seeing the beneWts, or they don’t want to see [them], or they’re afraid to. Let me learn about you and you can learn about me, and we can all get along – this is what I wanted.” She desperately desired at the very least a social encounter that recognized some shared human experience of the world. Encounters with those who work in various front-line aspects of the tourist industry are the closest that many tourists ever come to meeting local people. These encounters brought moments of pleasure, and afWrmed the possibility of reaching across cultural boundaries. Simple experiences left pleasant memories. To some, this was completely satisfactory. But many wanted to be able to meet local people outside the tourism infrastructure.

Meeting the Local People Meeting the “real people” meant stepping out of the tourist infrastructure and connecting with members of the general population who had nothing to do with tourists in the course of their normal lives. The desire to make these contacts led tourists to initiate exchanges simply to meet someone local, which also at times served as a vehicle to obtain information such as directions to a local address or tourist site. Such exchanges often resulted in the sharing of a broad spectrum of helpful information. Fred and Susan took the opportunity to buy rafXe tickets from a group of women selling them at a church they stopped at in England, even though they knew that they were not likely to claim the prize if they won.

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As Susan said, “You can always chat to someone selling rafXe tickets.” In the course of the purchase, they learned a great deal about the church and the village, which added greatly to their appreciation of their visit there. They continued on that trip to England to encounter very helpful and engaging local people. While they stood pondering their map in a Cambridge college portal, they were almost literally taken by the hand by a gregarious professor who, once determining that Wren Library at Trinity College was their desired destination, took them on a personalized tour of the library. He managed to open several “closed” doors, allowing them to see parts of the collection not normally accessible to the visiting public. After lunch and an animated monologue on the professor’s part about his life’s study of early English literature, Susan and Fred had gained some insight into the speciWcity of the academic work done by Oxbridge academics. He and Fred later engaged in a more two-sided conversation about their common interest in jazz. After several hours together, he disappeared from their lives as suddenly as he had entered, but not without giving them his telephone number, charging them to call him if they wanted further assistance while touring Cambridge (and not without feeding Fred and Susan’s sense of the eccentricity of Oxbridge academics). Meeting members of the local population to get some insight into how the ordinary people live was very important to Gwen. She emphatically stated, “I would change any schedule if I had the chance to go to somebody’s house and really see how people lived.” Exchanging English lessons for accommodation was Louise’s strategy for getting to know local people in Korea. But to meet a wider range of people, she decided to learn tae kwon do. Her host family queried her on this: The Wrst night, I remember, we were sitting around the table. I [said I] wanted to learn tae kwon do. They actually . . . brought someone in who spoke English for dinner the Wrst night so they could communicate with me: “You want to learn tae kwon do?” I said, “Yes, I do.” Then there was [a lot] of chatter, and then they said to me, “Have you considered learning Xower arranging instead?” I said, “No, I don’t want to learn Xower arranging, I want to learn tae kwon do.” [I knew that] they had tae kwon do clubs. What I didn’t realize, at that time there were only, even in the large city, only . . . three females who studied tae kwon do, because it’s a man’s sport, it’s not a self-defence art like we consider it to be.

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In the end she exchanged tae kwon do lessons for English lessons. She managed to extend her contacts in Korea by striking up a conversation on the plane in her rudimentary Korean with a young man from Korea with whose family she later stayed, exchanging accommodation for work in their restaurant. Louise eventually became Xuent in Korean, and after many repeat visits developed lifelong friendships with many members of her original tae kwon do club. She subsequently learned the success of her strategy was unique to Korea, as her later trip to Nigeria demonstrated. In Korea, she told me laughingly, “If you wanted to socialize with people, you could join clubs. Everything is a club. Well, that’s not exactly true of Africa.” Determined to have a local contact when she arrived, she rearranged her Xight to Nigeria to travel with a local resident whom she met in the embassy in London. In the end, she spent most of her time in Nigeria with this man’s family. Making local contacts was clearly central to Louise’s travel experience. She emphasized how every new encounter was an adventure, anticipated by her with openness and excitement. In talking of her travels, she identiWed each trip in terms of the people that she met and the lasting friendships she established. Locals who were also fellow travellers were often noted to offer assistance and gestures of friendship. While travelling by local transport in the Middle East, with no real knowledge of the languages, Sandra and Albert found fellow bus passengers very helpful in getting them to their Wnal destination. As Albert noted, “You end up somewhere and you try to Wgure out, well, where am I? [But] somebody will always direct you. They stand you up in the middle of the desert and say, ‘Wait here.’ You think, I’m waiting here by this rock, nothing’s ever going [to] come along. But eventually a bus appears from nowhere.” Elaine and Benjamin were taken under the wing of various fellow passengers who guided them through the mysteries of the Indian train system. As Elaine told the story, “They would say something like, ‘This is what you need to do and this is what you need to be careful of. You must not listen when people tell you these things.’ [laughter] You’d be kind of on an inner circle, and you’d be passed hand over hand by the locals to other people when you went [on] to the next town.” For some of those I interviewed, inability to communicate in the local language circumscribed the travels, or determined the choice of an organized tour, in certain locations. But sometimes language seemed unnecessary to facilitate connections with members of the local community, encounters that were remembered as highlights of a trip. Elaine

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commented that during their travels through South Asia, with a sense of humour (both theirs and the one they detected among many of the local people they encountered), “You did not need language.” Such was the case with Olivia and Zoya’s meeting on the train in the former USSR. Olivia told me the story: There was this woman [on the train] before we got to Irkutsk. She was very funny. She wiped everything clean. Her side of the little table was spic and span. And then she took out a huge bag, and I think her ketchup had spilled. Anyhow, she was eating this huge, maybe a goose leg or something. So, it was all dripping [with] this awful red stuff, all over the place. She had to lick her hands and it was a total mess! And I laughed so. She was such a dear person. She, a young man, and I were there. And then we were talking a little bit, I mean, a little. [She told me where she lived in Irkutsk. A few days later when I was out walking] I found myself near the street where she was. I thought . . . I would just visit her. But, of course, she didn’t have a phone. I just walked. Her number was 63, so [I thought that] it wasn’t very far. But every number seemed to take a whole block. I don’t know how it works. Maybe it was just [my] age. And then I asked [a woman]. She said, “Well, you are on the right street, but, no,” she said, “oh, you have to take the tram.” Then she called this other woman. Then she called, “Sasha, Sasha,” her husband. And he had to get me to the tramway. [But] he didn’t want to do it. So he asked another friend. And the friend got on and paid for me the Wve kopeks, and I gave him three cigarettes that I had left. He said, “Three stops.” At the Wrst stop, and [the conductor] said, whatever in Russian. I went [on past the second stop] and then number three. I got off. But I was still not there. You wouldn’t believe it. When I Wnally made it [it] was a little dark. And I thought, “Oh, my God, what I’ve gotten into.” I told this man her name, but I didn’t know her last name and I said, “Zoya, Zoya!” And there she was. And this was a communal kitchen and then she had a room. And, of course, I mean, she was very, very astonished to see me! I could [not] say all that much either. So, I stood there. “Zoya,” I said, “Zoya.” “Yes, come into my room,” [I think she said]. There was a big bed and a big fridge and it was a typical Russian apartment, because they have a communal kitchen and then they each have bedsitting rooms. She must have bribed everybody out of the kitchen, I think. She wiped the table, then she served me eggs, tea, and preserves . . . What did we talk about

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[laughter]? It was very strange. And I had to search through my dictionary and by the time I got the subject, I’d forgotten [what I wanted to say]. It was terribly funny. But she was so sweet. Then I said I had to go back to the hotel, and actually this tramway took me fairly straight to the hotel, but she insisted on coming with me. I said, “You come to my room and have a little vodka.” And then the sad thing was that it was a tourist hotel and she wasn’t allowed upstairs. I said, “Oh, no, this is terrible.” Then she said she was allowed to wait downstairs. And I just quickly ran up and got a little gift. And then I gave her money for the taxi back. The whole thing was such a blunder. But she was very sweet. I think that she was a retired factory worker.

The meeting of tourists and locals is a complex phenomenon. It engages histories, ideologies, cultures, personalities, race, gender, class, and age differences, as well as situational contingencies. Such encounters are fertile ground for good examples of Giddens’s idea of difference being a vehicle for communication. Olivia, Elaine, Benjamin, and Sandra tell of encounters that were precipitated because of the difference between them and the locals. They did, in fact, clearly stand out as needing assistance, as ignorant of local geography, and as uninformed about the unspoken rules of the place they were visiting. Response to their openness by members of the local population could facilitate a human connection, no matter how brief, and regardless of how incidental or trivial the gesture might be to the local person. In each encounter, an individual tourist made one-on-one contact with someone in the local population. If only momentarily, each was separated out from the generic category of “stranger,” and seen as a real person. The brevity and the anonymity of these encounters circumscribe what can be said about them. But to allow them to happen, to make the most tangential social encounter across cultural difference, the travel enthusiasts had to admit their vulnerability. They had to put a signiWcant measure of trust in the intentions of those who helped them. Furthermore, they had to be honest about their need for assistance. Such factors saturated these encounters with meaning for them. To be seen as an individual was one thing, but many also desired to feel welcomed, rather than feeling like an intruder or a curiosity. Elaine and Benjamin appreciated that in certain regions in South Asia, unlike other areas where they had been travelling, they “weren’t that interesting. We were interesting [simply] as people.” They felt that in these places there was a “general interest in engaging in conversation to know

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about you as long as you were wanting to know about them. So there was a sense of back and forth.” Overall, the travel enthusiasts desired some sense that their encounters with local people were in some modest way pleasurable, beneWcial, and honest on both sides. The ease and openness of many encounters took some by pleasant surprise and fulWlled their desire for connection. In contrast, people in the local population could choose to completely ignore them. In Thailand, “many people were not interested” in Elaine and Benjamin at all. Many of those with whom I spoke were quite happy to accept this disinterest. Being ignored by the local population ironically accomplished what several really believed was impossible. As Jackie put it, as a tourist “you will not Wt in . . . You know you’re not going to be one of them.” Yet to be ignored, to not be singled out as a curiosity, in some situations seemed to be a tacit recognition of a shared humanity. Such recognition does not presume that tourists are ever seen as local; however, they are often appropriately positioned into local systems of social hierarchies (see Erb 2000).

Seeing the Pope, Paying Homage to Shakespeare, and Dancing with Royalty Travel permits both planned and unplanned encounters with famous people. Some I interviewed sought out places associated with celebrated Wgures, while others unwittingly stumbled across such people in memorable moments. As a teacher and a lover of English literature, Frances had visited the homes of several well-known writers. She said she “want[ed] to see where they lived. You just want to make it part of your life. [In England] we went to Anne Hathaway’s cottage in Stratfordupon-Avon. They were saying, ‘Now these may not have been the furnishings that were here in Shakespeare’s time but they are of that time period.’ [But you still] think that you are seeing his desk that hasn’t been touched since [he died].” Travelling to the place where even a long-dead famous person once lived brings to life the connection someone might feel to him or her. Leslie (who is of Polish extraction) told me of her unplanned but exciting sighting of a very famous person – the pope: [There] is [a] Polish expression, “Been to Rome, you must see the pope,” and we were in Rome and saw the pope! The night before, we

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were in [a] restaurant having pizza. Some guy [from] the next table with several couples [started] talking to us: “Oh, you’re from Canada.” He said, “Why don’t you join us? I’m a tour leader tomorrow to the Vatican . . . [We’re] going to go inside.” At Wrst I said, “We’ve got a rough schedule, but thank you very much.” I didn’t think we could do that. But we were going to walk down to see the square anyway. [So we went with them.] When we got there the guards [asked], “What have you got in your bag?” “Excuse me, it’s my purse!” I said. [We] couldn’t Wgure [it] out. What’s going on? [There were] quite a few people standing around, not in a line or anything. Then we see these Xags go up and hear these shouts. We’re looking, looking. What the hell is going on here? We’re peeking, peeking. “My God! It’s the pope!” We have a picture of his white beanie. We couldn’t believe it, we knew nothing about it. We just stumbled into when he toured the square. Sue [my travelling partner] was not Catholic, but I am, so it meant something to me.

Travel can also lead to serendipitous encounters with famous people. Robert, a professional photographer, tells of his meeting with a wellknown English photographer: I was sitting in a pub in North London. I was just sitting there on my own, having a beer, and this really drunken English guy started up a conversation beside me. He was pleasant enough and I wasn’t going anywhere, so I talked to him for a while. He asked me at some point, “So what do you do?” “Well, I’m a photographer.” “Well, really,” he says, “my stepfather is a photographer. His name is Bill Grant. Ever heard of him?” “As a matter of fact, yes, I have.” Then came the clincher. “So, um, want to meet him?” At that point, I was tempted to say I heard he was dead, but I thought better of it and said, “Sure.” “Well, you give me your phone number then, and I’ll have his wife call you.” Sure enough, next day, I got a call and his wife asked me if I had any of my photographs with me to show Mr. Grant, who would like to see the work of a young photographer. And I happened to have a dozen with me and I scuttled over.

Grant gave Robert one of his photographs as a souvenir of their meeting, something he greatly treasures. Olivia thought that chance can be assisted by a spirit of adventure, an attitude that facilitated her brush with celebrity:

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Celebrities take on a human reality in such encounters. Gottleib (1982) has suggested that travel allows individuals to step, if only temporarily, out of the class milieu in which they live. While the duke and duchess of Windsor were clearly from a different class from Olivia, she stepped across the boundary and engaged in a moment of direct connection based on their shared love of dancing and her and her partner’s talent as dancers. Robert was allowed, through his chance encounter with one of the heroes of his profession, to step into the world of someone whom he felt was touched with genius, and who had reached levels of accomplishment in his Weld that Robert only hoped to emulate. But through such encounters, Olivia and Robert, along with Frances and Leslie, came to see the famous as real people, not simply as abstract caricatures. Chance encounters in the most unexpected places with acquaintances or friends of friends prompted several stories. Bruce and his second wife, Maria (who is of Mexican birth), told of meeting a Mexican family in a campground in Marrakech, Morocco, and then stumbling upon this same family on a street corner in Istanbul several weeks later. Such connections, which link individuals across time and space, were, as Beth said, “one of the highlights” of her travels. To her such memories make travel what it is. She told this anecdote to me with great enthusiasm. I was in Queenstown . . . I went for a walk around the edge of the lake. And it was one of those crystal-clear bright mornings, not overly hot, just a little ripple on the lake, but sort of beautiful photographic

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weather. It was sort of wild with a track and joggers and people taking their dogs out, et cetera. I was minding my own business. And there was a little old lady with a dog, and we fell into step. She started talking; we fell into conversation. Her husband caught up. I could see the look as he came around: “Oh, God, wonder who she’s got talking to now.” Cutting a long story short, he was a retired cardiologist who had worked in Essex, in England, who knew my late husband. Knew all the people, the senior academic staff who were there when I was at the London [hospital]. He knew a lot of the people that I knew at London. [He was a] New Zealander and he’d come back to Dunedin to practise. So, we Wnished up with a cup of coffee and the lady’s homemade cookies. Now, if you’d told me that I would have found a retired cardiologist who knew my late husband [laughter], from the end of the war years, in the backwoods of the South Island, New Zealand . . .

Places were attractive to the travel enthusiasts for many varied reasons, but several of those I spoke with began their narratives about particular trips by remembering someone whom they had an attachment to, someone who told them of a place and why they should visit there. Louise’s trip to Nigeria was prompted by the stories of the boyfriend she had in university, who told her what a wonderful place it was. Rachel told me a similar story: I had a girlfriend who was from Kenya. Her family had left Kenya because they didn’t want her brother to go in the army, so she went to school with me in Toronto. Linda and I took the same bus home, so we used to sit and make plans. She said, “Rachel, you have to go to Mombasa, it’s got the most beautiful beaches in the world. The Indian Sea is just the best place in the world.” So we were going to go to Mombasa. We never made it [together], but it was in the back of my mind. So it was just the place I knew I wanted to go to.

While not the only reason for making these trips, these travels clearly connected both Louise and Rachel to the memory of an individual. They reconnected with a person from the past through a visit to a particular place in the present. The experience of connecting across time, space, and social hierarchies, with those famous in the past or in the present, or with important personal memories, was deeply meaningful to the travel enthusiasts. But

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connections did not end here, as many reached further through their travels, fostering understanding of closeness and intimacy.

E N C O U N T E R I N G I N T I M AC Y

Going Away/Staying Connected When asked if she sent postcards while away on her travels, Rachel replied, “I send a million. My postcard list is two pages long.” She went on to discuss how she carefully selected cards to suit individual personalities and interests, and made certain that those of her friends that knew each other would each get a different card. Staying connected to friends, family, and co-workers while away was important to her. Postcards allowed her to share moments of her experiences with a broad spectrum of people, and also reminded her of who was important in her life. She and several others found that while travelling, they had time to write to friends and family. Travelling away from home ironically gave them the opportunity to stay in touch. Often the communication was only in the form of a short note on a postcard, but it highlighted what the tourists felt was an important moment in their life. Louise told me that one of her friends wrote to say that she did not want to receive any more postcards. She wanted a letter, she wanted to know what was going on in Louise’s life, not only where she had travelled that year. However, Louise felt that there was not much else of importance to tell; her travels were what she wanted to share with her friends and family. E-mail has now partially replaced the sending of postcards, but many of those with whom I spoke still preferred to send cards. Their visual component added something to the missive that an e-mail could never do. As the literature on the motivation of tourists suggests, travelling to see family and friends naturally plays an important role in determining if, where, and when people travel. Visiting allows individuals to stay in touch, to strengthen bonds, and to nurture new connections. Several of those I spoke with often incorporated a visit with relatives and friends into their travels. For some it was the primary reason for trips, for others it was part of a wide range of activities, and for still others it would happen only if it Wt in with all the other things that they wanted to do while away. On a trip to the Czech Republic and to England, which included a stay in Prague, driving for a week through the Czech countryside, and visiting Stonehenge and many other English tourist sites,

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Fred and Susan managed to Wt in three days with an English Wrst cousin whom Susan had never met. For Frances, on the other hand, going to visit relatives, even ones she hardly knew, was a key reason to take a particular trip. Frances told of meeting her Australian cousin for the Wrst time: “My cousin Glen who lives in Australia was going to be in Hartford, Connecticut. Could we meet him in Boston? It was just after New Year’s . . . the craziest time possible to go on a trip, but we had never met any of our Australian cousins so it was our opportunity to do it. We Xew off for twenty-four hours in Boston and got there no problem. It snowed a lot while we were in Boston, and it meant that our Xight was delayed, but we got to meet him. I’m more interested in going [to Australia] now having met him.” Family was central to Frances’s travels in many ways. She somewhat whimsically documented members of her imaginary kin group once on a trip to England with her sister. Because their surname is Henderson, they photographed every Henderson grave they found. She joked that she knew that she could not be related to them all, but as a Wrst-generation Canadian, it gave her some sense of connection to an established lineage in another land. Robert, as I quoted earlier, Wnds travel a way of “forging a connection between myself and my cultural or racial or genetic lineage.” SpeciWc individuals are not really important in this context; it is a much broader sense of connection that Robert seeks. Others have a clear idea of what family connections they want to Wnd. Olivia drew on the life history of a long-dead relative, with whom she shared a birthday and a love of travel, to deWne the routes and destinations of several of her trips. She tracked his life across Russia, Hawaii, and Alaska. These travels solidiWed her sense of attachment to a man she had known about since early childhood: I [have] an interesting ancestor who was the governor of Russian America in 1817. Because his birthday was on the same day as mine, and we had this old account in the family, I always was intrigued by him. He travelled around the world so many times. He did research. He was in Sitka, [and] in Siberia. Over the years it has developed that I’m researching his life. I have piles of things, letters, papers. An island in Bristol Bay in Alaska [was] named after him, so I have articles about this island and have ordered detailed maps of the area. I’m compiling things, but I don’t really know what I’m going to do [laughter] with it. I went through Siberia and I went to Irkutsk. It wasn’t so good

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however because I didn’t speak much Russian. I spoke minimal Russian . . . It was fun, but I couldn’t really get into the museums to ask speciWc questions. Later on, I found out [by] strange coincidence somehow that a descendant of this ancestor of mine lives in St. Petersburg. I visited them. They have his telescope.

Olivia further declared that unless she had some personal connection to a place, she was not motivated to go there. She said, “I have to have some connection to the country, and then I go from there.” She doubted that she would go to Africa, as “I don’t think I know anybody.” Travel, as many suggested to me, in many ways nourishes intimacy with a range of friends and family, past and present.

Like Finding Like If ideas of intimacy are grounded in expressions of truth, honesty, and vulnerability, several of my tourists told of Xeeting moments that could be described as intimate. Such moments characterized a range of encounters in which individuals shared something important in a context of uncertainty and disorientation. Tony said that some of the countries that he visited were “dangerous” and that airports were particularly intimidating places. Arriving jet-lagged in such places, he always found it somewhat disorienting to be greeted by “all these guys, you know, yelling, ‘Taxi, taxi.’” But it was in such situations when he was unabashed about his vulnerability that brief, but honest and heartfelt, connections could be made. On his arrival in Cairo, Tony immediately teamed up with a German woman who was going to the same hotel, and who, he later learned, was on the same tour as he was. This linkage gave him some sense of security, as he had “no idea of where the bus is going . . . You hope that they are going to the hotel, but you’re at their mercy.” Michael similarly tells of getting into Calcutta at midnight. Somehow, you Wnd somebody who you think is going to be a bit of a friend because they are from the Western world. There was this man from France, and we’d both come off the same plane. We were clearly sort of travellers together, and for some reason it’s a little more comforting if you’re with somebody in the middle of the night in Calcutta. You make this judgment that this person is Wne. This person was Wne, and he was looking for the same thing: to

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get downtown. We drove in this old bumpy cab on the roughest roads. Many of the lights [were] out and, for some reason, even the taxis, they put their lights out when they’re driving through the streets. I don’t know why. It’s as if they’re trying to save their battery or something. Looking out and seeing people sleeping on the streets, I knew I was somewhere new. My companion had a hotel booked and I had one, too. We dropped him off Wrst. Then we came to mine. It was a small place. It was dark. It was a big gate that was chained shut at the front. I got out of the cab, but I didn’t pay the guy then. I said, “No, you wait, you wait.” There was no way I was going to have him drive off and me sitting on a dark back street of Calcutta at 12:30 at night. There was a bell and I rang it, and somebody came out and opened the gates and said, yes, they were expecting me. And [I] paid the cabbie and got [to] my room. That was the start to that trip.

Amid the crowds and confusion at the airport, each of these two men sought out a recognizable person: someone who was a fellow traveller, someone who presumably came from a similar world, someone who potentially felt just as vulnerable. These brief moments of connection were crucial to a sense of security, and were recounted as the necessary umbrella for the stories of their trips to Egypt and India, respectively. Rachel avoided this fearful confusion by ensuring that she was met at the airport in Nairobi. She said, “I paid for that, and I made sure I’m paying for that, because I’m not wandering into an African airport without somebody being there for me.” Unlike Michael and Tony, she was not going to leave her arrival to chance. Moreover, Rachel was going on a tour: “I’m going to be with a group of people who are similar to myself.” Temporary associations with similar people were not restricted to airport encounters. Several of the travel enthusiasts had developed long-lasting friendships in the course of their travels. The development of such bonds was a deeply meaningful dimension of the travel experience. Tony, on a trip to Morocco, made three British friends who have been his regular travelling partners for the past Wve years. They travel together at least once, sometimes twice a year, and are in constant communication about their travels and plans. He commented that he was often startled by the number of tourists like himself who venture to what to him are remote parts of the globe. He lamented, however, that among all these tourists, there was never anyone from his home town. This comment followed his reXection that he did not know

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anyone at home who shared his interest in adventure travel, or anyone who even demonstrated much sincere interest in hearing of his adventures. Sharing a love of travel and having similar travel histories, while an important attribute in forging friendships, is not the only grounding for the relationships the travel enthusiasts had with fellow travellers. Sandra and Albert described those they travelled with on their trip through China: sandra: They tend not [to] be mainstream, they tend to be interesting people, a very eclectic group. albert: Just such a wonderful group of human beings. sandra: They were interesting and interested people. Elaine noted that the friends they made on an organized trip to Morocco were people who would get “into these very long debates, just [about] ideas.” The time spent together, the shared experiences, and a similar level of intellectual curiosity about the place they were in, the people they met, and the experiences they were having made many of these relationships the highlights of a particular trip. As Neil said of going on a threeweek tour: “You really do get to know [the group]. You have breakfast, lunch, and supper with them. [You share at times] eight-hour train journeys. You know a lot about them and their family by the time you’re Wnished [the] trip.” Friends made on the road as part of an organized trip would appear generally to Wt a similar demographic proWle to the tourists that I interviewed. This was clearly an example of like meeting like. When I asked for details about these travel friends, what I was told implied that they had similar educational, employment, and socioeconomic backgrounds to the travel enthusiasts. Some were retired but few were much past seventy, many were in their Wfties, and some were much younger, in their late twenties and thirties, often taking a break before furthering their education. These details, as a rule, determined that these individuals had the funds to spend on travel, although several of the travel enthusiasts wondered where the students got the money to take such trips. When the tourists I interviewed travelled independently, they encountered a much wider range of age groups and backgrounds along the way, depending on the nature of the trip they took. Such travellers often hook up with others of a similar mind, either to explore a particular location or to travel together for a few days, weeks, or even months. Friends made on the road share information about places to visit, routes to take,

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accommodations to avoid (or seek out), foods to try, precautions to be taken, or sights not to miss. They also, however, offer companionship and opportunities to have in-depth conversations about what they have seen, done, experienced, and felt about it all. There is, as Sandra said, “a sharing of ideas across the world.” Elaine and Benjamin, both in their Wfties, travelled independently around South Asia for several months on a modest budget. They were, however, glad to join a more organized trip to Australia and New Zealand, if only to be in the company of those closer to their own age. They grew weary of being followed by what Elaine called “hatchlings . . . young adults who were missing their parents,” or slightly older individuals (particularly males) in their thirties and forties who took to calling them “Momma” and “Poppa” when they encountered them in hostels and budget-priced hotels. The contrast in these two experiences, and their greater personal and intellectual resonance with the kind of people they met on the adventure-oriented group tours they had more recently taken, such as their trip to Morocco, led Elaine to say that they would probably travel this way more often in the future. Some of the connections with these travel friends end at the train station, bus terminal, or airport; others continue through mail, e-mail, or scheduled future rendezvous. Those who maintain longer-term communication share a desire to continue to travel, a sense that there is much yet to see in the world, and a spirit of adventure and exploration. Frances confessed she met “wonderful, wonderful people [who were] very interesting and compatible” on her cruise in the Greek islands, but she had “not kept up with them.” Michael, although he did not really like to travel alone, repeatedly expressed similar sentiments. For him maintaining contact with fellow travellers hinged on whether there was any possibility that they might actually see each other again. Fred and Susan, on the other hand, paid little attention to whether they might see someone again. On a trip to Australia they spent three days with a couple whom “we met on the Cook Islands years before, who came from Sydney. She’s a wonderful letter writer. It [was] the Wrst time that we had seen them in eleven years, but we’d written all those years.” Robert told me of the friendship that he formed with an elderly gentleman after their plane made an emergency thirty-six-hour stopover due to a bomb scare. Their relationship had been kept alive for thirteen years through regular correspondence and had survived “two thwarted near attempts to reconnect” in person. On a recent trip to Europe, which

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Robert described as “an opportunity to spend time with family and friends,” they Wnally managed to see each other again. Bruce and Maria planned entire trips around opportunities to see people whom they had previously met on the road. Such trips could include visiting friends at home, or connecting with them at a destination where neither of them lived. On their annual trip to Europe, visits to Paris or arrangements to connect elsewhere were essential to see a family that they had Wrst met in North Africa in the late 1980s. At the encouragement of this family, who had been travelling in a Land Rover around Africa for six months at the time that they met, Bruce and Maria drove across Algeria and Morocco with their car and trailer. This trip proved to be one of the most hair-raising but exciting adventures they ever embarked upon. Bruce had the conWdence to do it simply because he had faith in the character and knowledge of their then-new Parisian friends. Bruce and Maria continue to make close friends on their travels. They told me of a recent visit to Prague in the company of Dutch friends they had originally met camping in France in 1990: bruce: The walks that you can go on in Prague . . . maria: You’ll see it in the pictures. But it was wonderful for us. It turned out that our apartment was at the end of the tramline in the eastern part of the city. Our friends’ camp was in the eastern end, so they left their car and took a bus to the end of the tramline, to the stop near our apartment. bruce: It would stop off at our apartment. We all bought a week’s pass on the transit, so it’s not much more to come and go when you want. It’s a very good way to get around. maria: For a week it was a dream. Our friends had been in there, they had done all the walks, they knew exactly where everything was, and what we should be allocating more of our time to, so we had . . . bruce: . . . built-in tour guides. maria: Beautiful warm guides taking us by the hand . . . bruce: . . . but they were our own friends. maria: It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. bruce: Our friend is a retired geography high school teacher [in] Holland, and he’s very meticulous with guidebooks and details. He really, really studies them, and knows just what to do and how to do it. maria: There [were] many warm feelings going between the four of us. They are very, very good [friends].

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bruce: We met them camping in 1990 in the south of France. So, it’s another full circle again, and in a way it’s becoming even fuller as we plan this year’s trip. Clearly Bruce and Maria Wnd great comfort in these friendships. To them, connecting and reconnecting with friends scattered across Europe is as important as seeing new places. But seeing new places in the company of friends reafWrms bonds and linkages, and overall heightens the experience of a place. Many of the travel enthusiasts felt a particular closeness to the people with whom they had established friendships while travelling, whether the bond lasted only the length of the trip or was nurtured over many years. In contrast, most of the tourists I interviewed said that there were very few at home who were genuinely interested in hearing the details of their travels. In fact, they often found themselves with nobody to listen to their stories.12 Elaine thought it was “kind of tedious for our friends. They get the whole lead-up, [when] we conjure up every other trip that we’ve been on.” The consensus was that a cursory summary of a trip was all that people wanted to hear. More than one person had dealt with the limited interest of people (including family) at home by compiling small photo albums (Albert set a maximum of ten photographs) that gave a condensed overview of a particular trip. Many found these abbreviated narratives satiated most peoples’ interest. This limited interest contrasted with the enthusiasm shown by friends made on the road, who would happily read lengthy descriptions about the details of a particular trip. Only a few of those whom I interviewed said they had friends at home with a parallel love of travel. Most lacked friends who could be classed as what Albert called “good travellers,” someone who would take the time and effort to “really” see a place the way he and Sandra prided themselves on doing. Only one of their friends would endure the hardship of such “good travel” – using local transport, staying in budget hotels, going where fewer tourists go – as they loved to do. On the other hand, a few periodically travelled with friends from home. Sharing a travel experience created a unique bond between these people, but as I will discuss in Chapter 3, the success of the experience often hinged on whether they shared a common understanding of what the aesthetic of the trip should be. Judith, commenting on the second major trip that they took with another couple they had known for years, noted that their friends’ presence greatly enhanced her experiences in

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China. After a full day with their various ofWcial tour guides, she looked forward to sitting down together in the evening “to talk about things, to do our journals, to check with each other what we’d done, [because our schedule] was very, very tightly packed and being in another language which you didn’t know and couldn’t read, you did not have those mental triggers. And so, we had to sort of Wgure these things out together.” This togetherness established a form of intimacy between these two couples as they discussed and elaborated upon their uniquely shared experiences. This rehearsal of events contributes to the aesthetic value of the experience.13 The disastrous trip to Cuba that Monica and Lawrence took with friends from home was saved, Monica said, by being able to get “to know our friends: there was lots of time to yak with them.” They found little else to do at the resort where they stayed. The conversations about the shared misfortune of their experiences in Cuba extended their friendship outside of their daily lives at home. Life at home precludes, for most, the mindset and approach to life adopted while travelling. Knowing someone at home and knowing them as a fellow traveller intensiWes the understanding and insight shared by individuals. Such knowledge is fertile ground for an intimate relationship. For Monica and Lawrence, their experiences in Cuba also highlighted their requirement for complete freedom to construct their travel experiences according to their needs and desires. (This was a sentiment expressed by several of those whom I interviewed.) The destination, where to stay, and what to do there were all selected to satisfy a composite set of needs identiWed by both couples. Ironically, for Monica and Lawrence, although their experience afWrmed one set of connections to their friends, it also highlighted the intimate and nuanced understanding of what travel meant to them as a couple, as something that they could not share with others. They both agreed about feeling a closer connection to their friends following their Cuban trip, but they would not readily travel with others again. As I have suggested, friendships made on the road have the potential to foster a sense of intimacy. A distinctive characteristic of these relationships is that the people involved often come from different parts of the Western world. If they do see each other again following their initial meeting, it is often when one person travels to the home of the other. Thus at least one party is fully in that “eyes wide open” state characteristic of the tourist. Consequently these relationships are characterized in some measure by liminality. Intense, if short-lived, bonds are possible,

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grounded in Simmel’s “social ideal” or Turner’s “edenic” state. Prolonged association is precluded by the prescribed length of any meeting (one party is “only visiting”), and by the distance that separates their permanent homes. Such circumstances can magnify the strength of these friendships, fostering particularly fond memories and a sense of shared experience. They may also encourage tenuous assumptions about the depth of the friendship, which, in most cases, is never tested by prolonged, prosaic association. But none of this can deny the pleasure taken in and value gained from these associations, which was expressed by many. Friends made on the road implicitly demonstrated a shared interest in a world beyond their own. Those who were travelling independently outside the Western world showed a certain level of competency outside their own cultural milieu, demonstrating a spirit of adventure and exploration. Many travel friends often shared a similar list of places they had visited, things that they had seen, and observations they had made. Such linkages validated a shared love of and desire to travel. These friends undoubtedly supported the idea that such desires were reasonable, even important and noble. In the context of such friendships, people could be open about their dreams about the places, people, routes, and things they had yet to see and experience around the globe. The tourists could admit their vulnerability and mistakes in trying to function in varied cultural contexts; or on the contrary, they could share stories of how they acted in a culturally appropriate manner in a particular place based purely on their traveller’s savvy and intuition. Arranging to travel with people who shared similar interests fostered new friendships and afWrmed old ones. Samuel and Donna travelled to Israel with a group of fellow Christians, making the experience particularly meaningful. Some of those I spoke to chose to travel with particular tour companies, such as Explorer, WestCan Treks, or Adventure Travel, which attracted people of similar mindset desirous of a particular travel experience, one where luxury was not emphasized, physical activity such as hiking was central to the trip, and where tour leaders were knowledgeable about local culture and engaged in the spirit of adventure of the tourists. Such tours offered the likelihood that there would be some in the group with whom friendships could develop. Age, personality type, class, gender, nationality, language, direction of travel, and desire for companionship were just some of the other factors that could lead to either the development or the abandonment of this initial

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grounding for friendship. These people shared at some level philosophies, curiosities, and a spirit of adventure that led them to Wnd each other on their journeys – one could call this a sense of intimacy writ large.14 Many did not feel a need to extend these relationships beyond the immediate shared travel experience. It was, however, an added bonus if such Xedgling bonds of intimacy made on the road led to deeper, longlasting friendships that transcended the context of travel.

Meeting the Mythic Traveller None of the tourists with whom I spoke read many travel writers: at most, a few had read Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987). But written materials played a central role in their travels. National Geographic, Lonely Planet guides, Frommer’s guides, Rough Guides, the Globe and Mail travel pages, and the ledgers kept in hostels, on mountain summits, or atop pyramids all played a role in connecting the travel enthusiasts with those who had travelled before and those who might come in the future. Several I interviewed noted that the presence of National Geographic in their households as children, or their own subscriptions purchased as their children grew up, had fed their interest in other worlds, people, and places. Monica emphatically believed that one photograph taken by Lawrence in Venezuela “belonged in National Geographic.” To her, it showed the remoteness of the place and the innocence of the people that they had visited, as she said, “out in the boonies.” In some small way, their travels connected them to the adventurers whose stories and photographs Wlled the pages of the venerated magazine. The Lonely Planet series was the guidebook of choice for most of the tourists I spoke to, although some used Frommer’s or the Rough Guide, depending on where they were going and how they wished to travel. But all of the guidebooks required the reader get to know them; in academic terms, they had to learn to deconstruct them. Albert and Sandra talked of learning what a “good hotel” meant in the Lonely Planet series, which was something quite different from a “good hotel” in the Rough Guide. In the end, utilizing these books often meant developing a sense of personal relationship with their authors. Both the Lonely Planet books and the Rough Guides pepper their text with quotations from those who have previously used the books and provided feedback. These Wrstperson accounts further foster the sense that the reader is engaged in a

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conversation with others who have travelled the same routes. All readers and users are asked to continue to give their input into the text. Elaine spoke of another, much more informal, intimate, and completely unedited written communication that went on between travellers: The one thing that was kind of nice in a number of the countries we were travelling in on our larger trip was that often in places we were staying, they would have these large ledgers where people would just write. People would write all kinds of things, from talking about where they’d been and where they stayed and if they did any side trips, [to] a good guide and restaurants where they’d eat. In Malaysia and Indonesia we would often [be] at restaurants and backpackers’ places and there’d be two or three of these big things, and while you were having your meal, you would leaf through them and you’d take notes. Some of it was very funny, too. One young woman was dismissing a guy that she’d obviously ended a relationship with, suggesting that he had some terrible sexually transmitted [disease]. And then at the end she suggests that maybe she’s just being spiteful [laughter]. But do you want to take the chance?

The commentaries left in such ledgers take on a mythic quality. It is not really necessary to know who the authors are, or whether the story about the young man with the STD is true. These stories at their most basic level say, “I was here,” and whether from mischief, or a desire to share insider information, they make connections among fellow travellers. The writings in these ledgers – warnings about dangers to one’s health, or information about a place not to stay or an interesting side trip to take – establish a bond among those who are travelling the same route, those who have travelled it in the past, and those who will take it in the future. The fellow traveller who wrote these stories cannot remain a complete stranger to the reader, for these texts share a particular, if not personal, set of knowledge, known only to those who have travelled that route. These ledgers allow for a conversation between the real and the mythic travellers who pass the same way. Meanings are shared between them, and a connection is made: public in some regard, as these texts are there to be read by many, but also very private, as travellers bring to the dialogue their own situation, their own understanding of context, and their own experience of their journey. This private connection can be imagined across time, space, and other forms of difference. In some ways,

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these ledger writings connect all travellers of all times. And yet, despite the spectrum of boundaries that they cross, these connections take on an intimate quality in their brevity, nuance, and the eloquence of their mimetic character.

Other Forms of Intimacy: Affirming Connections For a few years Leslie has made several trips annually with a wide range of people including her husband, her mother, various relatives, and close friends. Generally she is away for a total of six to eight weeks per year. She is known to her friends and family as someone who was always game for an opportunity to go off on a holiday. In her conversations with me, she related stories of friends and family contacting her on short notice to suggest that they spontaneously take a trip (which she would plan) to such places as Florida, France, Italy, or the Caribbean. Highlights of her travel history included planning and sharing a trip with someone who had little hope of going on such an adventure again, being able to celebrate a special event in a friend’s life with a “dream trip,” helping another ease the pain of loss through travel, taking her father to Greece to fulWll his lifelong dream, and a cruise with her family down the Amazon. For her annual trips with her mother, she had particular “conditions” for their chosen destination. For example, she scrutinized such details as the slope of the beaches to ensure her elderly mother would be able to swim, and there had to be “nice” places to shop, good restaurants to eat in, and opportunities for them “to get dressed up in nice clothes and jewellery.” Her skills at researching these details to maximize the pleasure of these trips were a matter of pride to her, as these trips had become a focal point of her relationship with her mother. Indeed, when Leslie and I talked she was preparing a photographic collage of images from all the trips that they had taken, concentrating on photographs of the two of them, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their travels. Leslie’s identity was clearly tied up with her love, knowledge, and experience of travel planning, and her subsequent enthusiastic enjoyment of all of her trips, as well as the visual documentation of these experiences her photograph albums presented. Frances told me of the need she felt to travel with her elder sister to England, their mother’s homeland, following her mother’s death. Her sister had been born there but had never returned since leaving as a young girl, while she herself had never even visited. It was important to

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both of them that they visit the place their mother had grown up, to help with their acceptance of her death. The trip afWrmed their connection to their mother, as they came to better understand a place that she had known so well.

FOCUSING THE CONNECTION

Intimate Partners Much of the tourism literature suggests that, at its most sublime, travel fosters the ultimate experiences of romance and intimacy, which afWrms that such experiences are not generally imagined to be part of the mundane, everyday lives that people lead. And as Illouz (1997b, 137-41) discovered in her study of romantic love, many people felt that their most romantic moments occurred while they were travelling. Such statements indicate that the liminality of travel can intensify the emotional responses that individuals have to their travel experiences. These responses can manifest themselves in more intense expressions of anger and frustration if bags are lost, planes delayed, money stolen, or service rude, or in intensely positive emotional memories about all the good times had while away. Monica said the travels she and her husband Lawrence had taken create something really special, and that’s one of our bonds in our marriage, is that we both feel like we want to do this. We enjoy the same things, and it is a lifelong goal for us to do more and more and to enjoy more and more. I guess that’s one of the intimacies of our relationship. I’ve never really thought about it that way before, but it’s something that just he and I share, and that we can share with very few others. Because how do you tell your friends how wonderful it is to watch the sunrise over Tikal, unless they’ve been there? How can you tell them to hear a volcano rumbling, you know, and how loud it is, you know, unless they heard it?

The multisensory experience (a theme that I will return to in Chapter 3) of these shared intimate moments that Monica identiWes is coherent with the physiological state of arousal that the experiences of new places can stimulate. In the West, to be “in love” and sharing a sexual relationship implies feelings of desire, eroticism, passion, romance, and intimacy.

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When travelling, these qualities are further heightened, in part explaining why the honeymoon is Wrst and foremost intended to be a trip away from home. Feelings of arousal and a sense of bonding to one’s partner can be further intensiWed during travel by the separation and isolation sometimes experienced by travellers. They are separated from the regular distractions of daily life, and such liminality allows for more concentrated attention on each other. In addition, travellers can be isolated by language barriers, which can, in some cases, minimize the intrusion of others into the private experience of a couple vacationing in a place distant from home.15 Partners relive these moments of intimacy in many ways. At times Elaine and Benjamin share their travel experiences by looking at their photographs, admitting that the two of them are their most frequent audience. Serving as mnemonic aids, the pictures usually prompt one of them to ask, “Oh, do you remember this?” They admit that nobody else has the same desire to hear these stories, for Elaine says they “tend to go on about” their travels. Ultimately, only the two of them can truly appreciate the experience. In addition, the souvenirs Elaine and Benjamin collect are almost a physical manifestation of the nuances and the gestures that characterize intimacy. Mainly small items, these souvenirs are scattered around their house, on windowsills, on bookshelves, and in corners where they might suddenly catch the eye and prompt a Xood of memories of the place, the experience, or the sensory stimulation that surrounded their acquisition. As Elaine said, the souvenirs she bought were generally “something that’s very small so you can tuck it on a windowsill. Or you know that . . . it is sufWciently small they can tuck it away, and if they felt compelled, they can haul it out of a small drawer and put it up when I come by [laughter].” Like the ledger writings, their souvenirs are often mimetic of a moment or experience as remembered by Elaine and Benjamin. As such, they offer the eloquent and brief communications that Berlant (1998; see also Stewart 1993, 139-45) suggested were part of intimacy, as well as being part of the more mythic intimacy writ large mentioned earlier. Fred and Susan recorded some private shared moments in images that often emphasized the indulgence and decadence they periodically enjoyed during their travels. Several of their photograph albums included pictures of their hotel rooms, often showing one of them luxuriating in the bath with a glass of wine or Xowers on the tub. Susan exclaimed, “We are getting a reputation for this!” The discussion of these

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photographs was couched in the observation that “there’s been some interesting bathrooms” in the course of their travels, but these photographs signify the intimacy that these two share through travelling. Married for over forty years, they warmly discuss how lucky they were to have chosen the right lifelong partner, when they really knew little about each other at the time. Travel is important to both of them, but this love was not something they knew they shared when they married. Their photographs of hotel rooms, like the rooms themselves, are complex locations of both the private and the public. Hotel rooms are liminal spaces, as places for displaced people and temporary dwellings, and as such can be fertile ground for intimate expression. Monica described for me how she claimed these spaces as her temporary home (as I will discuss in Chapter 4). But they are also oddly public spaces, in that many different people spend time in them successively. Fred and Susan’s photographs, particularly those of the bathroom, which after the bed is the most intimate location in the room, make these public places private. Through their photographs, these spaces become Fred and Susan’s intimate places. By subsequently placing these photographs in the carefully constructed photo albums that tell the complete narrative of their trips, Fred and Susan expose this intimacy as an important part of their travel experience. Following Bakhtinian principles, this public expression of intimacy gives it a reality (see Dentith 1995), by engaging Fred, Susan, and anyone who views their albums in a dialogue about its existence. Again, as Berlant (1998) says, intimacy can have a public as well as a private dimension. The travel industry promotes particular destinations as places of romance, representations that are further supported in literature, poetry, and Wlm. Several of the travel enthusiasts selected and timed trips with such images in mind (see also Illouz 1997b, 88-91). Albert explained why their sixteen-year-old son, who had previously accompanied them on their extended trip to South America and Asia, would not be joining them on their planned trip to Paris and Italy. These places, to him and Sandra, “were just too romantic to have a sixteen year old in tow” – a statement that implies that romantic qualities were not associated with their understandings of South America and Asia. Certainly romance is not the image associated with these “exotic” places in the travel literature. Albert and Sandra planned their European trip for the spring, both to avoid the crowds of the summer and also because spring was the “right” time to see such places. This season has all the attendant symbolism of

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awakening, arousal, fecundity, and lushness, qualities that underline the romantic potential of Paris and Italy. The idea of sharing such romantic moments imbues the idea, never mind the experience, of this trip as something that will further nurture the intimate bonds that these two clearly share.

Locating Oneself In some ways there can be no more intimate connection than that with one’s self. The idea of “I” is predominant in Western being and discourse. Several of the tourists found that going away from home gave them opportunities for self-reXection, facilitating an exploration of who “I” really was. They could experience intimacy with themselves because many of the implicit codes, clues, and afWrmations in which they live, those things that habitually conWrm who and what they are, are suspended while away from home. As Robert eloquently said, travel provides the opportunity to, even accidentally, bump into parts of yourself that you didn’t know that you have. In a sense, it’s like having a limb go to sleep and then discovering it anew. By travelling to places I have an opportunity to discover parts of myself, because of the way that I respond to something foreign. Living in Toronto, which, of course, is where I was born and raised, I take too much of my surroundings for granted and as a result don’t feel or sense the abrasion or the contact with myself that I do in foreign places. By being for extended periods of time in cultures or places that are not native to me, I discover attitudes and assumptions that I carry and which would remain unknown to me in familiar surroundings. But, by being in a different place, by being in a foreign place, I have the opportunity to learn about myself in a way that is not only beneWcial but incredibly enjoyable. I think I’d like to do the same thing in prison. I’ve heard that [laughter] spending extended periods of time in solitary conWnement, one starts to encounter parts of oneself – and I think that probably the result is similar [when travelling], but it’s a much nicer way to do it.

Jennifer and Louise both identiWed the experience of travel as one of “soul searching.” Jennifer, when she Wrst travelled back to England, where she had been born, felt that she “had come full circle . . . I really

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felt . . . my roots when I was over there . . . I really did a lot of soul searching and trying to think about maybe I wasn’t supposed to be here” (that is, in Canada). Louise Wnds herself in this self-reXexive, introspective mode whenever she travels. Such self-exploration has always been part of her travels, which is why she prefers to travel alone: Even in the early days I tend[ed] to spend my time alone. Generally in some way communing with nature, but it doesn’t have to be somewhere [remote]. I can get very introspective just sitting on a street corner watching people go. I think it’s good for the soul searching and the introspection that it allows . . . But I don’t think it does that for everyone. Maybe [when I am away] I can do something any time I want. There’s not the pressure. I don’t like travelling with someone, [which is] why I hate tours. I would never go on one, I’ve got to be on my own. Just going to Newfoundland and renting a car and then climbing over a bunch of rocks and sitting by the edge of the ocean. Or going to a different bed and breakfast [or] sitting in a cemetery in the rain. I just love that. There are cemeteries around here. I could go sit in one in the rain, [laughter] I guess, but I don’t.

Leslie, as I mentioned previously, wants to ensure that her photo albums, which she has carefully constructed and displays in a special bookcase, “go to the old folks’ home” with her. Such statements indicate that her travels are very important to how she deWnes her personal identity; she expresses herself in her travel experiences. Married but with no children, Leslie called herself a “consummate underachiever” in reference to her pursuit of a career, although she was fortuitously able to retire comfortably before the age of Wfty. Leslie noted that throughout her work life she consciously developed skills that she could readily take to many work situations. She had no singular professional identity or company allegiance. Work provided for her basic needs, gave her the resources to travel, and until her retirement, occupied her time between her travels. She told me of challenging her former boss once when he balked at her taking her holidays at a particular time of the year. When she promptly threatened to quit in order to go away as she had planned (she felt certain that she could readily Wnd work elsewhere), he relented. Her travels, both in the past, and certainly now that she has retired, are clearly central to who she understands herself to be.

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Making Connections C O M M U N I CAT I N G / C O N N E C T I N G THROUGH DIFFERENCE

Louise tells a poignant story of frightening a young boy, Dapo, who lived in the small Nigerian village where she stayed for an extended time several years ago: He had never seen a white person before, and I was like a monster to him. I didn’t approach him [right away] because I realized that I scared him. But I was always hanging around the same place as he and his mom, grandmother, and uncle, so he got used to seeing me. Shola [Dapo’s sister] was Wve, and she wasn’t scared of me. She would come to me and we’d play, or maybe I had some gum or . . . I can’t even remember the exact situation, but it would just kind of be like adult and kid playing. I would bounce her on my knee or something. One day, after I’d been around for two or three days, Shola [and] Dapo [were] walking along. I remember saying, “Dapo, come here, Dapo.” And Shola went to Dapo. She took him by the hand, brought him up to me, then she took his hand and with his hand she caressed my arm. She said to him words to the effect of “See, Dapo, she won’t hurt you.” She was basically having him pet my arm, so to speak, to get used to me, and that was a really neat experience, winning him over.

To Louise, the connection she made with Dapo was genuine. She imagined herself transformed in his eyes from a “monster” to a human being, if a strange one. This transition was very real to her. As Simmel ([1910] 1971b, 139) says in the epigraph to this chapter, if sociability is not to be “empty and lying,” it must nourish itself “from a deep and true relation to reality.” The criticism made by many (see, for example, Errington and Gewertz 1989; Gewertz and Errington 1991; Boorstin 1973; Turner and Ash 1975) is that the tourist experience is far from any reality, and, using Simmel’s terms, should be seen as an “empty farce . . . proud of its woodenness.” I take exception to this position. Travellers connect. They enjoy sociable and intimate connections with humanity at large. They seek to make some link both with those who work in the tourist industry and with other local people. Intimate bonds are forged with fellow tourists (real and mythic), with travel companions, and with partners. They delve inside themselves, exploring with intensity who they really are.

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These social and intimate relationships have a signiWcant meaning to the tourists who engage in them. Some form of human connection was, therefore, one source of meaning that these tourists sought from their travels. This pursuit, no matter that it was assumed to be morally correct, does not release the tourists from facing the reality that true cross-cultural communication is complex and difWcult to achieve, often taking many years and signiWcant labour to accomplish. Given this complexity and the intrusiveness that any real effort to become fully conversant in another culture entails, it is probably impossible for a tourist to gain the attendant level of understanding. It could be argued that because of this level of intrusiveness, such connection is not even a desirable goal. In any encounter, be it touristic or not, is there not dignity in maintaining one’s privacy and a sense of one’s separate self and distinct community? Even though the tourists were generally aware of the limitations of their cross-cultural engagements, they did not experience them as Simmel’s “wooden farce,” but as genuine. However, what they saw as communication across all kinds of borders – of time, space, culture, age, gender, class, language – cannot be understood as anything other than their own culturally shaped understandings of what constitutes a social engagement. As Sahlins (1985, 147) has said, there is no such thing as “immaculate perception.” But the connections the tourists perceived can be broadly characterized by what Sennett wrote of the historical “public” relationships of American urban life. These were relationships “in which it [became] meaningful to join with other persons without the compulsion to know them [fully] as persons” (1978, 340). These relations do not mirror the trivial, power-stripping intimacy, an intimacy that reveals all and nothing at the same time, that Sennett says has a become an ideological tool in American public discourse. Rather they were relations imbued with an honest, often passionate, desire to make a connection across difference. This desire is not that which Sennett (1978) argues characterizes popular American ideas of intimacy – a discourse that suggests that the “choice of the correct breath mint” can prompt an intimate relationship (Berlant 1998). The connections that the travel enthusiasts told me about were also very different from those generated by breath mints. They were, in their own way, much more resonant with meaning. The connections made by these tourists, however, were Wrmly entangled in the power relations that characterize the contemporary postmodern world. Recognition of these embedded imbalances prompts questions

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about the perceived equal sharing that occurred across some of the connections the travel enthusiasts made with locals. What was the local person’s perception of the same encounter? As a rule, the answer to this question was never known. Yet no matter how blind some tourists were to the webs of power that surrounded their travel experiences, what they found meaningful was the sense that they had reached in some measure across differences of culture, age, class, time, and space to afWrm or strengthen a sense of a common humanity with those whom they met. Travel also afWrmed a sense of self, as well as invigorating relations with a partner. New connections were made with others who valued the travel experience. In revealing the essence of a common humanity, travel connected people with the mythic and the real. Such was the potential of the sociability and intimacy of travel. The intimate relations nurtured by travel take many years to develop, and do not automatically Xourish after one short holiday spent together. Regardless, in the travel stories I was told, the theme of connection, no matter what form it took, was central. It was obvious that such linkages and bonds were what, at least in part, imbued the touristic experience with meaning for the travel enthusiasts. MacCannell’s (1999) much-debated suggestion, that the tourist is seeking authenticity in the alienating modern world by visiting sites that are seen to embody something more real than his or her own world, has some validity if the emphasis is shifted from seeking the authentic in places one visits to seeking it in the sociability, perchance the intimacy, that one encounters while travelling. In seeing the desires of the tourists in this manner, I would say that the tourists with whom I spoke have journeyed beyond the modern world, and Wnd themselves in the postmodern world. To take but one example, the networks and bonds that exist between the fellow tourists exemplify a postmodern community. These people share many things in common, things that are sometimes experienced through a spontaneous, ephemeral connection, or in other contexts through gestures of intimacy, friendship, or support, which implies some idea of shared community. Yet this community resides in no one particular place, existing in many places simultaneously. It has some long-term members, and has many who quickly pass through the doors; yet all make important contributions to the idea of the connectedness of the community. As I will discuss in Chapter 5, if we live in a globalized world, the tourist experience can be seen as an individual’s quest to understand that world.

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What I have tried to suggest here is that these tourists in their travels anticipate, and desire, connection. As Albert said, “As ridiculous as it sounds, I try to blend in, which you cannot do, I know. I understand that. But at least I try not to stick out.” He desired some sense of being the same while knowing that he is different. Monica also noted that such difference can be comforting: “You know you are the outsider, and that’s kind of a nice feeling.” When Leslie found herself on a Sicilian truckers’ ferry instead of the regular passenger ship, she felt that she was treated better than she would have been at home, had she made the same mistake there. Difference, in its own way, allows for acceptance. It can be rendered harmless and non-threatening in the context of the tourist experience. As the comments of several of the married couples whom I interviewed indicated, a difference in place and space afWrmed the intimacies of their relationships. Displacement for the tourist, as Boym argued for the immigrant, allows for ambivalence, which sets the stage for new connections and opens up the potential for intimacy. It can strip away pretence and expose what is truly important. As such, touristic experiences have the potential to provide the framework for what Giddens (1991, 196) desires to see operating in both personal and political arenas, that is, “difference . . . becom[ing] a means of communication.” Perhaps it must happen Wrst at the personal level, to provide fodder for political change. Following Bakhtin (Dentith 1995), Wnding meaning through difference will emerge only in the dialogic nature of any communication. The travel enthusiasts imagined engagement in a dialogue with difference across all sorts of boundaries, and in the process, found meaning for themselves in the sociable, and often intimate, connections they made and reafWrmed. In Chapter 3, I will discuss how they aestheticize this difference.

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chapter 3

The Tourist Aesthetic To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

–lord byron, “The Isles of Greece”

T

ravel at its most primary level is about the movement of bodies through space (Desmond 1999). But as anyone who has travelled knows, that movement can tax one’s body. It is the traveller’s body that goes without sleep and knows the achiness and stiffness of such loss; it is the traveller’s body that is forced to sit cramped in airplane seats, breathing only stale air; it is the traveller’s body that is feasted on by bedbugs, leaving it to itch and swell painfully; and it is the traveller’s body that must absorb any number of new foods, eaten on the wrong schedule, and at times, must violently reject some of these in its struggle to nourish itself. But it was not these uncomfortable, often painful, bodily experiences that the tourists with whom I spoke highlighted. What they chose to highlight was quite the opposite: Fred and Susan mentioned their trip to India at the very beginning of their interview with me as one of their favourite travel experiences: fred: We went to Rajasthan in India. People that go to India don’t normally go to Rajasthan. susan: India was marvellous, like nothing we’d ever seen before. No matter how much you’ve seen of the world, I think India is unique. But towards the end of the four-hour interview, details of the experience came out: susan: Well, we were sick for practically the whole three weeks we were there. fred: It didn’t stop us from doing anything. We weren’t in the hospital. 92

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susan: Fred missed one afternoon tour in Jaipur; I missed one part of something another day, that’s all, but we kept going. It rotated through the whole group. Everybody was sick at least some of the time. Some were worse than others. Ours kept repeating. The visceral discomfort of being sick for almost three weeks is not the sensuous experience primarily remembered, even though Fred and Susan’s bodies clearly suffered much during the trip. That Rajasthan was perceived as a place visited by few tourists, and that the trip was unlike any they had ever experienced before, clouded their memories of their bouts of diarrhoea and nausea, allowing them to talk of the experience with enthusiasm, fondness, and excitement. It was these other aspects “that evoked a positive emotional response . . . associated with pleasure,” what Morphy (1992, 181) would call an “aesthetic response.” Eagleton (1990, 13) has suggested that “aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body,” but in what I am calling the “touristic aesthetic,” the discourse appears to turn a blind eye to the physical discomforts travellers (and their bodies) often endure, choosing to emphasize more positive emotional memories and responses. Other, more metaphorical, bodies also travel and must be considered as part of the discussion of a touristic aesthetic. Spokespeople for local communities who have argued against tourism development have likened the movement of the tourists’ collective body around the globe to rape (see Trask 1991-2, Kincaid 1988). Susan Sontag (1978) has argued that any photograph a tourist might take can clearly be read as such an act. The “penetration” by tourists into their selected destinations, and the questionable willingness of their “reception” by locals, infuse a gendered, even violent, character to the actions of the tourists’ collective body. The violence of such metaphors cannot simply be ignored in discussions of touristic travels. But as I noted in the last chapter, the tourists with whom I spoke wanted to Wnd a connection, to make a linkage, to be allowed intimate glances at the places and people they were visiting. This desire for access to private spaces, to them, was devoid of any hint of the violence of such metaphors. Such interpretations of the penetrative act of the tourists’ collective body can, in their innocence, also be seen to contain sensuous, if not erotic, notions. A trip to a selected destination can be understood in this metaphorical context as the much anticipated exploration of the body of a new lover. It is these pleasurable sensations that I am calling the touristic aesthetic. However, at the end of

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this chapter, and more fully in the Wnal chapter, I will further discuss the more troublesome interpretations that are equally embedded in any metaphoric actions of the tourists’ collective body. L O CAT I N G T H E A E S T H E T I C A N D T H E T R AV E L L E R

Travel, Adler (1989, 1367) says, “has been written about and consciously practised as an art for almost Wve centuries,” and clearly many of those to whom I spoke had perfected this art. But what does it mean to say that travel is an art form, a statement that I take to imply expression of aesthetic values? The Oxford English Dictionary states that aesthetic means something “received by the senses . . . or pertaining to an appreciation or criticism of the beautiful.” The word comes from the Greek aisthesis, which can be translated as “pertaining to sense perception.” Following the writings of eighteenth-century German writers such as Kant and Hegel, aesthetics came to be seen as the “a priori of all sensuous knowledge,” and beauty as the “supreme end of all sensuous knowledge” (Regan 1992, 5). Thus aestheticians since the eighteenth century have been searching for beauty, and in the Kantian tradition, this pursuit involves “cognitive appreciation, distantiation, and the controlled cultivation of pure taste” from a position of disinterestedness (Featherstone 1996, 275). Thus ultimately, aesthetics involves the “making of judgements,” (Porteous 1996, 21), an act that Huhn (1995) suggests is rooted in domination and violence (a point that I will return to below). Aesthetics is about “collective or intersubjective” preferences, which in the end can only be validated by subjective veriWcation (Porteous 1996, 21). For example, we may be told that sunrises from atop Haleakala, on the island of Maui, are some of the most spectacular in the world, but we can tell whether this is true only when we make the predawn journey to the summit of the dormant volcano and judge for ourselves. DeWning aesthetics is a complex task. Anthropologist Howard Morphy (1992, 181) admits that it is “easier to state the kind of things [aesthetics] is about than it is to provide a neat deWnition of what it is.” He simply acknowledges that aesthetics deals with those things that appeal to the sensations or prompt positive emotional feelings when encountered. Faubion (1998, xv) identiWes both the aesthetician’s “search for beauty,” and the idea of “felt experience” as embedded in the Greek term aisthesis. This experiential element coheres with Bourdieu’s (1984, 30-44)

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description of the enjoyment of the sensory, the visceral, vulgar delight in bodily sensation of the “popular classes.” This perspective clearly contrasts with the distantiation and disinterestedness of the Kantian tradition and its original orientation to an appreciation of art. Felt experience can be seen to include the same “voyeuristic attitude found in the stroller [or Xâneur] in the large cities whose senses are overstimulated by the Xood of new perspectives, impressions and sensations that Xow past him” (Featherstone 1996, 274).1 Or it can include the kind of aesthetic response that Morphy (1992, 181) contends “may arise out of . . . the simplicity of an idea, or the elegance of a solution to a problem.” Both of these postures, as the travel enthusiasts repeatedly told me, are part of the travel experience. Such an understanding of aesthetics incorporates the contemplative pleasures of immersion in what Bourdieu called the “sensory” and the “grotesque,” in contexts well beyond the “popular classes.” Featherstone (1996, 270), drawing on the work of Jameson and Baudrillard, suggests that seeing the contemporary world as one in which the “built-up, dense and seamless, all-encompassing extent of the production of images” effaces “the distinctions between reality and image” is a postmodern reality. Thus both the simple, mundane, everyday dimensions of life, and the grand, the magniWcent, and the sublime, can be experienced and seen as art. And ultimately, it does not matter if these things are experienced in one’s own world or observed about the Other in some place far from home. These ideas ground what I am calling the touristic aesthetic. The touristic aesthetic is situated in that which the tourist considers beautiful; that which gives sensuous, bodily pleasure and that which elicits positive emotional response; in something that the tourist sees from afar, as well as something in which she or he is immersed; in things grand and things small; in the concrete and the abstract. Rachel’s Wrst view of the Caribbean, and Jennifer’s amazement at commonplace sights in England, highlight what I mean by the touristic aesthetic. I will identify many other examples in what follows: rachel: Sometimes when I’m looking at the blue of the sky, that incredible blue of the Caribbean and the white beaches and the palm trees, it’s just, that Wrst moment, it’s just so beautiful that I don’t want to go home. It makes me want to cry because of the beauty of it. jennifer: I met a lady on the train who said to me, “Where are you

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from?” I told her. She said, “How do you like England?” I said, “Oh, it is so beautiful.” And she said, “What is beautiful about it?” I said, “Look out there.” You know what the gardens are like there. They are just fabulous. And then a fox ran across the Weld. I said, “Did you see the fox? Isn’t that great!” She was still kind of frowning at me when she got up and left. The travels of the tourists with whom I spoke each expressed a personal aesthetic sense, each somewhat different than the next, although this sense was grounded in a collective Western (if not Canadian) aesthetic (Howes 1991). Following Kant’s ideas of the “transcendental quality” of the aesthetic, Weiner (1996, 6) argues that aesthetics reXects “our sensible intuition,” something embedded in “prior cognitive schematism [that] makes stimuli recognizable.”2 Lakoff and Johnson (1980) see this “sensible intuition” or meaning as embodied in our physical movements. Thus sensuous pleasure can be seen to be triggered both by actions of the body and by its cognitive schemas, all of which are culturally speciWc. Such ideas ground the common adage that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and, as Morawski adds, in “the light in which the object is seen” – a statement that highlights the need to consider the particular experience and circumstance of the aesthetic response (Morphy 1992, 182). Travel as an aesthetic expression is both “worldmaking” and “selffashioning” (Adler 1989, 1368); it makes one’s world visible and yet allows individuals to transcend the conWnes of that world (Weiner 1996, 6-7). It thus “bestows meaning on the self and the social, natural, or metaphysical realities through which [tourists] move” (Adler 1989, 1368). Travel performances, following a cursory evaluation, have been canonized over time, each with its own aesthetic. Adler (1989, 1368) declares, for example, that formalists deny the importance of destination, modernists believe that there is nothing real left to see – a view that would have MacCannell’s tourists on a fruitless quest – and postmodernists suggest a playful posture, with a recognition of the social impact of the experience and development of the tourism industry. These broad categories are not my interest here, however, for in any one trip, tourists can deny the importance of where they actually went and express great pleasure in the journey that they experienced, or lament the loss of a place to mass tourism while enjoying some time out from the demands of travel at a beach resort in such a lost place, and still reXect thoughtfully on the

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impact of tourism development around the globe while insisting on the opportunity to indulge in the simple pleasure of a holiday in a place far from home. The individual experiences of tourists are much more complex than Adler’s broad aesthetic assumptions. Porteous (1996, 22), in his discussion of environmental aesthetics, identiWes three different types: sensory, formal, and symbolic. These parallel Hospers’s ideas of “thin sense (physical appearance, i.e., sensory and formal), and thick sense (expressive values or meaning) [that is, symbolic] of aesthetics” (as quoted in Porteous 1996, 22). Roberts (1990, 9) argues that junk Wction (deWned as the books that we never want to admit that we read, commonly treated with the same disdain as being a tourist) is read both for its “formal pleasures” including “variations in . . . textures and intricacies of design,” and for the information, advice, or intellectual stimulation that it offers. These writers agree that there are at least two categories of aesthetic experience: a more formal, purely sensory response that can be seen to correlate loosely with the traditional disinterested search for and appreciation of beauty; and a more engaged response, manifest through immersion in a particular time and space, a sense that is grounded in a search for meaning and intellectual stimulation. Ideas of immersion, distance, and disinterestedness, however, are also relative. Like tourists themselves, these ideas are in constant motion, always on a journey between two points. It is rare that tourists become truly immersed in a place they visit, as they are normally not in any one place long enough to achieve this. But a tourist who has been on the road for an extended time does become completely immersed in the posture of being a tourist. She or he is in an entrenched liminal state between home and away, potentially at times entering into that “peak experience” laden with sensuous pleasure that Csikszentmihalyi (1975) calls “Xow.” Distance depends on whether one is travelling in a place that one has some ancestral connection to (either imagined or real), or whether one regularly travels to that particular location. Similarly disinterestedness can depend on whether it is the Wrst or tenth time that one has seen the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, or the ruins at Tikal, or whether arrival at one of these places for the Wrst time is the fulWllment of a lifelong dream. In the remainder of this chapter, using the metaphor of the collective body of the tourist, I will discuss the touristic aesthetic as I came to understand its expression among those with whom I spoke. This aesthetic took many forms: at times it was associated with sensory and formal

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perceptions (the “thin sense”), at others it was deeply resonant of symbolic meanings (the “thick sense”). Some of the tourists found pleasure in the structure, which Hospers (1972, 42) calls the “form-in-the-large,” that underlay their travel experiences, and in their stories the classic devices of “framing, distancing and isolating” were evident (Adler 1989, 1383). Others, in contrast, found joy in the texture that Hospers (1972, 42) calls the “form-in-the-small” – the sensuous and symbolic value of their experiences. No one travel experience, of course, expressed only one of these, just as Roberts’s junk Wction readers took pleasure in multiple ways from the books that they read. Prosterman (1995, 12) discovered participants in country fairs in the midwestern United States conceptualized their experiences almost exclusively as ones of beauty and harmony, allowing themselves to imagine a world outside the farm closures and serious economic challenges to the future of their livelihood and lifestyle in which they were all immersed. The tourists imagined their experiences in the same manner, for as Porteous (1996, 21) argues, aesthetics, the experience of sensual pleasure, “is basic to human nature.” Similarly, Coote (1992, 269) has suggested that people, when they can, will “act in the world to maximize their aesthetic satisfaction.” THREE AESTHETIC PLEASURES

The tourists’ experiences included expressions of sensory, symbolic, and formal aesthetics. Multisensory bodily, almost visceral sensuousness, and the appreciation of symbolic meaning are conveyed along with more formal aesthetic values. It would be wrong, however, to assume that these values can be understood in complete isolation from one another. The examples of sensory aesthetic were myriad in the comments made by the tourists: jennifer: You had to be there to smell it! You had to be there to touch the prickles, and to get into it. That is something that I get very excited about. rachel: There [we were sleeping] under the stars. It was a lot of fun. I watched the stars go across . . . and there were some shooting stars . . . the occasional camel grunting and Jonathan snoring. michael: I’ll never forget when I arrived in India – the sights and the

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smells! And the sounds! Everything was saturation . . . I was just fascinated by that trip. The sounds, sights, textures, and smells had particular sensuous resonance for the tourists (Porteous 1996, 22). Touristic travels, according to Goodman, were “undertaken and executed with a primary concern for the meanings discovered, created, and communicated as [tourists] moved through geographical space” (as quoted in Adler 1989, 1368), and as I will discuss later in the chapter, through time. Symbolic aesthetics, which “involves the appreciation of the meanings” (Porteous 1996, 22) of places and experiences was vital to the appreciation of the touristic experience. As Robert and Annelise said of a Roman arena, “This was a fascinating place. We walked underneath it into the place where they kept the lions in cages. [It] contained spiritual echoes. You could feel the torment of the people who would have been there before they died . . . [It was] overwhelming.” It was their symbolic response that gave meaning to their imaginings of the torture suffered by those thrown to the lions. Fred and Susan took pleasure in the authentic responses that they had from locals while visiting Prague. While the substance of these engagements was not important to them, the feelings that they prompted gave them meaning. Susan said of these encounters that they were not the “artiWcial tourist sort of thing,” but rather, “everyone seemed pleased to have you there.” They felt welcomed. She summarized: “It was a happy trip. Everyone was smiling, not just coming on, ‘Give us your money’ . . . It was rather pleasant.” Those forms of appreciation, which I would class as symbolic, support what others have suggested elsewhere about tourists – that they are more than “collectors of gazes” (Abram, Waldren, and Macleod 1997, 8; see also Lofgren 1999). Donna, a self-described “church person,” concluded of her visit to Israel, which she and her husband planned for Wve years, “I will never be the same . . . I was changed.” Jackie commented similarly after her trip to southern Africa, “In some way I have changed for having seen it. In some way I am a different person. [It is] kind of like people can tell you what it’s like to have a baby, but you don’t know until you do it.” Jackie and Donna truly felt that these experiences touched their souls and resonated within them at a deeply symbolic level. Such resonance made the experiences profoundly meaningful to them. A formal aesthetics – that which “is more concerned with the appreciation

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of the shape, rhythms, complexities and sequences” (Porteous 1996, 22) – also gave value to the tourists’ experiences. As Monica said of her Wrst travel experience, I just could not believe how beautiful it was. I could not believe getting up there and Xying and seeing the big, white, puffy clouds. It just looked like cotton balls. I just thought, this is so beautiful. I think I’m in heaven, if this is what heaven is like. I could not imagine a more beautiful place on the earth than up in the skies. And these big, white, puffy, gorgeous clouds. I just thought that this was spectacular. I could not count how many Xights I have been on since. It is just a thrill sitting down on the aircraft, buckling up, having a sip of your drink, and staring out the window.

Michael often emphasized the formal compositional dimensions of scenes that he wanted to photograph during his travels. He showed me several photographs of doorways with people standing in them, a framing device that helped him “get a better picture,” bringing together colour and composition. As he said, “Another trick I like for a good picture is that I walk down the street and I say, ‘Oh, isn’t that a nice doorway. But, it would be more interesting if I had a person [in it].’ So, I . . . wait till somebody walks into [or] through the doorway.” For example, Michael talked about a photograph he took in Vietnam: “It’s a beautiful doorway. Nice yellow wall and bright colour, and I just thought, if I can just get somebody interesting walking by, it will make a nicer picture. I guess [with] this one I was just kind of lucky. I saw this old man with the nice beard coming down and I thought, well, is he going to stop? Is he going to go somewhere else? He just stopped [and I ended up] chatting to him.” Sunsets, sunrises, mountain vistas, desert vegetation, ‘local dress,’ and the colour and visual pleasure of marketplaces were other aesthetic moments that many of my tourists remembered. They often spoke of the play and the variation of colours, the clarity of the light, and other observations characteristic of a more formal appreciation of beauty. Sensuous, symbolic, and formal aesthetics played and replayed through much of their commentary. I found that these pleasurable sensations and positive emotional responses were expressed whether the tourists stood detached from the experience, or whether they felt themselves completely at one with it.

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S E PA R AT I O N A N D S E D U C T I O N

Separation: Keeping One’s Distance The tourists I interviewed, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, fully recognized that they were “grazing” when they visited a place. As Susan said, “At most we touch a place.” Judith put it this way: “We were just very passive, we just Xowed along and looked . . . We got impressions.” This gathering of impressions, this touching a place, happened on several scales. Harold took great pleasure in moving through “as many countries as I can . . . I’ve been to eighty-six I think at last count, and I’m running out of countries.” When I asked how much of these places he had seen, he described his travels in South America. “I took a month and went down the east coast, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, over to Chile, Peru, and then up the west coast. That was a bit of a mistake trying to do so much in a month. I’ve been back since to Ecuador and Venezuela, just for a day, while a cruise ship went in. I went to Colombia, but I only went to Cartagena for a week, but that was just a tourist spot. I’d like to get to Bolivia one of these days, but otherwise I think I’ve done South America.” Harold had no real desire to go back to these places, as there were still new places in the world he had never been. He was truly a Xâneur of a global magnitude. Others took pleasure from moving more slowly through smaller areas. Beth clearly enjoyed what she saw of northwestern Australia from the motorcoach window. Looking at her photographs from that trip she noted, I [went] to see the country. There’s never a dull moment on that scenery. It is constantly changing. The mountains and hills are not necessarily that high. I mean they call them ranges. They’re hills, they’re not really mountains. You Wnd that they are a different colour depending on where the sun is, sometimes they appear redder. The Australian light is fantastic; there are no two ways about it. Look at the colour mix in that. It literally changes all the time. Sometimes you have hills and rocks and sometimes you haven’t. There are Xowers and more Xowers: that’s a roadside stop and just look at all the bloom on that.

Similarly, Monica took pleasure in carefully examining the Irish landscape when she Xew over it as a child: “It was fantastic: forty shades of green. It is absolutely beautiful; it is like a patchwork quilt.” Many people varied the focus of each trip, depending on where they

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were going and their reasons for choosing that destination. For example, Bruce and Maria’s trip across northern Africa was undertaken for the sake of the journey, and Samuel and Donna travelled through the Panama Canal because Samuel, a civil engineer, wished to see how the canal worked. Other trips they took were focused more on their ultimate destinations, such as Bruce and Maria’s week in Prague and Samuel and Donna’s time in Venice. Both described important moments when they simply moved through these particular destinations, however, not unlike the Xâneur. Bruce said of their Wrst walk through Prague, “The sky was blue, the sun was shining, the warm heat – the city looked absolutely fantastic. It never looked again as wonderful as that Wrst day on our Wrst tour. I think that our tour comprised the whole city because we walked from 11 in the morning until 6 o’clock or something like that. We walked all over the place. It was so nice the Wrst time we saw this beautiful city. It was perfect.” Samuel described an afternoon in Venice: “We did a lot of walking there across the bridge and into the university area, not particularly to speciWc destinations but just because we enjoyed walking and looking. Up around the Rialto Bridge and up beyond that are some lovely areas, again for walking, looking, and feeling.” These descriptions convey a sense of pleasure in moving through these cities, rather than focused attention on any selected aspect of them. The sense of separation, or distance from a destination, as Samuel and Donna found out, is particularly heightened when on a cruise. They said of this type of travel in general, samuel: You don’t have a concept of distance. It’s like walking out of a room and going into the bedroom and sleeping. Wake up in the morning. Open the door and walk out into the room, but it’s a different room or a different picture. You don’t have a concept of distance or separation from the various places you were at. donna: Utterly fascinating. The journey, based on Samuel’s comments here, can be seen almost as a distraction from the destination. But seeing things from these distances can nurture an intense response. Such moments can be truly awe inspiring. Jackie and Damien went on safari in southern Africa after spending time in the more urban areas of Botswana. From the van early one morning, they had their “Wrst view of a lion. It was like mystery and awe and all the joys of the universe wrapped up. It was more amazing than

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dancing to African music. It was the most amazing [experience]. It was so different. [All] this in the morning light. They looked so healthy and they were so beautiful, it was just transcendental.” Earlier on that trip, Jackie had attended a local dance. The intense pleasure she felt as she danced long into the night to what seemed to her completely natural rhythms, as she reached what Csikszentmihalyi (1975) would call a state of “Xow,” was only later to be surpassed by things she saw while out in the African bush. The experience of seeing the lions at dawn – even from the distanced position of a van – embodied “all the joys of the universe.” Her comments make an important point that a detached, distanced posture does not necessarily have limited emotional resonance. As Jackie suggested of her Wrst view of a lion, such moments can be very intense, rendering Kant’s ideas of “cognitive appreciation” inadequate.

Separation: Taking Pleasure in the Remote The idea of separation took more than one form. Albert and Sandra, like many whom I spoke with, always wanted to be on the edge of the tourist wave. They wanted to get to places before others did, places that they imagined as remote from their world. As Sandra said, “The other thing is that we’re looking [for] places in the world that haven’t been ravaged by rampant tourism, so we’re looking at so-called travellers’ frontiers. And we’ve managed to somehow be abreast of the large waves before. They start opening places up where you get the large jumbo jets landing, where they’ve built the big airstrips to handle tourists and these all-inclusive clubs.” Michael chose to go on a hiking trip in Irian Jaya for the same reasons: “It was a very remote place . . . just because it is so isolated.” Gwen spoke of her sailing trips to the Grenadines: “I like it because it’s remote and it’s virtually unspoiled. There’s not a lot of tourists there. It’s not like going to a resort in the Barbados and staying in the same place for a week and eating with people that looked like other North Americans.” In a more modest way Beth, who regularly travels on organized tours, took great pleasure in the day she spent in a Fijian market, where “I was the only Caucasian for miles around.” When asked why it mattered that certain places were understood to be more remote than others, places where not many tourists went, or just relatively isolated from the Western world, the responses the tourists

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gave indicated that visiting such places gave them a certain degree of what Bourdieu calls “cultural capital.” The places provided the opportunity to have a real experience, in their perceived stepping out of the context of the tourist. Some of those I spoke to did travel to places where relatively few tourists went. Yet all these people either travelled with groups periodically, or went to places where some tourist infrastructure existed, even if, as Michael discovered in Irian Jaya, it was very minimal. On this adventure he still travelled under the auspices of a tour company, with only three other Western tourists. Remoteness, even in a relative way, from the world in which one lived and from large numbers of one’s own kind, however, remained as an ideal for some. Clearly these experiences were a source of real pleasure and meaning, a part of the process that Adler (1989) calls the “self-fashioning” of the tourist. Such senses of separation, whether it be from the moment and place through which they are moving, or from their own milieu, give the tourists a feeling of autonomy from their own world.

Seduction: “Flow,” More Real Than Real At the same time as feeling separation, a tourist can feel “truly autonomous and truly connected with the world” if he or she is in a state of “Xow,” a highly sensual and seductive state that gives pleasure and meaning to these experiences (Csikszentmihalyi 1975, 206). Elaine and Benjamin described the following experience they had shortly after their arrival in Kathmandu: benjamin: I remember a time, our Wrst big trip. We went to Nepal and India. We Xew to Delhi, spent a few hours there and then Xew to Kathmandu. We were a bit shell-shocked for a while, but on about the second day we were in Kathmandu, we started to relax and get into a groove. We were wandering about the back streets of Kathmandu, and we got into this open [area] in late afternoon and there was just all this activity, all these people just living life. elaine: Not interested in us. benjamin: It’s like we disappeared. elaine: It was wonderful. benjamin: I mean it was like a meditation. All of a sudden I could have stood there forever, just, in the scene. elaine: People were cutting hair.

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benjamin: So there are moments like that I really can remember. elaine: We have quite a number of ones like that where it was just somehow magical that you were invisible, but not in a way that was detached. You were just moving with the people, and no one found you particularly striking. You didn’t disrupt what was going on, but people were doing whatever it was they were doing, [whether] they were leading a cow, or cutting someone’s hair, or frying something in a wok, and that was really, really lovely. And there are probably moments in most of the countries we were in but that one was a very striking one. benjamin: That was a striking one. Up until a couple of hours before that, I was still in a state of stress, adjusting. There is something about a – particularly with a long trip – where [you get] into a bit of a groove and you get into the moment. In a similar manner they described a day in the High Atlas area of Morocco: elaine: I think both of us just have a wonderful, wonderful image of one day. It was a rest day from trekking. We’d gone for a very long walk over to quite a remote village with three or four other people and a bunch of dogs that had been following us all the way. They realized that when four of us set out that the gang must be leaving – so although people had set out in ones and twos that morning, somehow there wasn’t enough mass, but when four of us set out, these three dogs began to trail us. And then we met one of the single women, who was the Xoater, and then we met a couple of other women later on, so we ended up sitting on a hill under olive trees. benjamin: Under an olive tree on the side of the hill. elaine: There was this wonderful breeze and just . . . benjamin: Oh, that’s a memory that won’t go away. I don’t want it to. One of those to keep. elaine: It shouldn’t. The dogs lying under the tree, and . . . benjamin: Just sitting there chatting. elaine: It was really just such a lovely sense of having absolutely nothing you had to rush to. And nothing you had to do other than just sit there on this hill, enjoy the breeze and the shade, and watch the light change. And talk about – I can’t remember. I have no idea what we were talking about. But the conversation was very lively. And then

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setting off. Gradually we realized that some of us probably had to help make dinner, and we gradually set out and the dogs set out with us [laughter]. We were very much part of [the place]. Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “Xow,” which he describes as “the holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement . . . [when they merge] action and awareness” (1975, 36, 38) describes Benjamin and Elaine’s experiences in the back streets of Kathmandu and under the olive trees in Morocco. In states of “Xow,” actions become “automatic, effortless, yet a highly focused state of consciousness” is experienced (Csikszentmihalyi 1996, 110). In Kathmandu all other distractions disappeared as their extreme fatigue and jetlag dissolved from their consciousness. As Csikszentmihalyi explains, in a state of “Xow,” “paradoxically, the self expands through acts of self-forgetfulness” (1996, 113). Such experiences move into the realm of the spiritual. Elaine and Benjamin knew they were outsiders in both Kathmandu and Morocco, but at the same time they felt part of the place and the moment. They were not aware of time, a dimension about which I will have more to say later in this chapter; I doubt they could have told me how long they stood watching the scene in Kathmandu. Both of these experiences were mere interludes, brief moments in their travels. They accomplished nothing substantial in terms of satisfying material needs or facilitating their journey. But such moments were vital to their experience in both places, as they were enjoyed purely for their own sake, another characteristic of a “Xow” experience (see 111-13). Elaine and Benjamin were in a state that is “intrinsically rewarding . . . [providing] its own motivation,” and ultimately giving the participants much enjoyment and pleasure (Csikszentmihalyi 1975, 191). As Victor Turner says, to “Xow is to be as happy as a human can be” (1974, 89). Being in this state of connection with the moment also assumes that there is a balance between one’s skills and the challenges that one is positioning oneself to confront (see Csikszentmihalyi 1996, 111). Bruce and Maria had a true “Xow” experience, one that required they carefully balance their skills and the degree of challenge they were undertaking, when they drove across Algeria with their car and trailer. They had pulled their trailer around Europe for several years, but they had never taken it on roads as dangerous, isolated, and rugged as those in Algeria. When they crossed the Morocco-Algeria border, “We did not know what was ahead of us . . . Frank [another tourist who was to become a

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very close friend and who had just completed the same journey in a Land Rover] said, ‘Oh, you can make it. Take my advice.’ We did, we had lots of that, brainstorming about what to watch for. And I went through the guidebook. It was really an adventure. I guess that it was the biggest adventure of our lives, and it stretched on and on. The desert goes on and on.” On this trip in particular, Bruce and Maria exempliWed those who had learned “to Xow with conWdence” as they negotiated sandstorms, imagined the stories of the many burned-out vehicles that littered the road, and marvelled in their assumption that they were probably the only ones who had ever attempted this trip in a car pulling a trailer (Csikszentmihalyi 1975, 206). Being in, and of, the experience that one is having was a posture that many of the tourists I spoke to tried to adopt. As such they had to roll with the punches when the inevitable lost bags and robberies happened. Fred and Susan’s luggage went astray for over a week while they were visiting Kenya and Tanzania, having become mixed up with that of another tour company. They simply made do with what they had, buying a few essentials and borrowing from others on the tour. At the end of the trip their tour guide gave them “a lovely piece of fabric . . . Because, she said, ‘You were so good, you didn’t raise such an awful fuss.’ She said, ‘I know there are people who would have made life very, very unpleasant for me.’” Leslie told me of an incident that happened on her Wrst trip to Europe. We were robbed – in Marseilles – second day we were there. It was my Wrst time to Europe and I had taken all my silk things, my gold to wear at dinners. We were going to [dress up]. We came back to our car, and we had been robbed! [Our] suitcases had been stolen out of the car. So, [we went to the] police station. We did all the normal things, but in the end we were stuck in a pair of pants and a top. We went and bought some things and the bottom of a bathing suit – that’s all you need for there, right? . . . We had a choice. This was either going to ruin our vacation entirely. It could have been a big deal – tears, the works. Or, well, we still had ten days left, what are we going to do? We had a riot. It was just a riot. We had a great time!

Several tourists had been robbed in the course of their travels, and others talked of staying in hotels where they were sure the linens hadn’t been changed for weeks, where the cockroaches were so big they almost

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required a double bed for themselves, and where the rooms were so frigid due to overzealous air conditioning that there was ice in them despite blistering hot temperatures outside. They described places where the food was barely palatable, restaurants where the dishes were liberally stained with the residue of the last meal, and bathrooms that challenged even the most minimal standards of hygiene. Such stories were often related with much laughter, and probably enjoyed more in memory than in reality. Yet all of those I talked to always wanted to emphasize the positive aspects of the trips during which they encountered these nasty realities. There was always something good to be remembered about a trip, and such experiences never deterred them from further travelling, from planning their next trip. As Susan said, “We’ve had very few disasters, as far as there’s been disasters, but they always turned into wonderful experiences.” There seemed to be a tacit understanding that vociferous complaining, and demanding standards equivalent to the ones they knew at home, would negatively detach them from the moment. In the liminal state of travel, many of the travel enthusiasts seemed to become inoculated with resilience.3 This is not to say that they did not express frustration and admit little desire to return to the places where they encountered such conditions. But most of those that I talked to wanted to make the best of any situation. Remaining engaged with the experience, allowing themselves to be immersed in all of its good points and accepting its bad, enhanced the pleasure of what was good about the trip, and allowed for the full enjoyment to unfold. Such is the seductive nature of travel: nobody really wants to admit that things went wrong, because it is supposed to be an experience suffused with pleasure and, if desired, adventure. The shape of a trip, the attraction of its form, is one dimension that helps to seduce the tourist into remembering the good, and overlooking any slightly less-than-positive dimensions of the experience.

THE PLEASURE OF FORM

Form-in-the-Large: Structuring the Trip “The pleasures of form-in-the-large are the pleasures that structure provides – the overall organization that results from the interrelations of the basic elements of which [it] is composed” (Hospers as quoted in Roberts 1990, 118). Roberts applies these comments to literature, but they also apply to the travel experience. When I asked Linda what they would

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miss if they had to stop travelling, she replied, “The plotting and the planning, which is always interesting. It’s just such an extra dimension to life.” A well-planned trip thus had the potential to offer the same pleasure that Dryden, writing in the late seventeenth century, found in good design in prose: “If . . . the parts are managed so regularly, that the beauty of the whole be kept entire, and the variety become not a perplexed and confused mass of accidents, you will Wnd it inWnitely pleasing to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your way before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it” (as quoted in Roberts 1990, 119). A well-structured trip had the potential to satisfy all the previously imagined experiences and expectations that Linda and others wanted from a particular place or during a particular journey. Good planning always left space for serendipity to embellish the texture of the trip’s experiences: despite the fact that they planned each trip to its conclusion, the tourists never knew how it would actually unfold, what its impact would be, until they returned home again. But just as Roberts noted for readers of different genres of junk Wction, some tourists opted for an experience rooted in structure, some for one more loosely designed but rich in texture, and others strove for both (1990, 118).

Laying the Groundwork Jackie lamented following the advice of her friends on her trip to southern Africa. They had told her, “Don’t arrange everything, every minute of your trip ahead of time . . . You can do it here.” When she was unable to do some of the things that she wanted due to scheduling problems, she concluded that this had been “bad advice.” Overall her trip was successful, as much of it was carefully planned, particularly the personalized safari that she and Damien took. Arranging this had been a complex undertaking “with faxes Xying back and forth,” but she concurred with Michael’s admission that personally, he enjoyed planning. He emphasized, “I enjoy researching . . . thinking about places and knowing where I’m going. I just feel I end up with a better trip because I’ve orchestrated what I want to do.” Jackie, Michael, and Leslie admitted that they “invest a lot of time in” planning. Leslie felt that the time spent planning in the months before a trip extended the experience, allowing her to “savour” the anticipation for up to six months before she even left. Frances, who has planned trips that she has not even taken, and who like several I spoke to, keeps numerous Wles on places that she wants to go, admitted, “There have

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been times when planning a trip has almost saved my sanity. When I am under so much stress, I think, yes, but when school Wnishes I can do this. I love, I love planning a trip. I do a lot of the research myself. I get some information [from my travel agent] and I buy guides for where I am going . . . I read travel sections and articles on places I have always wanted to go.” For Monica, planning trips is an ongoing activity. Immediately upon returning from one trip, she will start to plan the next. She acknowledged that “everybody teases me. All of our friends say, ‘She’s not planning the next one already!’ It would be impossible to say how much time, thought, and reading I do in preparation for each and every trip regardless of where it is. Guidebooks go into the bathroom with me. Any time I have a spare minute, I’ve got my face buried in them.” Good research, absorbing the information available on the selected destination, weighing and evaluating it, allowed Judith and Henry to successfully plan their Australia and New Zealand trip. They planned, as Henry said, “to the most minute degree so we didn’t have to waste any time learning things, or Wnding out we were going the wrong way and having to backtrack. We wanted to see as much as possible in the time we had. [We] think that we were quite successful.” Planning gives structure to the myriad variables that shape the tourists’ experiences. Time available, cost, where one wants to go and why, where one feels secure in going, where one will stay, what type of transportation to use, and what one will do while there are just some of the factors that determine the structure of a trip. But the idea of what constitutes the destination is key to all of this. Is it a beach, an experience of luxury, a change of scene, an adventure, a visit to another culture, an experience of history, a geographical or architectural wonder, or a visit with family that lays the fundamental grounding for the trip? Clearly no one factor structures a trip, but rather a complex mixing of many things determines its Wnal form. It is also important to note the desire of some of those I spoke with to travel in a context of “anti-structure.” They did not plan thoroughly and carefully, and took great pleasure and satisfaction in letting serendipity and chance structure their travels. However, even the most anti-structured trip had some structure. Destinations had to be chosen, tickets bought, departure and return dates set, time from work or other responsibilities set aside, Wnances arranged, and so forth. But having arrived in the chosen destination, some individuals moved around solely

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in response to opportunity, or whim. Gwen’s family came to visit her during her solo eight-month trip to India. En route to Goa with them, she met a Canadian group travelling to a Tibetan refugee centre just outside the city, a place that she was really keen to see. In the end, she did not spend time with her family in Goa but went to the centre to join in the special celebrations scheduled for the Canadian group. She admitted that her husband was not too pleased with her determination to visit the centre, but in the end, he realized how much the visit meant to her. Harold emphasized that he did not like to tie himself down. He declared, “I don’t like to plan too much in advance, [preferring rather to] play it by ear . . . I spend a lot of time doing a lot of haphazard things.” Lack of planning sometimes prevents him from seeing and doing certain things, but it offers him the freedom to move from place to place as his desires, mood, and the weather dictate. He moved around Austria on one trip simply trying to stay ahead of the rain! Louise hastily and somewhat brazenly rearranged her scheduled return to work (she had already been off for three months on a professional development trip to Argentina) to Wt in a last-minute trip to Egypt, in response to a Christmas Day invitation from distant relatives (whom she had only just learned existed). By early January, she was in Cairo for a two-week stay. Such quick decisions were easy for Louise to adapt to, as she preferred when she travelled to “dive in not knowing anything and just really soak up the experience.” Harold, Gwen, and Louise tried to structure their trips as little as possible, relying on the texture of the experience to give it meaning. I will come back to a discussion of texture after outlining some of the major factors that structured the tourists’ travels.

Monumental/Mythic Attractivity The desire to visit famous monumental sites was a central determinant of the structure of many of the tourists’ travels. The temples at Luxor, the Aswan dam, the fertile strip of the Nile, the remains of Ephesus, Angel Falls in Venezuela, Notre Dame in Paris, theatre in the West End of London, Ayers Rock in Australia, and Machu Picchu in Peru were just some of the sites that the tourism literature would label “high attractivity” that had been the focus of the itineraries of several travel enthusiasts. The attractivity of these destinations lies in a complex melding of many factors in individual lives and experiences. To Donna, seeing the Nile river valley from the plane conWrmed images from her childhood. She said, “Flying into Luxor, I fell asleep on the plane, and I woke

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up just as we were coming in. As children, we saw the picture of the drawing of the geography of Egypt with the blue river and the green grass and then the desert. And it actually, from the air, looks like that.” Other monumental sites suggested the expanse, tenaciousness, and at the same time connectedness of the human experience, something that drew Rachel to Egypt. Rachel said the temples at Luxor were as she had imagined, “marvellous. It is amazing what remains after so many years. Unfortunately Romans, Christians, and many other groups have defaced the statues and walls . . . Yet in other places the pieces are whole and the original paint is still visible.” She went on to comment in her diaries on seeing the recently opened Temple of Nefertiti. She expressed a sense of privilege at the collapsing of centuries of time, with a childlike excitement about the potential of such a visit. She was able to gaze upon “the paintings which are still intact and . . . paint . . . fresh as the day it was Wrst applied.” A desire to see the physical wonders of the world drew others to particular locations. As Judith said of Angel Falls, “We were Xying along in a sort of a rift valley, about 1,500 [or] 2,000 feet below the top of this plateau and looking at the waterfall. Angel Falls are the world’s highest fall. And there is an absolutely sheer drop of 3,000 feet. Just straight down . . . It really is something that you have to see to believe it.” Albert was drawn by the romance and magic of places far away, of places full of stories and mystery, and by the fascination of the exotic. Such was his interest in visiting Tibet, Mongolia, Zanzibar, and Africa in general. As he said, “But, how can you not want to go to Zanzibar? Whew, the name alone is almost enough to get me there [laughter]. And all the stuff you’ve read about the – it’s romanticism – you always read about the old explorers and so on going through Africa, darkest Africa, and so on. There’s got to be a fascination. And, even at the lowest level, if you’ve watched Discovery Channel, how many things have you seen on antelopes? Or giraffes or . . . I wouldn’t mind seeing some of those things – I’d like to go.” Linda and Neil were adamant that what shaped their trips was an interest in history, something that Europe, in their eyes, overXowed with. As I have mentioned above, the desire to go to mythically remote places where not many other tourists go, or at least where large numbers of organized tours are not found, shaped the travels of several travel enthusiasts, as did the desire to keep going to new destinations. Guidebooks structured nearly everyone’s travels in some measure, but the true

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creative genius of the tourist came from taking what was read in these books and shaping it into their own individualized experience – a point that I will return to in Chapter 5. Even Gwen, though she did not want to plan her overall trip, admitted she “used the Lonely Planet [and would] do all the things that were highly recommended in that book.”

Organized Tours Organized tours, with their planned itineraries, give a clear structure to any trip. But how the tourists experienced the pleasures of the package tours is where individual creative planning came into play. One dominant desire among those who did travel in organized groups was that the groups be small. Most did not want to travel in the company of thirty to forty other bus passengers; less than twenty was most desirable, and Michael had travelled in a “group” as small as two. Careful planning was aimed at adding rewarding pre- and post-tour activities, extensions that were integral to the entire experience. Thorough research also aided the selection of the right tour company, that is, one whose standards coalesced with the tourists’ expectations of hotels and meals, included an itinerary that hit the important sites yet allowed for sufWcient free time, provided good guides (which Samuel and Donna deWned as individuals who really knew “their stuff,” could answer questions on a wide range of topics, were well spoken, and set good examples of culturally appropriate behaviours), expressed that it valued the custom of tourists (Beth was particularly impressed when their Australian coach captain threw water on the rocks to enhance the striations, “to give us a good picture . . . that’s the sort of trouble that they go to”), and overall offered “good value for money.” Samuel and Donna focused their initial research for their trip on selecting a tour company, and after collecting a series of brochures, used the analytical tool of a spreadsheet to make their decision. Several of those I interviewed used the same company each time they opted to go on an organized tour, so that they would know what to expect.

Pacing Embedded in the overall structuring of a trip were notions of its pacing. How much to see in the time that one had available in any particular place, what form of transportation to use, which determined how fast or slowly one would move about, how much ground to cover, the length of the overall trip, how long to spend doing any one activity, and the

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ability to adjust the level of activity and movement within the context of a trip were all factors that the tourists manipulated to pace their travel experiences. Fred and Susan talked of ending a hectic safari trip in East Africa with a week lying on a beach, simply to relax and recover from the rest of their busy sightseeing holiday. Michael told me how he mobilized his fellow travellers to successfully lobby for a change in the itinerary of a bus trip through Vietnam. The main reason that he did this was that he wanted to spend less time on the bus, and more time in leisurely walks around the local villages. Gwen Xew to various points within India because she felt that it allowed her to get to her destination quickly, rather than spending countless hours, if not days, moving through the country by train or bus. Elaine and Benjamin preferred to travel for extended periods of at least several weeks, if not months, while Michael and Harold both admitted that after a three-week stretch they grew “weary of travel.” Beth had no problem travelling on four-week bus tours, whereas Fred and Susan wanted to go on nothing organized that lasted more than ten days. Several of the tourists mentioned that they made a point of arriving anywhere from a few days to a full week ahead of the start of any organized tour they might be taking, to allow for, as Beth said, “the biological rhythms to get in order,” and to get some sense of the place and culture that they were visiting. During this time they could move at their own pace, depending on their energy level and personal interests. Even on guided tours, Beth was adamant that she “would not be rushed” and would straggle from the group when she did not want to keep up, even if it meant that she did not see all that was intended. Fred and Susan would, if possible, combine an organized tour with considerable time spent on their own, to allow them to ask the question each day, “Where will we go today?”

Fear Fear and uncertainty were structuring factors in several arenas of the travel experience, but as my comments below will indicate, these are not Wxed constructs, but rather variables, like the pace of a trip, that can be managed. Concern over health and hygiene implicitly structured trips. For example, when I remarked that Michael’s trip to Korea seemed like a great trip, he replied, “It was very good and I kept healthy,” signalling that he had some concerns over the health risk that travelling can present. Fear of conditions that might compromise their health stopped

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Samuel and Donna from travelling up the Nile on a local boat. Others chose certain hotels and tours on the assumption that they would provide healthy foods and drinking water. Leslie talked about getting over her fear of travelling alone as a young adult by launching herself on a Wve-day trip to Halifax, proving to herself that she could manage and enjoy the experience. Sandra was not anxious to go to Africa “because [it] is just politically so unstable . . . Diseases are rampant . . . It’s not a good time.” In their travels through south Asia she and Albert planned their itinerary to avoid certain countries during elections, because at these times things can be “nasty . . . You can get killed.” The places they did choose to go to raised other types of fears and concerns, but these were more manageable because they did not relate to broader social and political circumstances. Thus Sandra and Albert tested their fear of heights and their ability to deal with altitude sickness by hiking in the Andes before they committed to a trip to Tibet. Rachel, expressing her concerns about her Wrst trip to Africa, admitted to wanting “to pay a lot [for her safari trip] because I was a bit nervous about being alone.” She wanted to make sure “that they weren’t going to lose me.” These early experiences allowed her to overcome her fears of travelling alone in Africa, opened the door to new places for her to discover, and prompted her to make several repeat visits. Asia, however, was still somewhat intimidating to her. She commented, “Asia is still so mysterious and so . . . The language is something worrisome . . . At least when there’s a European language, I’ll have a sort of a sense of knowing at least, [but I wonder would] I be able to communicate.” In addition, Asia worried her “simply because of the great numbers of people there. I am afraid of being claustrophobic and just wanting to push people out of my way and rush into the air.” In the end, however, Rachel knew she would “get over this.” Fred and Susan talked of fellow tour members who were far more adventuresome than they were. They stayed close to their tour group in East Africa, as they “were afraid of picking up ringworm or all of these different horrible things,” while another member of the tour “was in the middle of it all making friends” with the locals. Frances admitted not taking a side trip to Egypt and Israel because of her concerns about terrorism in the region. Samuel and Donna stayed close to the major tourist areas of places they visited, as it was there that they felt comfortable moving around. McArthur (1999) has written of the “geography of fear”:

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how solo female tourists often feel safer away from home and how they use well-honed intuition to deal with unknown situations while travelling. Those I interviewed, despite their skills as travellers in a wide range of places and circumstances, acknowledged that they had threshold levels of fear and anxiety that they were not willing to cross. Staying within those limits allowed them to move around during their travels feeling “very safe.” They admitted that these feelings may at times have been naïve, but as they experienced no physical harm or emotional distress beyond that of missed connections or lost baggage in their travels, as a rule, they felt very secure. Even those who had been robbed seemed not overly distressed by the experience, as they had taken the proper precautions regarding their travellers cheques and valuables before leaving home, and simply carried on with their trip following such misadventures.

Money A dominant factor structuring the tourists’ travels was that of cost and availability of Wnancial resources. None of those I spoke to travelled without some cognizance of what their trips cost them Wnancially. Henry spent the equivalent of “four or Wve weeks full time” planning a trip to Australia and New Zealand, a trip that he determined was going to cost each couple about $20,000. As he said, his planning was not “a trivial exercise . . . [I] did a lot of pre-planning . . . [I] costed it out with a high degree of precision” to ensure that they saw what they wanted to, but did not spend more than they could afford. In the end, the eleven-week trip cost about $24,000. Having adequate Wnancial resources allowed the tourists to fulWll their desire to travel. But many of them maintained that they were not in any way wealthy, proudly claiming that one did not have to be to travel regularly. One just had to be careful, willing to put in the effort to Wgure how costs could be cut, and know one’s priorities in terms of accommodations, food, and activities. Several mentioned using Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day on their Wrst trips to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, a guide which set the precedent that it was possible to travel and not spend excessively. Some minimized their daily living expenses at home, driving older model cars or not even owning a car, opting not to buy a cottage or other recreational property, or not buying a house but rather renting a small apartment. Other ways people maximized their Wnancial resources for travel was to use frequent Xyer points or Air Miles whenever possible to cover the costs of their airfare. More than one tourist, however, acknowledged borrowing money to

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Wnance a particular trip seen as “the trip of a lifetime.” For example, Jennifer borrowed so she could take her son to New Zealand when he was the age that she was when she immigrated from there to Canada. Some mentioned that they did not start to travel until their “kids and mortgages” were gone. Albert and Sandra noted that money determined how, but not whether, they travelled for several weeks each year. They recognized that a group tour would make it possible for them to go to Mongolia and Tibet, for example, something that could have been prohibitively expensive and much more difWcult to organize on their own, even though that was the way they would ideally like to have made the trip. Limited resources led travellers to prioritize their spending. Many felt privileged simply getting to a particular destination, and economized on food and meals, if necessary, once there. Others would stay in very basic accommodation, yet spend money on good food. Some, in contrast, felt good accommodation was essential to maximize the pleasures of their experiences, securing stays in Wve-star hotels through careful research, last-minute deals, good negotiating skills, or Xexible scheduling of their holidays. Some shopped around until they found a travel agent who could get them where they wanted to go, staying in the type of accommodation they wanted, for prices they could afford. Securing such bargains gave the tourists great pleasure. Gwen described the place that she stayed in Goa: “I stayed in this huge house right on the beach, just a beautiful place. I had this whole Xoor to myself with a beautiful balcony, overlooking the ocean. It was $10 a day, if you can imagine, and that included supper. It was like being in heaven.” Monica and Lawrence recognized that they had to spend a certain amount of money to get the kind of experience that they wanted. They economized on the package deal for their trip to Cuba, however, as it was all that their travelling companions could afford. In the end, all grew weary of the surly service, the limited opportunities to do things, the poor food, and the deteriorating facilities of the resort. For their next trip they planned to pay over a certain threshold in the hope of avoiding such disappointments. Some travellers kept detailed records of their expenses, while others made no such effort. Some admitted that they had once done that, but such things no longer mattered to them. Most of those I spoke with willingly spent 8 to 20 percent of their annual income on their travels. All made it a priority in their Wnancial planning. Leslie remembered that the only thing she insisted on in the management of the Wnances in her

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marriage many years ago was that there be $2,000 annually set aside for travel. How the rest was spent mattered very little to her.

Restructuring Structure When the tourists returned home, they had a few souvenirs, an array of photographs, slides, or videos, a smaller bank balance (at least for a time), and ideally, a lot of memories. Most of the tourists to whom I spoke collected relatively few souvenirs, but almost all took photographs, and one or two shot videos (most of which were unedited purely due to the time and effort that it took to do this). Some had once taken slides, but had stopped because the difWculty of viewing slides meant that they rarely looked at them. I have mentioned previously that some tourists constructed elaborate scrapbooks with photographs, written commentaries, published articles, and small ephemeral memorabilia (e.g., ticket stubs, matchbooks, business cards, pressed Xowers). Some of these albums followed the chronological structure of the trips. These albums reXected a concerted effort to document as many details and nuances of the trip as possible, and each trip deserved a separate album. Two people with whom I spoke simply integrated the images of their trips into the larger narrative of their lives. Robert, a professional photographer, created collages of his family’s life annually, inserting pictures from their travels along with those of birthdays, Christmas, visits of friends, and other images. Olivia cropped her images and combined aesthetically pleasing photos, many from a range of different locations. She enjoyed this creative process of rearranging her travels. Albert, Elaine, Harold, and others compiled abbreviated albums with as few as ten to a maximum of a hundred selected images of any particular trip for their friends to view. Most often these condensed versions followed the narrative structure of the trip as it was experienced. Other albums, however, completely ignored chronology or geography in favour of other underlying themes. One was a focus solely on people, either seen or travelled with. Michael showed me albums of what he called his “masterpieces,” his favourite photographs from the many trips that he had taken. Images of people predominated in this collection, in particular images of women and children, whom he admitted he found easier to photograph than men. These images were by and large aesthetically pleasing photographs to him, rather than efforts to suggest his personal travel history or the narrative of any one trip that he had taken. Other structuring themes for albums were motifs pertinent to the places visited,

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including markets, people, architecture, fauna, Xora, or landscapes seen on a particular trip. These albums almost completely rewrote the original narrative structure of the trips, as they took the images completely out of chronological order and geographical sequence. Images that set the context for these selected motifs were often randomly placed, or Wled in an ad hoc manner at the back of the album. Interestingly, a few of those who carefully planned their trips before departure had the most random, if not chaotic, organization (or one could say disorganization) of their photographs. Less surprisingly, some of those who derived pleasure from trying to be completely spontaneous in their travels, and minimized any efforts to structure their trips rigidly, did not organize any structured narrative with their photographs. They were often simply stored in loosely organized boxes or envelopes, with no annotation or dates added to the images. Thus structure, no matter what aesthetic value it has at one level, is clearly mutable. It has the potential to be reconWgured, if not reborn, into new forms from which new pleasures can be wrung, be it a different form of order or simply a pleasing disorder.

Form-in-the-Small When speaking of the “form-in-the-small,” Hospers (1972, 42) refers to the “sensuous values” of art including texture, colour, and tone. His ideas can be extrapolated to the travel experience by deWning “form-in-thesmall” to include detail, nuance, and intensity. The details of the travel experience – what the accommodations were like, which moments were particularly special, what personalized the experience of an organized tour – are just some aspects of the form-in-the-small that add sensuous pleasure to a trip. The subtle, understated, nuanced moments of travel experiences, and the intensity of the emotional and visceral response to them, gave travel the kind of sensuous value that Hospers attributes to texture, colour, and tone in art. The tourists took pleasure from both the form-in-the-large and form-in-the-small of their trips, but each found their own balance of these dimensions in their sensuous appreciation of the experience.

Details visual What we see, taste, smell, hear, and feel in the world around us gives us much pleasure. Our sensory responses, which Howes (1991) has

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argued are culturally determined, deWne in large measure how we come to know the world. The visual is the dominant sense of Western culture. It privileges a formal aesthetic but cannot be seen to stand separate from sensuous and symbolic aesthetics Consequently, and if tourism is the “organised bombardment of the senses” (Rojek and Urry 1997, 6; cf. Kracauer 1995, 65-73), then the tourist has to be “more than a collector of [visual] gazes” (Abram, Waldren, and Macleod 1997, 8). Regardless, as the stories quoted so far have indicated, the visual was clearly very important to the tourists. Beth was amazed by the Australian light, by the huge variety of shape and colour in the Xowers, and by the changing scenery; Rachel noted the sight of the Nile River under a full moon, where it appeared to be a “dark, dark, ribbon, [which] was beautiful”; Michael was often startled by the beauty of the architecture in Korea; Elaine lamented that “her eyes could not take pictures” of the visual panoply in the evening light in the back streets of a small village in Morocco, noting that the vivid colours drew you to “look at the rest of the environment”; Jennifer startled the calm of an English restaurant by exuberantly exclaiming about the colour of the roses climbing outside the window in the ladies toilet; Judith could not imagine how the Chinese did not continually crash in the “hordes of bicycles” that she saw clogging the streets; Susan recoiled at the “cockroaches and unnameables [that] I saw crawling around” their hotel room in northern China. Leslie remembers Versailles, particularly the chandeliers, as being “overwhelmingly fabulous . . . very rich, ornate, opulent”; Gwen treasured her “Wrst vision” of Mt. Everest; Olivia remembered the sunrise seen from atop the mountain she hiked up in Indonesia; Albert expounded on the attention to aesthetic detail that the Balinese integrate into the physical world around them – the Xowers, the basket weaving, carvings; Linda unsuccessfully searched all over Australia to see a duck-billed platypus, but marvelled at the other diverse Xora and fauna that she and Neil did see; Fred’s memories of Prague centred on the dinner he and Susan had on their last night, sitting outdoors at a restaurant “on the edge of the river, with the castle hanging over top of us. It was all Xoodlit. The river was rippling away beside us. We were sitting there drinking our wine, having a lovely time.” Fred’s memory of this dinner in Prague shows that it is impossible to completely isolate the response of one sense to the exclusion of the others. Fred and Susan could see the river rippling, but they could probably also hear it. They could appreciate all at once the taste, bouquet,

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and colour of the wine that they drank. Taste, after sight, was what the tourists frequently remembered about their experiences, followed by smell and sound, and lastly, touch, the one sense rarely mentioned among the pleasures of the travel experiences. taste Eating is a truly sensuous experience. The complexities of this act can not always be articulated, as it involves so many of our senses. The response to the act of eating and the taste of what one eats, and how this is heightened in a foreign place, is nowhere expressed more seductively than in Italo Calvino’s short story “Under the Jaguar Sun” (1986).4 The couple in the story come to know themselves and Mexico through the foods they eat there, and the connections established between them in the sharing and devouring of such foods. Several of those I interviewed could imagine themselves similarly engaged with a place through its food while travelling. We can know taste only through the sensuous act of eating and drinking, activities that are integral to everyday experience. Taste sensations are powerful mnemonic aids. In some cases for the travel enthusiasts tastes were metonyms for an entire trip. They were a concrete afWrmation that one was far from home. Familiar food and drink taste somehow different when one is travelling5 and unimaginable things are considered edible; ingesting them often stimulates new and tantalizing taste sensations. Bruce noted that at home, “You cannot see, eat, or smell what you see, eat, or smell abroad.” This is particularly true now in relation to the senses of taste and smell, which cannot be transmitted through television, the Internet, or virtual reality experiences. Sights and sounds can be more believably reproduced through technology, but taste and smell are too complex, dynamic, and nuanced to be successfully transcribed. Only the individual physical body can taste and smell, and each body does this in its own particular way. Buying local foods, and the context of those purchases, allowed Bruce a Xeeting entrée into local culture; savouring the Xavour of these foods intensiWed his sense of connection. He described a photograph taken on a trip through Morocco and Algeria: “This is [Maria] buying bread from the local, hole-in-the-wall bakery. You can see where the smoke has been coming out. We love that type of thing. [We like] shopping there because the [locals] do. None of the Europeans would buy there. It’s a delicious bread, it’s like a huge, thick pizza crust.” Elaine and Benjamin talked also about their experience of food across many trips:

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benjamin: In Thailand [the food] was wonderful. And in Singapore – that was one of the nicest parts of Singapore, just the food. elaine: [Prepared food in] Indonesia wasn’t that interesting. benjamin: But the fruit there was familiar, but it was so much better. The pineapple in Indonesia was to die for! And we’d be out trekking, and the guy would just take out a pineapple, chop it up, and you’d eat it and it would be like nothing you’d ever eaten before. elaine: Well, in Morocco, the oranges . . . benjamin: Mmm-hmm. elaine: . . . which were magniWcent, as were the olives. And, just things that you wouldn’t necessarily enjoy at home . . . And just realizing that it was a fruit that was in season or a vegetable that was in season and was just wonderful. In India, the lime sodas were . . . benjamin: Mmm-hmm. elaine: . . . a quarter or half an inch of lime and then soda. It was so hot and I would just virtually kill for that. benjamin: Initially, when we saw it . . . They made this stuff, it wasn’t like tea. God, why would you do that? Both us drink tea without milk or sugar – just tea. And to see them boil it up in the pan, the leaves and the milk and the sugar . . . But then, on the train rides, early in the morning, somebody’s passing these clay cups through the [train] window . . . elaine: That deteriorate in your hand. benjamin: And you have to drink it quickly or it melts . . . You got really quite attuned to it. It was quite a nice drink. elaine: But what was interesting again in different countries, I found that we would move from saying, “Oh, get a grip, that’s not what’s going to be satisfying to me,” to very quickly realizing that in India, chai was very, very satisfying, in Turkey apple tea was incredibly satisfying, in Morocco, [so was] mint tea [even though] they put about a pound of sugar in it . . . You have an insulin reaction! benjamin: That’s right. elaine: But it somehow goes with the climate. It is indeed really refreshing, exactly the thing you’ve been wanting. You bring it back here and somehow it doesn’t work. benjamin: It doesn’t work. elaine: I think some of it must have to do with the climate as well and what’s happening with your body.

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Trying different foods, Elaine said, “was one of the things that . . . we’ve enjoyed as much as anything in travelling . . . It has expanded our boundaries.” Food allowed them to get closer to new places. Furthermore the taste of food constructs a deWnite sense of place that is not portable or transferable, as Robert found with the luscious fruits, vegetables, and wines of southern France, “the quality of which puts even produce from the Niagara Escarpment to shame.” Similarly Jennifer wanted her son’s Wrst meal in New Zealand to be lamb, as it symbolized her childhood memories of that place (he, however, wanted to stop at the Wrst McDonald’s that they saw). To the well-travelled tourist nuanced differences in taste can also Xag the subtle differences between seemingly related cultures. Monica and Lawrence bought hot sauces as souvenirs, both for their own consumption and to give away to friends. All hot sauces are hot to the taste, needless to say, but what constitutes that spicy taste varies, and these differences require some sophistication to appreciate. As Monica explained, “All of these hot sauces come from different types of peppers from different spots.” Their exploration of these subtle differences can be read as a metaphor for Monica and Lawrence’s exploration of the details of cultural difference around Spanish-speaking Central and South America. The new, unusual, or pleasing tastes of food were further symbolic of the adventure, thrill, and ultimate pleasure of the touristic experience. Judith spoke of eating kangaroo meat in Australia, noting to her amazement that it was pretty good. Richard remembered the crunch of “limecoloured ants” in Taiwan. Albert and Sandra used Mongolian yak meat in the chili they made for their fellow campers, and despite the devastating impact of the beans on their fellow tour members’ digestive systems, it “tasted great.” An abundance of good-quality food on cruises, organized tours, or in bed and breakfasts symbolized the indulgent pleasures of the travel experience. Susan spoke of the “breakfast banquet” that they were served in a small town in the Czech Republic: “We had everything from sweet buns to all kinds of different breads and toast to boiled eggs . . . along with cereals, muesli, yoghourts, fruits, all kinds of coffee and tea.” Samuel and Donna noted the “astronomical amounts” of delicious food on the good cruises that they had taken; on those that had been problematic in other ways, the “food was also bad.” Fred and Susan associated “bad food” with India as they were sick for most of the trip,

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but unlike the enthusiasm that bracketed all comments about good food, bad food was not given much prominence in their narratives. smells and sounds and the absence of touch “I’ll never forget when I arrived in India. The sights and the smells! And the sounds and everything, just saturation,” was how Michael began describing his trip to India. Others had pleasurable memories of spice markets – the aroma of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger that hung in the air – smells especially noted in Islamic countries. Many of the tourists noted India to be either a place of either “beautiful smells” or, in contrast, “very bad ones.” Morocco was remembered by Elaine and Benjamin for the aroma of orange groves and bay leaves. Jennifer remembered intensely that “Xowers in England actually smell.” Others, while curling up their noses, conjured up memories of the bad smells of the Venetian canals, or of Barbadian money, or of Chinese toilets. Others remembered particular smells, but confessed that they did not know what they were derived from. As Louise said, “Africa has a smell, and I can smell that . . . It’s not very often that I do, but it’s real,” but she had no idea of the origin of this distinctive odour. The regular call to prayer so pervasive in Islamic countries, the blaring of videos on buses in Turkey, the din of trafWc, street music, and masses of people in India were common auditory memories. Rachel talked of the “symphony of horns” of the Cairo trafWc, which began at Wve every morning. Bruce remembered the music in a Moscow hotel where they had dinner: “It was so loud, they did bang, bang, bang, the music away, in the big cavernous marble hall, dining room.” Louise mentioned the beating of the drum that haunted so many of her nights in the small community she visited in Nigeria. Olivia noted the extreme silence and stillness, the absence of sound, that she experienced on an island off the coast of the former Yugoslavia. Everything there had been destroyed by war. She remembers the air being heavy with the smell of lovage, hanging there “very muggy,” even in the midday sun, which somehow ampliWed the silence. Those who travelled almost exclusively in Europe, Australia, or New Zealand commented little on the sounds or smells that they remembered, which they concluded were “very much like here.” But Judith did note of a group of Maori singers she heard in New Zealand, “I didn’t expect them to sing so beautifully. That struck me as a very forceful part of their culture. It was a kind of singing that I could relate to as a Western

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person. It’s got melody and rhythm. It didn’t seem foreign at all. It was just beautiful. Very melodious, I loved it.” Comparing Maori music to that with which she was more familiar allowed her to frame what she heard as music, as she understood the term. It allowed her to make sense on her terms of the ever-present Otherness that hovers outside the world of the tourist. Such comparison allowed her to “aurally gaze” upon the Maori. Those I spoke with mentioned the sensuous pleasures of touch much less often. Maria spoke of a wonderful New Year’s spent camping in Morocco “drinking French champagne, and being hugged and kissed by everybody else in the camp who came in the rounds to say, ‘Have a happy New Year!’ while the palm trees were swaying in the moonlight. After that, there are no New Years anymore.” The champagne and the festivity may have aided the willingness of these relative strangers to “hug and kiss,” as such bodily encounters were not frequently mentioned by the tourists. Jennifer responded to Xowers growing in her aunt’s English garden by “wanting to lie down in them!” She wanted complete immersion in what she imagined would be the tactile sensation of the visual and aural magniWcence of English gardens. Some travellers chose to stay in good hotels to ensure that they had such pleasures as a comfortable bed and air conditioning. As Beth said, at the end of a day of travelling, she “wanted [her] hot shower” to refresh herself. Leslie indulged in another form of bodily pleasure by seeking out spas and beauty treatments in her travels. One of her favourites was in Ireland: the “seaweed bath, I thought that I was going to die and go to heaven. It was just wonderful, just wonderful . . . It [felt like] sitting in loose Jell-O. It is to die for, it is wonderful for your body.” Clearly many who travelled on crowded buses and trains felt the sensation of touch as they were pressed Xesh to Xesh with many others. Such memories, however, are rarely pleasant. Elaine reXected on becoming very aware of your difference. It made it not very nice [learning] to give away our need for space. We’d be sitting with our elbows out [on a train] when we were in India. We’d be complaining bitterly about the fact that we’d bought tickets for those seats and then they’d let on Wfty or sixty other people, which meant that your seats really weren’t that comfortable because people were kind of leaning into you with their luggage. They were sort of trying to squeeze into your seat. But by the time we got to Indonesia the bus would pull up and then we’d

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hang out and say it’s too full. And we’d wait and then often about Wve or six other people would get off, and everybody would shift around and then more people would get on. There everybody was very good natured about it, so it made you feel like you weren’t a very gracious person.

Stepping outside Western codes of conduct regarding human touch and ideas of personal space was difWcult. The invasion of parameters of personal space so implicitly understood by Canadians, yet so foreign to many in the rest of the world, was the one thing that several people noted they found hard to accept in their travels. Many found people reaching out to touch them disquieting. Touch, which Western discourse associates with intimacy, eroticism, sexuality, or violence, is thus not a sensation that we talk about as openly as sight, smell, sound, or taste. The tourists generally downplayed their experiences of touch as a pleasing part of their travel experience. As Elaine said, it more often made them confront their cultural biases in ways that they found not very Xattering, and often somewhat troublesome. additional details Michael, along with many others, often mentioned the character and quality of the hotel rooms in which he stayed. The basics of an acceptable hotel room required it be clean, have a comfortable bed and simple basic furniture, and ideally have its own bathroom. A television or a phone in the room were not necessary. Elaine and Benjamin, whose needs for living accommodation paralleled Michael’s, were pleased to learn that they could “sleep on a roof [one] night . . . without being out of sorts the next day” – a circumstance that they found themselves in when the hotel was overbooked one night on their tour through Morocco. Fred and Susan talked of periodically “splashing out” from the fairly basic hotels where they normally stayed to indulge in more luxurious accommodations. One such “splurge” in Bangkok found them staying in a lovely hotel where every night there “was an orchid on your pillow . . . Everywhere you went there were orchids, even your drinks were served with orchids.” Special travel moments came in many forms. They were embedded for some in the simplest small events and occurrences; for others they were in the more encompassing dimensions of their travels. On a cruise to Greece, Leslie enjoyed listening every day to the announcements of the activities available on the ship, such as when the lectures would be,

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when the shore excursions were planned, and crucially, “when the fresh ice cream would be served.” Such things reminded her of the indulgence of a cruise, a time when the things that would schedule her daily routine were those designed only to give her enjoyment or satisfy her personal indulgences. She and her parents took great pleasure in dressing up for dinner every night, getting a chance to wear “their nice clothes, and jewellery.” On the other hand, those who embarked on trips that required some physical activity found it pleasing to observe that their bodies were willing and able to do such things. Noticing the ordinary, commonplace details about the people and places visited was a source of much pleasure. Jennifer told me her English relatives wanted to know why she took pictures of the milkman. She told them, “because we do not have them here.” Louise was fascinated by the “different shapes and colours of [Japanese] phones . . . [and the] style of door handles [in France].” Robert, standing in Paris’s Gare du Nord in the 1990s, commented on the intense daily hustle and bustle of the station. His French wife reminded him that this was “the train station out of which all the Paris Jews would have been shipped to Auschwitz.” This observation gave his reXection on the “ordinary” character of the station and its activity a new tone. His further observations on a First World War battleWeld outside Paris deWned the relative nature of everyday experience. Robert said that while standing on ground where “something important happened . . . [I] was struck by the signiWcance of [the] place, because growing up in Toronto [my] image of the two world wars, especially the Great War, is of cenotaphs in small towns dedicated to the boys of Newmarket who went over there. Yet here’s evidence that people died on this spot, who came from twenty miles away. It put world war in a very different light for [me].” Many of Susan and Fred’s trips were “not necessarily [Wlled with] big moments” but rather with small ones, such as holding a baby kangaroo in Queensland, Fred’s opportunity to paddle a canoe while in Australia, or “poking around,” craning their necks, and marvelling at the ornate architecture of Prague. Neil and Linda spoke of the pleasure of the localized routines – such as their morning walk to town to buy fresh bread and coffee daily – which developed while renting an apartment in Portugal for three weeks one year. On a slightly different scale, Gwen took great pleasure in the variety of the experiences available in India: “deserts, mountains, beautiful beaches, rice Welds – there just seemed to be a microcosm of every possible thing you could ever want to Wnd anywhere.”

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Several tourists talked about what I would call the aesthetic detail of the traveller’s economy. Judith enjoyed the memory of indulging in Irish coffees in a bar in China, which were the “same price as a cup of tea or a beer.” Michael noted with pleasure, and some amazement, the reasonable price and comfort of the trains in Korea. Albert and Sandra took great pleasure in walking away from a Wve-star hotel to stay in a small local establishment, having booked their trip as a package deal that included this rather luxurious accommodation. Such deals offered them the cheapest Xights, but they did not allow packages to suppress their desire to be closer to the local community. Rachel remembers a meal in Venezuela where she gorged on seafood, wine, and drinks, all for about $15. Having a glass of champagne included in the price of a concert ticket, where the music “was just outstanding,” afWrmed Fred and Susan’s pleasurable memories of an evening in Prague. Such opportunities to save money, or to enjoy indulgences at what were considered to be incredibly low prices, became pleasurable memories.

Nuance The nuances of the experience of travel add further texture to the formin-the-small of the travel experience. Whereas the “details” discussed above are somewhat substantive in their character, nuances are more subtle, prompting, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “a slight or delicate variation or difference in expression, feeling or opinion.” The nuances of the travel experience are not so much in what the tourists did, or things that they saw, but in their response to or reXection on events, encounters, or exchanges, some of which might happen over a period of time. This could also include things that they did not do while away. Testing one’s personal limits was one aspect of the nuanced appreciation of travel. Elaine, who cannot swim and who is frightened of being out on the water, noted that she and Benjamin “were on more damn boats without any life jackets or any hope of ever getting off if anything happened” during their extended tour through South Asia. The memory of these trips caused her some anxiety. But counterbalancing these feelings was the fact that she had survived them all, an accomplishment that gave these memories more meaning, and more than a small amount of pleasure. Small encounters or incidents often were cause for reXection by the tourists, particularly about their own cultural difference. Jennifer confessed that it might seem a little “conceited, but it’s fun when people are

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listening to you and marvelling about the way you talk. My aunt loved the way I would say ‘pansies’ and she kept trying to copy it.” Louise listened intently to an Egyptian man as he explained the importance of having more than one wife in his culture. Confronting someone face-toface who actually had two wives made the phenomenon real to her, and made her question her “preconceived cultural notions” about polygamy. It was clear to Sandra that some of the most basic human acts often deWned the most obvious differences among cultures. She and Albert playfully photographed the many toilets, and noted the various toilet protocols, that they encountered on their travels. These slides took on added value for Sandra when she used them to “get one or two of [her high school geography students] to understand that there is more to seeing the world than Wve-star hotels.” The search for the authentic as a motivating force behind contemporary tourism is one concept that has been discussed at length in the tourism literature, beginning with the work of MacCannell (1999; see also Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994; Bruner 1995). Some suggest that tourists are seeking the authentic; others maintain that such a goal is impossible, as it is difWcult to distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic in the context of the touristic experience. What made an experience authentic for some of the travel enthusiasts, however, were often the subtleties of an experience, not its grounding in something that could be categorized as real or not real. To Beth, the authentic was tied up in ideas of being entertaining. She was normally skeptical of staged local characters who performed for the tourists, but noted “an old bushy,” who spoke to them one day at lunch in the Australian outback, “was great entertainment . . . telling . . . yarns . . . he did very well and really held everybody’s attention.” Whether this man had ever really worked in the Australian bush was incidental to her. He told the stories well; he made life in the bush seem real. Another example from the same trip of Beth’s exempliWes an aspect of nuance that added to the aesthetic value of her experience. The tour had a set route (subject to change only for weather conditions) covering about 8,000 kilometres, with about 1,000 kilometres on dirt roads. It also offered six river cruises – a nice detail. But Beth appreciated not the number of these cruises, but their variety: “They were all slightly different.” Some traversed gorges large and small, others navigated wide, open rivers, and all moved through different vegetation growth. Their subtle variation gave them more nuanced meaning.

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One of the most explicit examples of valuing the nuance and subtleties of the travel experience is what several people said about the souvenirs that they did not collect. As Monica said, “It looks great down there, but then, how many times do you wear that muumuu? It just doesn’t blend with [our] culture. I Wnd the same thing with loud T-shirts. The Wrst couple times you go south, everybody’s wearing T-shirts and you bring some [home]. But, you know, you’d be embarrassed to go uptown in them.” Elaine similarly observed, “What’s very interesting and is quite magniWcent in another context doesn’t quite work . . . in [our] modern homes.” Noticing the local aesthetic, things that cannot be translated, or transported – and ultimately, experiencing these nuances Wrst-hand – even if one cannot fully articulate what they are, lies at the root at the sensuous appreciation of the nuance of experience. Olivia spoke of another element of some of her travel experiences that fostered a “delicate variation . . . in . . . feeling.” While in Guatemala, she travelled and lived in a very “pared down” way: choosing Spartan accommodation, eating only the most basic local food, staying in selected locations for extended periods. This kind of experience allowed her to “be totally open to other things.” In the same manner, travel offers Louise the potential for “awakenings,” as her schedule is uncluttered. Such simplicity allows both women to be much more reXective while travelling than in their normal daily lives.

Intensity I have quoted several times already in this chapter comments from individuals that reXected the intensity of their responses to particular experiences. Jackie’s Wrst view of the lions at dawn, Donna’s trip to Israel, Bruce and Maria’s journey across Algeria, Rachel’s tears at the sight of the beautiful Caribbean waters, all indicate the strong sentiments that give sensuous value to these experiences. These moments were not readily forgotten, and could be archived in an individual’s memory as those that happen once in a lifetime. In fact, several of the tourists felt that a particular trip that they had taken was a “trip of a lifetime,” a sentiment that infused the sense that their experiences during that particular trip could probably never be repeated. As such these trips were valued more deeply than other travel experiences. The signiWcant space that the idea of being a traveller or a tourist occupied in the personal psyche and social identity of those with whom

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I spoke determined that they deeply valued the travel experience. Its potential removal from their annual routine was a matter of much concern. Albert and Sandra said they could not bear to think about the possibility of not being able to travel in the upcoming summer because of family commitments. Such thoughts were “disturbing their inner peace” nearly eleven months before such circumstances might become a reality. As imaginings about future travel plans drew strong emotional responses, so did memories of travel in the past. Over thirty years after the trip, Bruce’s eyes welled up with tears as he talked of his efforts to camp across Russia. Jennifer indicated that a different kind of intense emotion underlay some of her travels. She spoke of having a sense that she just had to make particular trips, even if she did not have all of the resources in hand, and despite people who suggested that the trip was not important. She said, “I can’t explain it . . . and I don’t try to . . . I just get the feeling that I have to go.” So she does. Intense emotions and feelings of elation came to Fred and Susan in much more grounded experiences. Susan remembered driving through the Czech Republic: “When you are driving in a different, really unusual country where the language is [all new] . . . I couldn’t read the map properly. You are on the edge, because it is exciting. It gets your adrenaline pumping. We were glad to be on our own and have that excitement again.” Such intense moments are deeply treasured. They are the small moments, along with the details and nuance of the experience, that give meaning to these tourists, and leave their desire perpetually unsatiated. There is always one more trip to be taken. But one dimension of the touristic experience has the greatest pull for many of these people, and that is the intellectual stimulation of the entire experience. Stimulate the mind of the collective body of these tourists, and everything else about travel is simply added pleasure and enticement to keep on travelling. “ F U C K M Y B R A I N A N D YO U CA N H AV E T H E R E S T ”

A friend of mine used this phrase to describe her ideal lover. Once someone stimulated and excited her mind, she would willingly be physically seduced. Similarly, the metaphorical collective body of the tourists was seduced into travel by intellectual stimulation. Many of the tourists I spoke with were as interested in having their minds stimulated by their travels

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as anything else. In fact, without intellectual stimulation, the virtues of a trip were often seen to be particularly limited. Monica was disappointed with her trip to Cuba in part because there was little to do. Samuel and Donna said similar things of a trip they took to a Mexican resort: “There was nothing to do. Really. Quite honestly, there was nothing to do, nothing to stimulate our minds. I think the whole thing can be wrapped up in that sentence.” Beyond that they had very little to say about the experience. Once this negative context for the trip had been set, it followed that they found fault with the hotel, food, beach, and local service. They had told me in our very Wrst conversation that when they travel, “We want something that will challenge our minds, will expand our minds.” For the same reason, some enjoyed having guest lecturers accompany them on tours. Donna and Samuel were “keen to learn why, [and] not just see something.” Some lamented having guides who could not answer all their questions. Others spoke of the joy of meeting up with someone who had a wealth of knowledge about a place that they were visiting. Neil and Linda would seek out museums and historic sites in their desire to try to understand the complexities of European history, which motivated much of their travel. Albert was stimulated to ponder the larger questions about the variety and complexity of human cultures found around the globe. Why did certain cultures develop in certain ways? What are the similarities and differences among various cultural groups within one region? Why did people stay in certain places and leave others? These are not small questions. Travel provided an opportunity for him to explore them. Others incorporated their professional interests into their travels, such as Samuel, a civil engineer, who desired to see all the civil engineering “wonders” of the world. Those who were teachers often tried to visit local classrooms. Robert’s personal interest in medieval history directed some of his stops around Europe. Frances’ fascination with and subsequent study of Greek theatre and mythology at university fuelled her desire to go to Greece. Similarly, her interest in English literature took her to the homes of famous authors. She and others would organize their travels to particular places to see major art exhibitions; still others would make a point of taking them in, if they were on in a place where they were visiting. Olivia’s interest in the distant relative who once was governor of Russian America directed some of her travels and led her to pursue contacts with various academics around the globe who might be able to tell her more about him.

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Travel for those that I spoke with was clearly not an opportunity to turn off their minds and suppress their intellect. In fact, most frequently, just the opposite was true. Travel, whatever form it took, offered stimulation for the mind in many ways. But it must be noted that despite craving a level of intellectual stimulation, the tourists rarely considered the political context of their touristic actions and desires. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, some had a limited consciousness of the moral issues surrounding the actions of tourist and the experience of tourism. But this absence must not be seen to indicate that abstract dimensions were not deeply embedded in their appreciation of their travel experiences.

Selecting One’s Lover The Attraction of the Exotic A new love is always an exciting love. The experience is enticing, frequently all-consuming, and seductive. And each new love is different, which can in itself be a source of pleasure. What constitutes that difference does not matter. In keeping with the metaphor of travel as an act of making love to the chosen destination, this aesthetic of difference, no matter how abstract, nuanced, or dramatic, as Benjamin said, “was always appealing.” For him and Elaine, along with others I interviewed, places such as India, Indonesia, or Thailand were perpetually seductive simply because, as he said, they were “so different from home.” Rachel admitted that she worked hard to make sure that when she travelled she was “not taking home with me.” She noted, “If [I] wanted to take home with me, I’d just stay here.” Similarly, the last people whom Monica wanted to meet on her travels were “fellow Canadians,” particularly those who lived only two hours away from her at home. She went away to meet new people, because she was looking for, and always anticipating, new and exciting experiences. This potential is what she found exhilarating and seductive about travel.

A More Familiar Lover Michael, on the other hand, confessed to me: “One morning, I was just walking down the street [in Seoul, Korea] and I looked up and I caught sight of this little sign with the little red-haired girl with pigtails, and I said, ‘That’s Wendy’s.’ And Wendy had a breakfast sandwich, which was egg and ham and like an Egg McMufWn, coffee and juice. [It was] oh, so good!” The appeal of the exotic had its limits for some; this theme

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appears and reappears throughout this entire book. The mediation offered by guidebooks, guides, organized tours, tourist resorts, hotels, and cruise ships put acceptable limits on the encounter with the exotic. Self-contained travelling, as when Bruce and Maria travelled in their car and trailer, and the barriers of language also mediated any interaction. Touchstones of familiarity, points of connection with life at home, and previous knowledge of the cues for acceptable behaviour were reassuring and comforting to many when they travelled. Nobody craved all that they had at home while away; none of those I spoke with were Graburn’s (1977b, 30-1) timid tourists who travelled around in “their home-grown ‘bubble’ of their lifestyle.” But some did take pleasure in having moments of familiarity to help them negotiate the Wne line between pleasure and uncertainty, if not fear, associated with new and different experiences.

Making Love: Taking Time/Being Free For Leslie, when it came to planning her next trip, “time, time is [my] constraint.” There was never enough of it outside the “demands of everyday life [and that] put boundaries” on her travels. The concept of time emerged over and over again in my conversations with the tourists. Some of the dimensions of time that heightened the sensuous nature of the travel experience for the tourists were the importance of having the right amount of time in a particular place; or the right time to take a particular trip; or a sense of moving back in time by visiting certain historically or geologically important locations; or the efWcient use of time as a result of good planning; or acting in time to visit a particular destination before it was ruined by tourists; or visiting a place at a particular time in one’s life when one was able to appreciate its character (several of those I spoke with talked of “saving” Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Canada until they were older, as they were “easy places to travel” unlike India, Nepal, or Africa); or being free of the schedules and commitments of home or work, thus having a sense of completely unconstrained and uncluttered time to enjoy and learn from a travel experience; or the sense that it was impossible to waste time while travelling, as every experience, even waiting for hours in an airport, could be meaningful; or having a particularly pleasurable experience due to being in a certain place at a certain time; or spending time with someone close to you while away together; or organizing one’s life so that one would have the time to

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travel. Through travel the tourists deWned time as something they had more of while away, something they had more control over. Time was more easily managed while on holiday, and ultimately they could more readily use it as they wanted. The talk about time of which I heard so much was implicated in much of what I am calling the tourist aesthetic. Time and its relationship to travel took on great symbolic value for these tourists. The sense that they could manage it while travelling was rich with meaning for them. Travel gave them time to think and time to experience the intellectual stimulation they desired. Managed time allowed for sheer delight in the form of their trip: be it form-in-the-large in the planning and length of any one trip, or form-in-the-small in their freedom to reschedule their daily plans to respond to a particular opportunity. Travel further allowed them to step out of time and into a state of “Xow,” or to assume a distanced gaze upon the world they were in, while in the next moment they could feel immersed in the mundane aspects of life in a foreign country, the magniWcence of a physical monument, or the handiwork of nature over many millennia as they gazed upon a natural wonder. Travel gave them a chance to imagine themselves in the expanse of time and reXect on their place on the path of human history and experience, a sense of time, as I suggested in Chapter 1, that is bound up in ideas of social evolution and human progress. Travel also, very importantly, allowed them to suspend at least in part and temporarily, the cultural and ideological dimensions of the modern Western world. In travel they challenged the idea that time only moved forward in a linear manner: they stepped back in time as they wandered the pyramids at Giza, or climbed the temples at Palenque. Those who were still working stepped out of the pattern determined by the structure of work versus leisure time. When travelling many of the travel enthusiasts engaged with ideas of time imagined to be part of the postmodern world, where linearity, structured rigidity, and Wnite amounts are seen as changeable realities. Closely tied to the idea of time was the concept of freedom. Being able to manage their time gave the tourists a great sense of freedom. Travel freed them from schedules, structures, and normal expectations. It allowed them to enter that liminal state, the state of in-between, and indulge in a sense of liberation, facilitating heightened intellectual and physical stimulation. Such sensations and aesthetic indulgences underlay the idea of a good trip as one that was a fully sensuous and aesthetic experience. The travel enthusiasts, as I have said, were not likely to see

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their travels in terms of sexual metaphors. But if they were to engage in such metaphorical conceptions of either their individual selves or the collective body of twentieth-century Western tourists, at the very least they would see themselves as tentatively making love to their chosen destination. The penetrative actions of their arrival in foreign communities (if they had a good experience) would be imagined almost exclusively in positive terms, because of the intensely aesthetic pleasures that such experiences offer at the level of the individual mind and body – something that we can extrapolate to the collective body of Western tourists. If such metaphoric imaginings focused on a trip where a tourist had had a somewhat less positive experience, but with some redeeming aspects, the experience could be imagined as an act of sexual intercourse, a physical act involving the same basic actions as making love, but lacking the intense positive passion, overly heightened stimulation, and unwavering emotional engagement. Never, however, would the travel enthusiasts see themselves as participating in anything reminiscent of an act of rape – that form of sexual intercourse at the opposite end of the spectrum from making love. Rape is an intense expression of violence and aggression. And yet, in many ways, violence is embedded in the act of being a tourist.6 There is something implicitly aggressive about it. Ironically, such violence has its own beauty, its own aesthetic, which I propose is as seductive as the sensuous pleasure of a completely consensual experience of sexual intimacy. AC T I N G O U T V I O L E N C E

Two of the tourists I spoke with told me of the following incidents: I can remember being a young girl going into Eastern Europe and a woman coming up to me. [She] gives me this Xower and says, “Welcome in your coming!” I thought, “Oh, isn’t this lovely and wonderful,” until she wanted money. “Give me money,” she said. And I said, “Well, here’s your Xower back.” She must have followed me for an hour and a half and yelling at me in a public place until I went to the hotel. She was standing there at the door the next day I came out. She was still there yelling at me. [We were] travelling round the countryside where you see the local people. We walked into their villages and people invited you into their

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houses. You’d go in there and they wouldn’t expect you to give them anything. They were just happy to sit there. They were so open that you could put a camera in their face and they would smile. You had no problems taking pictures versus [what we had heard elsewhere, where everyone said] “I want $5 for a picture of my house.” But next year that will be the case [all over].

Are these tourists innocent? Is being a tourist an innocent act? In the Wrst story the tourist expected the local woman to give not only hospitality but also a gift of welcome, in the form of the Xower. The local woman’s aggressive assertion of her contradictory understanding that she was engaging in an exchange (that is, money was to be given for the Xower and any gesture of welcome) expresses a violent character in its intimidation and harassment strategies. However, there is also a symbolic violence in the actions of the tourist in her refusal to pay for the Xower, even when she realized her misreading of the situation. Riches (1986, 22; cf. Bourdieu 1977) sees symbolic violence as a coercive circumstance where the “nature of interpersonal relations . . . are intrinsically alienating with respect to one party in an interaction.” This kind of symbolic violence is what is of interest to me here; it is violence that was reXected in many of the stories the tourists told me about their travels. It also prompts much of the critical literature on tourism development discussed in Chapter 1. The innocence with which the tourists imagine their travels blinds them to the intrinsic alienation of the locals in these encounters. The second anecdote is even further embedded in symbolic violence, again on the part of the tourist telling the tale. The encounter as described reveals an implicit aggressive assumption of her right to intrude, her right to be welcomed, and her right to take photographs. Those who told me such stories further assumed a desire on behalf of the local people to be on show, to have strangers in their private spaces, to make friends with foreigners, and to be generally receptive in any engagement with tourists, at least until “next year.” Any aesthetic value of such encounters is embedded in the tourist’s assumed right to make judgments about the pleasure and beauty, even the sublime nature, of such moments. Huhn (1995, 269) suggests that in such sublimity domination is made “pleasurable” and “violence beautiful.” It has been well recognized that violence, symbolic or otherwise, has an aesthetic value, if not an erotic one (see for example Schechner 1993, 297-8).7 I am not implying in any way that the

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tourists consciously took pleasure in the symbolic violence of their actions, but I do believe that aspects of the pleasure in their travels stemmed from the aesthetic value of what can be read as acts of symbolic violence. Travel allowed them to make aesthetic judgments on places, people, and experiences in a manner that they might not do at home. In making these judgments they established dominance, and consequently, if unwittingly, became engaged in violence. They were engaged in a form of Pratt’s (1992; see Chapter 1) “anti-conquest.” Sensuous pleasure was just one factor blinding the tourists to the symbolically aggressive nature of their touristic endeavours. Such aggression is manifest in the comments of one person I interviewed, who felt that it was highly desirable to get to a country or a region that was on the verge of, or just recovering from, a major social and political upheaval, when “there are no tourists and no line-ups to contend with.” What of the local conditions in this context? Is being a tourist at this time a morally acceptable thing to do? Is there not something violent and aggressive in gazing upon people and places recovering from gravely disruptive and emotionally debilitating circumstances? Are there moral issues around arriving somewhere where local resources may already be overburdened due to recent social and political turmoil? My tourists would argue both yes and no. If reliant on tourist spending, local residents would probably appreciate the return of their dollars, and the word-ofmouth advertising tourists could spread that a place was still good to visit, despite recent upheavals. On the other hand, what of personal safety in such conditions? As I will discuss in Chapter 5, there was a resilient desire on the part of the majority of those I interviewed to experience and imagine places they visited as in a perpetual state of stasis, an imagining that did not let them grasp what local conditions might actually be. Returning to the metaphor of the collective body of the tourist that has pervaded this chapter, it must be added that any penetrative act, either driven by the pursuit of an aesthetic or in itself manifesting an aesthetic expression, contains an implicit symbolic violence. As such it could be imagined as a metaphorical act of rape. This is a critical dilemma for the tourist, which I will examine in Chapter 6.

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chapter 4

Journeying Home To accept our reality – the myth of complexity – is to live out of step with most other nations. It is an act of non-conformity. –john ralston saul, ReXections of a Siamese Twin

When I went to Holland, I discovered that I was Canadian, and [was] quite pleased to be that. –rachel, travel enthusiast

A

ll those I interviewed travelled on Canadian passports. All, save three, could be classiWed as English-Canadian (Resnick 1994; Angus 1997), or as Mackey (1999) would call them, CanadianCanadian.1 At the time of our interviews, their home was central Canada, speciWcally Ontario – an area and a population, by virtue of geography, demographics, and circumstances of history, frequently seen as a metonym for the entire country and its citizens. My conversations with these people all took place in the mid to late 1990s, and several commented that the Canada they had known as a child, or the one they had immigrated to, was not the Canada that they now saw around them. Any discontent with this change stemmed from the perceived “Americanization” of the country: growing intolerance of difference and diminishing social and health networks and support for public education. None commented negatively on the changing colour of the country due to changing immigration patterns. Instead, they articulated a heightened appreciation of cultural and racial difference, an enhanced sensitivity to what it would take to adjust permanently to a new cultural milieu, and a recognition that increased cultural mixing made Canada a much more interesting place to live. In my initial interviews I asked them all if their travels changed their idea of Canada, a topic that we often returned to in subsequent informal 139

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conversations. I was curious to know how Canada was viewed from the vantage point of individuals who repeatedly travelled away for set periods for reasons of pleasure, enjoyment, education, or relaxation, but who always returned home. Any departure they made was couched in the security of a known return. This movement, their journeys, and their experiences clearly informed their ideas of “home” as opposed to “away,” a dialectic geographer Douglas Porteous (1990, 107) sees as “fundamental . . . in human life.” It also informed their ideas of Canada and being Canadian. In turn, these ideas affected how they made sense of the globalized landscape of the late twentieth century and how they found a personal place within this often ambiguous, contradictory, and dynamic space. These themes are the subject of this chapter and the one that follows. M A P P I N G CA NA DA / B E I N G CA NA D I A N

I came to Toronto [and] then we went to Algonquin [Park], which was really a low blow. I had been in Europe. I had lived in Rome for a number of months, and before that I had travell[ed] to Europe with my friends and my brother, and of course I had the [love of ] travel, but I had never seen anything as beautiful as Algonquin in the fall. I said to [Bruce], “I have seen monuments and I have seen an incredible number of masterpieces of art made by man, but this is God’s work. This is unbelievable.” How could I leave it?

The beauty of the Canadian landscape seduced Maria, who immigrated from Mexico. Its landscape and the brilliance and magniWcence of the autumn colours were to her the work of God. Clearly she is not alone in responding emotionally and intensely to the Canadian landscape, and, in particular, the spectacle of the autumn leaves, which are a major Canadian tourist attraction. Much has been made of the ruggedness of the Canadian landscape and the attendant ideas of wilderness at play in the rhetoric of the nation’s identity. The late prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau once said that Canadian identity was not something that could be learned from books, but that one had to come to know it by exploring the lakes, rivers, and rocky terrain of the Canadian Precambrian shield (an image that best describes what those in central Canada see as the wilderness of the country). This statement, at Wrst gloss, privileges the physical over the cultural landscape as the nurturing ground of Canadian

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identity. But this is a land, like any other, that at its core is cultured, for how we perceive landscape is, of course, culturally determined (see Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Strang 1999). A good example is the complexity of Aboriginal land claims negotiations. How the Canadian state, its ideologies rooted in those of Europe, and the majority of mainstream Canadians understand land in terms of property, ownership, and exploitable resources is in many ways diametrically opposed to how land is perceived by Canadian Aboriginal peoples. Such oppositions cause contemporary Aboriginal land claims negotiations to travel an arduous path to agreement.2 Many of those who have written on Canadian-Canadian identity make the case that to grow up in this country, or even to live here for an extended time, is to absorb an identity grounded in a physical expanse that is mapped by Canada’s political borders. As one author stated, Canada’s “essential political framework was space rather than class” (Rotstein 1978, 112). But much of this space is constructed as impenetrable, “beyond the line of minimal growth of cereal grains”, that is, a line not far north of the forty-ninth parallel (W.L. Morton as quoted in Wadland 1997, 53). It made perfect sense then that those that I spoke with saw Canada’s far North both as the most exotic part of the country to visit, and as a region quite distinct, remote, even detached, from the rest of Canada. Therefore the North was on several people’s wish lists of places to visit. Canada also has weather, speciWcally the cold, snow, ice, and freezing temperatures that grip many regions of the country for several months of the year. The west coast of the country is free of such winter weather, but even there long dark days of rain and damp cold can be the norm for at least three months of the year. The experience of this weather, or the desire to avoid it, prompted several of those I interviewed to travel, particularly in the months of January and February. Gwen admitted, “It [is] my long-range plan not to spend the whole winter in Canada.” Others noted that they went away periodically in the winter months simply to “get warm.” Imagining winter weather as harsh, threatening, and unpleasant is integrally linked to the imagined ruggedness and harshness of the Canadian landscape. Apart from the sheer physical experience of the land and the winter cold, many things have perpetuated these leitmotifs of Canadian identity. The nation’s motto, “From sea to sea,” highlights the role of physical space in our sense of identity, even if it ignores a third and vital sea.3 As recently as the 1970s, I was taught in public school that I was part of a

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nation of “hewers of wood and drawers of water” – a description intimately linked to images of Canada as a place where trees grew and waters Xowed in abundance – and that we were a people perpetually engaged in harnessing these resources. Canada supplied the raw materials to the manufacturing and processing industries of the rest of the Western world. The metaphor of rawness nurtured images of this country as a pristine place with yet-untamed wilderness.4 Rotstein (1978) asserts that “mappism,” the “territorial ethic,” or what he alternatively calls the “integrity of Canadian territory,” is particularly central to the English-Canadian identity. And while Laxer (2000, 66) notes that “mappism may be overused as a symbol,” for those I interviewed, the map of Canada was a central vehicle for their imagining of this country. Many of them were adamant that they had mapped the nation for themselves by physically traversing it before they travelled much outside its borders. As Susan told me, I had this argument with a man at work years ago. I was talking about wherever our next trip was, and he said, “Well, personally I think you should see Canada Wrst.” And I said, “Well, I totally agree.” In the years before we started our international travel, we have literally gone from Mile 1 of the Trans-Canada Highway in St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Mile 1 at ToWno, on Vancouver Island. So far all we have not done is the Northwest Territories.” [Then] I said, “Tell me, have you been to Whitehorse?” “Oh well, no,” he said. It’s not like we’ve lost our own country in the shufXe – we still love to travel in Canada.

Not everyone I talked to had taken such cross-Canada journeys, and some of those who did had not been so fully comprehensive in their exploration as Susan and Fred. But most had traversed large segments of the east-west axis of the country at some point in their lives, often camping along the way, an experience that kept them on the margins of the urban centres, close to the natural landscape of the country. In addition to this cross-country trek, or often along with it, many made regular journeys to Ontario’s “cottage country” or near-north regions, either as children themselves or with their own offspring. Some had spent extended periods in the summer in youth camps in these same regions. These travels and experiences were central to the reasoning people offered as to why they were so keen to travel. Many saw these Canadian experiences as formative to that interest.

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All who took cross-Canada journeys viewed them as a “safe” travel experience. They were testing grounds for the experience of leaving home, for the idea that one could survive while away, and that home would be waiting on one’s return. In fact, the safety of travel in Canada prompted a few of those that I spoke with to leave exploration of their home terrain until they got older. As Tony said, “I’ll do that when I retire.” The security of known language, customs, foods, good transportation, and expected behaviours all made travelling in Canada sound easy, almost dull, compared to the unknown, the unexpected, and the potential adventures that might be encountered outside the country. This security, while making Canada a good place to live, prompted little urgency to travel within its borders. For those who were immigrants, travels in Canada had a somewhat different character: they were journeys of exploration, attempts to claim this land as home. As Frances said of her British parents, they “wanted us to see Canada, and so we went coast to coast with them.” This mapping of Canada implies the delineation of borders and boundaries that several authors highlight as central to the Canadian imagination and sense of identity (see for example Angus 1997; New 1998; Reid 1997). Many of those who spoke to me of their travels across the country carefully noted that they crossed (some might confess “transgressed”) “the border,” dipping into the United States. This border is central to Canadian identity.5 As Kuester has said, “Canada is unthinkable without its border with the U.S.A.” (as quoted in New 1998, 6). In fact, the Canada-United States border was actively emphasized by many of those I interviewed as they moved about the globe, in an effort to set themselves apart from those who live south of it. They saw this border as what New has called the “conceptual edge” between themselves and Americans (ibid.). Ian Angus has said, “The border is [not a] place, but the discovery of place . . . [It] is not difference; it allows difference to appear” (1997, 134). Crossing the American border fosters a bird’s-eye view of Canada in the same way as travelling away from the North American continent does. Such a view helped many of those with whom I spoke to discover this place, their home, Canada. It allowed them to see differences between Canadians and Americans, even if these differences are hard to articulate clearly. Angus further notes that to “perceive an Other, the border must be maintained” (134). Travelling beyond Canadian borders, like mapping those borders from within, helps that maintenance.

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Travelling also afWrmed that some non-Canadians knew that there were clear differences between Canadians and Americans. Linda and Neil told me about an encounter they had while travelling in New Zealand during the Gulf War: The New Zealanders were very anti-American and we were actually accused of being American, hiding behind being Canadian because we wouldn’t admit to being American. “Whew!” I said, “There isn’t an American alive that would hide behind being a Canadian, so forget that one.” We were just so stunned to be told this! I think that was up in the North Island and when we were looking for a concert, a Maori presentation, and it was right near what we call [the] Legion. They call it the RSL, I think, Returning Service [League], something like that. Anyway, we asked somebody what time it was and they said, “Well, where are you going to eat tonight? [It] is a very good place to eat, and I would be quite happy to sponsor you if you’d like to come. You’re not Americans are you? Because I couldn’t invite you if you’re Americans. You’re sure you’re Canadians?”

To this New Zealander, Canadians were quite distinct from Americans, something Linda felt most Americans would emphatically agree with. She imagined few wanting to be Canadians. Jennifer, on the other hand, grew angry at a British policeman’s elision of life in Canada and the United States. After a late-night break-in at her uncle’s shop in England, a police ofWcer, when he found out that she was from “somewhere near Toronto,” said to her, “Oh well, you’d be used to this sort of thing then, wouldn’t you?” This statement implied that she had a familiarity with robberies, guns, and violence – things Jennifer felt characterized American, not Canadian life. Overall, she felt, the incident was rather comical, as her uncle rushed to the scene with an unloaded shotgun with tissue stuffed in its barrel. She mused that if anything the comedy, rather than the violence of the incident, linked it to Canada. Travelling out of the country was, for some I interviewed, also a process of afWrming the parallel majesty, magnitude, and beauty of their home compared with lands in the world. In his volume of “masterpiece” photographs selected from all of his travels, Michael proudly included several scenes from across Canada, just to demonstrate that “we have beautiful scenery here as well.” This collection, however, included few pictures of Canadian people, urban environments, or examples of contemporary

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life, but rather featured landscapes. The idea of Canada as dominated by its physical space was further evident in the emphasis that Linda and Neil put on going to Europe to see “history.” Only when speciWcally questioned did they agree that Canada had history too, which they would take in, as Linda said, when driving in “travel mode, poke-around mode, [let’s] see what’s down this road.” Unlike their travels to Europe, however, exploring Canadian history was rarely the motivation behind their travels at home. “Poke-around mode” was primarily about “seeing the country” or leisurely travelling from one destination to another. Harold also bothered little about the history he found in Canada, speciWcally Toronto. It was the richness of the “cultural life” of his favourite city – something he saw as removed from history – that often determined the length and frequency of his trips away. He rarely stayed away more than three weeks on his two annual holidays, as he did not want to miss anything happening at home. He also felt that the cultural life of Toronto had vastly improved following the immigration of people from many non-European nations to the city in the last three decades, nations that were some of his favourite places to visit on his travels. He had not explored much of Canada beyond southern Ontario since immigrating from Britain Wfty years ago. Cities were clearly his love, and his travels abroad usually took him to urban centres, experiences that let him contextualize the uniqueness and the richness of his life in his beloved adopted home, a place he dubbed “perfect.” In a recent article in one of Canada’s national newspapers, respected journalist and broadcaster Mark Starowicz (2000) said of Canadians, “We are the debris of history. We are the children of the expelled, the persecuted, the abandoned and the marginal. We are the remnants of empires and the refugees of lost causes. It’s not blood that unites us, it’s the experience of refuge. That’s how we recognize each other in foreign places.” Not all of those I interviewed would agree with this assertion. They had much more concrete ways of recognizing fellow Canadians in foreign places, as I will discuss below. But Starowicz’s assertion about the marginality of Canada and Canadians did have a resonance with some. They saw Canada as a “small part of the world,” often hidden in the shadow of the United States. Furthermore they saw their home as a place that often fails to promote itself with conWdence and vigour, something they particularly noted as a contrast between Canada and Australia, after visiting the “land of Oz.” Canada to many of them was a place that was accessible to all, especially

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those who wanted to escape “the old world.” Leslie, the daughter of displaced persons who came to Canada following the Second World War, experienced discrimination in the small Ontario town that was her home. She was “a DP kid growing up . . . [Many people assumed that their] job [was] taken by somebody coming over [from Europe]. My parents were educated, [yet] my mother picked strawberries, waitressed. Eventually she became a medical laboratory technologist, but it was a lot of hard work in a language she did not know. They came here with nothing.” She remembers intolerance as coming particularly from those in her community who had British roots. To her, the British who came to Canada were “the black sheep . . . They were kicked out of England . . . Sometimes not the best ones emigrate.” These assumptions were proven correct to her when many years later she did travel to England and met many “warm and lovely” people. Framing her childhood experiences as encounters with British attitudes, however, let her disassociate them from her understanding of Canada. These were “old world” voices speaking, not the voices of her Canada. Thus she emphatically stated that in the early days of her travels, she “did not care if I went to Europe or not . . . I had so much of Canada to see . . . I thought, Europe, oh, all that old stuff, big deal.” To her, people who travelled to Europe were “kind of snotty, [on the] grand tour.” Canada was a place of new beginnings, somewhere she could claim as hers. To Leslie, Canada is a place “you just want to kiss . . . every time you come home . . . I still feel very, very special and very, very lucky to be Canadian.” L U C K , L U X U RY, A N D R I C H E S : CA NA DA’ S G O L D E N AG E

Leslie continued, “What we have in North America, it’s incredible when you see the poverty and how people live elsewhere, even Italy. It’s a much more simple life there, without any conveniences that we take for granted here. Sometimes you feel you were born at the right time at the right place, in between wars, Vietnam is over. I know that right now is like a golden age and I think Canada is really positioned very well [emphasis added].” Leslie’s sentiments were not unique among the conversations that I had. Most felt that to be born in Canada, to be able to make Canada your home, is to be lucky, to have access to often unappreciated luxury, and often blindly to accept an embarrassment of riches. The “golden age” of which Leslie spoke afforded the vast majority of Canadians material wealth and security not known in many other places

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in the world. Others corroborated Leslie’s sentiments about what they came to understand of their life in Canada in the context of their travels: elaine: [Travelling gives you] a sense of tremendous privilege to come from a country where there is so much that’s available. Coming from a safe community where there are opportunities. [Such] privilege, often I would Wnd embarrassing. In many countries I found that we didn’t talk even about having a car, as that would be seen as being just so outrageous to have your own vehicle, or your own fax machine, or any of those things. You begin to realize that these things aren’t necessarily a given. You see people who have absolutely nothing in the centre of Delhi and you realize how much you have. benjamin: [Travelling] gives you a different perspective on what it is to live in Canada. I feel that you become a little less . . . what’s the word? Ethnocentric? albert: I’ll tell you my image [of Canada]. I pretend when I get off the plane I’m the pope and I kiss the ground. This is the best country in the planet, and we are in this special window of time and place that we should be so grateful for [what] you can’t even possibly imagine. We have not experienced wars in this country. We are in the top 2 percent of the food chain on the planet; we are the most fortunate of human beings. We won the lottery through no merit of our own . . . [What have] we done to deserve this? Nothing. Just fortunate, you know, in terms of being born in this century the way we are. I could have been born a few years ago and been [sent] off to war. I could have been [born when there was] no disease protection whatsoever. We’re very lucky, so I love this country [emphasis added]. gwen, sitting on the deck of her cottage: It does not get any better than this – the standard of living, the lifestyle, the scenery. We’ve got everything. Robert noted that travelling had taught him much about Canadian Aboriginal people, and about the meaning of having a spiritual attachment to place: I think that probably the most profound way [that travelling has affected my understanding of Canada] is in allowing me to look

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differently at the experience of the Aboriginal peoples. I don’t have a personal connection with Aboriginal communities, so it’s not something that comes from personal experience. I suppose it’s an intellectual or an emotional appreciation by proxy, or at some distance. But the awareness of the colonial attitude that I had run into in other countries that was visited upon the Aboriginal peoples here [has become clear to me]. I wish I had a greater sense of the spirituality of places here but, unfortunately the places here, although I grant that they do speak with a profound spiritual language, they don’t speak to me. And that’s not to say I don’t recognize that those voices, that those spirits are here. It’s just that we’re on different channels. And the spirits that speak to me are Western European spirits, but, at the same time I think I do have a greater appreciation for and willingness to acknowledge the spirituality of places.

The wealth and muniWcence known by these Canadians nurtured in some a humility about how privileged they were. It left Rachel with “a bit of dissatisfaction with my own life and goals. I’m looking for new directions. I’m wondering, is what I am doing going to give me satisfaction? I think about how I spend my time. I think how meaningless it is. What value am I giving back to the world?” ReXections on their travel experiences provoked in many a sense of frustration with fellow Canadians who “whined” about so many things: health care, taxes, the cost of living, Quebec separatism, the need to settle Aboriginal land claims, and so on. As Fred emphatically stated, “I think every Canadian should travel to some of the parts of the world that we’ve seen, not the glamorous places, but where you see life being lived by the ordinary person. I think they’d Wnd a whole lot less to complain about here. I think they’d realize they’re living in the best country in the world, and be very grateful that for some reason life put them here.” Others corroborated his sentiments: linda: Well, when people are grouching, you think you should ship them off to some of these other places. Then they’d come home and they would certainly see things a lot differently. People have nothing to compare it with. They can only Wnd fault. neil: We’ve got to realize that Canada is a wonderful country and that it’s little wonder that the United Nations has it as [the] number-one

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place in the whole world . . . I mean, where else can you Wnd a multicultural country like Canada without a lot of violence and bloodshed. All you have to do is look at the Albanians and the Serbs. I just can’t understand what they’re all complaining about. Of course, that’s because we have something to compare it with and other people don’t. monica: Canada is a far cleaner . . . safer country than most on the globe. It must be remembered that those who made these statements, members of the “new middle class” as Munt (1994) would suggest, knew little, if anything, of the life of the homeless, the poor, or the disadvantaged in Canada, never mind the real hardships of the lives of many of those they saw on their travels, particularly in those places that Wallerstein (1974) would identify as located in the “periphery.” Those I interviewed largely observed from a distance changes in the social fabric of Canada in the deWcit-cutting years of the 1990s. Few were directly affected by these measures. Quite simply, because of economic positioning or commitment to a particular lifestyle, they had the ability and the freedom to make choices in their lives. Such options are rarely offered to many who inhabit tourist destinations, or to many in Canada who have experienced none of the nation’s economic prosperity in recent decades. As I have discussed earlier, social and political issues, as much as economics, are integral to any reXection on tourism and the tourist experience. It is important to note that some of those with whom I spoke were prompted by their travels to reXect on what Leslie called Canada’s “golden age,” recognizing their privileged position. For some it sowed the seeds of a critical reXection on the whole experience of travel. As Rachel questioned, “When you watch somebody walking two miles to the water tap every day – now I didn’t watch her [a Kenyan woman] every day, and I didn’t watch her walk two miles, but I knew how long it was since we passed the water tap and I saw how far she had come, and that woman did that every day. And I can walk and turn on my tap. What am I doing there?” Gwen noted that after her eight-month trip through India, “I had more culture shock returning to North America than I ever had going to India . . . It was the people, the noise, the afXuence.” She went on to suggest that she found much about life at home excessive and indulgent. Elaine even wondered whether, despite her greater material wealth, her life was really any better than that of many women she saw in various

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parts of India: “We stopped for tea somewhere – it was late afternoon. There were a few women standing [chatting] near where we were in this wonderful late afternoon light. I started thinking, well, is their quality of life worse than mine? Certainly they have a lot less materially than I do, but I found it hard to see that what they had was in some way lesser than what I had.” Such reXections prompt one to ponder whether we have really “won the lottery.” T H E CA NA D I A N TO U R I S T A B R OA D

Individual identity is nurtured through a complex dialectic of inXuences from without as well as from within. Thus being Canadian means not only knowing that you are, but also having others validate that selfknowing. The tourists I spoke with clariWed for me various ways that they are known to be Canadian while travelling, as well as how they recognized fellow Canadians. As noted earlier, being Canadian could at times mean not being American, which many boldly asserted by attaching small Canadian Xags to their clothes or luggage. Tony mentioned, as did others, that when his Xag was visible, it made “quite a difference . . . You don’t believe it, but it does have an effect on how people treat you once it is clear that you are not an American.” Other signs more subtly marked fellow tourists as Canadian. The wearing of Tilley Endurables, a Canadian line of low-maintenance, practical travel clothing, was one sure sign (at least until the company started selling internationally in the 1990s). In Prague, Susan saw that “there was one other Canadian couple from Vancouver in our hotel . . . [We] recognized him because he was wearing his Tilley pants.” Donna also commented that a fellow tour group member “was complaining about the fact that underwear was difWcult to dry, and we said, ‘Oh, we’ve got the answer to that one. Tilley brings out underwear that dries in two hours,’ so everybody wanted a catalogue.” She exchanged addresses with several in their tour group simply to forward to them the address for Tilley Endurables in Toronto, although she did not expect to hear from these people beyond this exchange. The durability and understatedness of these items of clothing, as exempliWed by their ease of care and their practical design – if read as undemanding and inelegant – could be metaphors for how some imagine Canadians. Benjamin corroborated such possible imaginings: “I think that Canadians are fairly clearly deWned when we travel . . . [but in the end] we may suffer a little bit from being bland.”

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Gwen wore a Roots T-shirt (another Canadian brand) while travelling. As she said, “Thus it was quite obvious that I was Canadian,” a comment probably more accurate before Roots expanded to the US market recently. Such statements assume knowledge of the speciWcs of national commodities, a fair assumption in the globalized world of the new millennium, for tourists have penetrated even locations where the Internet has not, exposing remote communities to (and at times leaving behind) an eclectic range of commercial goods such as T-shirts promoting hockey teams from distant lands, baseball caps, cameras, compact disc players, and Walkmans. Nevertheless, knowledge of the subtleties of things Canadian, more intangible things about the country, known by those in distant parts of the world even in the early 1990s, surprised some. Elaine noted, “And even in places, little remote places in India, people who had probably very little education would often say [when they found out we were Canadian], ‘Are you from the French part or the English part?’ How would they know the difference?” Others imagined themselves expressing their Canadianness by acting in a more reticent and subtle manner than the bolder and brasher behaviour they attributed to Americans. Albert said he never announced his nationality when travelling: “I don’t wear the maple leaf, no Xags . . . I don’t tell people where I’m from . . . [only] if they ask and it comes up in conversation.” A Canadian passport obviously identiWed their nationality, but few besides border personnel, hotel staff, and Wnancial exchange employees ever get to see a traveller’s passport. The tourists noted that others identiWed Canadians on the basis of their assumed bilingualism, the strategic international work of Canadian politicians in the area of human rights, perceptions of the country’s landscape and its political associations, and because Canada was the site of certain natural landmarks. As an Australian asked Henry, “If I came to Canada and did not see Niagara Falls, would I have seen Canada?” To this person, Canada was not the rich cultural environment that Harold emphasized to me that he knew it to be. Bruce told the story of being sought out by a Muscovite who wanted to meet him because he was Canadian. He went to meet this man “on the steps of this building. He came down and started to speak to me in French. He thought that because we were Canadians we would speak French, we would speak French automatically. He was a teacher of French, but he had no English. And I was disappointed that we couldn’t converse.” Benjamin found that some individuals he encountered did not know

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speciWc facts about Canada, such as where it was located, but understood other, more intangible qualities about it, such as its size and its linkages to England, or simply had positive associations with the country. He summed up these impressions as “just that it’s somehow this big country. They have a sense of the bigness. They’re not even sure quite where it is. I remember we actually asked somebody once and he thought it was somewhere near England, so they’ve got [that] connection. [Others,] Wrst they’d say, ‘Where you from?’ This is, of course, usually the Wrst question you get, and you say, ‘Canada’ and [they’d repeat,] ‘Canada!’ There’s something that impresses them [even if ] they are not sure what it is.” It appears that these individuals, without any direct knowledge of what or even where Canada was, had a sense of the country that amazingly parallels what its citizenry understands the nation to be: a big place, with historical yet now uncertain links to England, and generally “good.” For many Canadians, though, this minimalist, understated sense of their country can also nurture, by its very unencumberedness, a passionate commitment to it.6 Other ideas of Canada held by the tourists I interviewed understood it to be a nation of “bridge builders,” a defender of the principles of democracy, and an advocate for human rights around the world.7 Several tourists had this understanding of Canada and Canadians fed back to them, as happened to Judith in Fiji: We learned about this from the driver of the car that was driving us around for the day, who happened to be one of the oppressed Indians. We were sort of startled to discover that not only did he have an awareness of Canada, he had a very high regard for Canada. And particularly, he was enthusiastic about good old “Joe Who” [Joe Clark], who was minister [of External Affairs].8 The way he knew of Joe was because Fiji opted out of the Commonwealth, [then] decided it had made a mistake and applied to re-enter. Joe led those who refused to allow Fiji permission to re-enter the Commonwealth unless and until they changed their constitution to give equal rights to all citizens. So, at the time we were there, only a year ago, they were still sort of wrestling with it and hadn’t decided to let all their citizens have equal rights. Once he found out you were from Canada, he opened up.

Reid (1997, 15) suggests that Canada has made “room for creative

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pressures from without . . . recognising that self-creation [in Canada] . . . lies beyond the limits of the self,” and I would add, beyond the limits of the country. Different Canadians respond to this pressure in different ways. For those that I interviewed, travel took them beyond themselves; when they stood outside its borders, understanding what it meant to be Canadian, what their country Canada was, became seductively more straightforward. These ideas of Canada afWrmed through international travel denied the complexity of the Canadian nation identiWed by John Ralston Saul in the epigraph to this chapter. This complexity is hard to grasp when you live within it, but travel away helps to distil it to a few essentials. Bird’s-eye imagining readily blurs many details. To assume these imaginings are real is to assume a false reality for Canada. To insist that Canada is something straightforward is, according to Saul, to deny our uniqueness, to betray what is really distinctive about this country. I would argue that travel out of Canada, for many of those that I interviewed, gives the nation a rarely warranted Wxity.9 Present-day Canada is one of the most multicultural circumstances in the history of humankind. As Benjamin said, he “left England to see the world, and ended up in Toronto.” The world in many ways lives “on the doorstep” of those I interviewed. Elaine mentioned that in her neighbourhood, there “are thirty-seven different languages spoken and cultures represented . . . Europe is on our doorstep, almost familiar.” Many whom I interviewed thought that they were more prepared to accept the world as their close neighbour simply because they had travelled, they had encountered cultural difference, and they took pleasure, as Harold said, in the fact that “people have different ways of doing things.” These changes in the cultural landscape of Canada in some ways radically alter the maps of Canada that many of my tourists had drawn for themselves. These tourists, like many other Canadians, have to ask, does their Canada still exist? Can they continue to imagine Canada as some sort of Wxed place? But it also could be asked, did such a Canada ever exist? John Wadland (1997, 54) has suggested, in fact, that “Canada does not exist . . . Rather Canada is in a perpetual state of becoming.” The country that the tourists return to is, in fact, a different one every time they come back. But some things do remain the same. Wadland argues that Canada has always been “animated by hope,” and it is obvious from the comments quoted above that hope and faith in this nation was afWrmed in the minds of those I interviewed by their regular travel beyond its borders. This same sentiment was also what always brought

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them home, a process that has to aid over time in acknowledgment and acceptance of the complexity that is Canada.10 In the next section I will explore just what “home” meant to these travellers. Rojek (1997, 70) contends that home is essential to any tourist’s enjoyable travels, and I further maintain it is central to their ability to go away at all.

L O CAT I N G H O M E

Home and Away Ann Game (1998, 44; see also van den Abbeele 1992, xix) has acknowledged that “we always bear the traces of home in travel.” It is impossible to achieve what she calls “an absolute departure” and equally impossible to experience “an absolute return” to an unchanged home. Home to her is “remarkably elusive.” Rojek (1997, 70) further notes that tourism “is not a break or escape from ordinary life. Rather, it provides a plane of cultural difference in which everyday life routines are contrasted and developed.” The ambiguity of the English word “home,” says Tim Putnam (1993, 155), cannot “go unmarked: does [it] indicate an environment encountered, relationships enacted, and idea envisaged, or an articulation of all three?” To Mary Douglas (1991, 289), home “is always a localizable idea . . . [It] is located in space, but it is not necessarily a Wxed space.” Home, for those I spoke with, was a phenomenon manifesting all of this complexity. For most, it had strong links to Canada, but home is also separate from the idea of nation. To some it is opposed to “away”; to others it is a particular set of relationships. It is seen variously as space claimed as one’s own, as a complex intermixing of ideas of place and family, and as the mundane minutiae of life. Schedules and work characterized home for others. Frances said she was not motivated to “go away to work,” even though as a teacher she had many opportunities to go on exchange programs. She wanted to travel for play, keeping home as a place of work. For some (particularly those who are retired), home is where one returns to get away from the work of travel (Urry 1990, 2). As Michael, who retired in his mid-Wfties, said, after his travels he “came home for a rest.” Physically, home to these travel enthusiasts, at the time I interviewed them, was in Canada.11 Thus in our conversations it was at times difWcult to separate ideas of Canada (discussed in the previous section) from ideas

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of home. Indeed, for some these two concepts were inextricably tangled up with each other. Separating them here is in some ways arbitrary, but at the same time I believe remains true to a distinction made by Robert: Canada was the country he had been born in, where he had grown up, that had shaped his values and his accent, and at the time of our interviews, it was the place he always returned to; home was where he felt safe and secure, where his wife and daughter were, and, at the risk, he said, of sounding “clichéd . . . where we happen to be hanging our hats.” Game (1998, 44) suggests that we have a sense of home only in relation to away, as it is when “we are ‘on the road’ that we most assiduously produce homes.” Some of my tourists would readily agree. When Benjamin travels, home becomes “a fantasy,” which he acknowledged that he starts to construct the minute he leaves. He looks forward to returning home about halfway through his trip, but is quickly eager to leave again once he gets there, in part because home as experienced can never quite live up to the fantasy. To Leslie, home was not so much fantasized as made new again by travelling. It took on a new reality upon her return from a trip, something she experienced even when she returned from family vacations as a child. She remembers it was “kind of sweet to be back in your room where you could touch both walls [with your arms out], to get back to your desk and open it, seeing all your things again. It was fresh. If you stay there all the time, how fresh can it be?” Even though Michael went away three or four times a year, he clearly liked all that home had to offer. After nearly three weeks of travelling, he said he “had had enough” and was anxious to get home. To him, at its very least, home was a place of “comforts and conveniences.” Such comforts included physical, sensuous things: a familiar bed, a favourite radio station, food that tastes “good,” the ability to get around without a map or “reading your guidebook and packing your bag every day.”12 Home, to the travel enthusiasts, was more than just a place where one can Wnd familiar things, or where technology, material possessions, and other amenities make life a little easier. It was grounded in ideas of family and roots, safety, security, and stability, work and the ordinary, schedules and commitments, and the presence of loved ones. All of these things implicitly speak of a place bounded by the discourses of class, gender, generation, race, ethnicity, and personal subjectivities. It was, of course, impossible to leave all of these realities behind when people went away. In fact, some of those I spoke with readily packed all of this as baggage on their travels. The privileges some assumed were their due by

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virtue of their socioeconomic class, or in some cases because of their age or generation, were conWrmed by the luxury of the cruises or bus tours they chose, or the good-quality hotels they stayed in. They did not wish to step outside these familiar frames. Others attempted to suspend such discourses and structures in the “anti-structure” that travel can be said to represent (Turner 1969). Tourists, Urry (1990, 11-12) has said, want to “experience distinct pleasures which involve different senses or are on a different scale from those typically encountered in everyday life.” To do this, some I interviewed opted to travel in modest, even Spartan circumstances, conditions often much different from those at home. Travelling like this allowed them to symbolically, if only temporarily, step out of their middle-class assumptions about comfort and convenience. Others, in contrast, sometimes desired to step up in class and social level by basking in Wve-star accommodation, with its attendant luxury well beyond that of their normal lives at home, even if they knew that such upper-class indulgences could be indulged in only brieXy. Some stepped out of their normal behaviours to be much more physically active, spending hours sightseeing in a city and walking miles in the process, taking in cultural performances such as the opera that they would not see at home, or getting far less sleep than normal as they either danced all night as they had not done since their late adolescence, or as Monica said, woke “up at 4 a.m. to go off somewhere for the day.” Others, in contrast to their lives at home, spent days in complete relaxation on a beach with a good book. If the touristic experience is one of liminality where all normal structures are absent, leaving the tourist in a world of anti-structure (Turner 1969; see also Graburn 1977b), the basic social mores of life at home are temporarily suspended. Some would argue that such suspension can solidify the discursive frame of life at home by its very opposition to it. Gwen travelled in a relatively austere, anti-structured manner for eight months in India, and commented that this experience changed the way she saw the world. But this change did not prompt her on her return home to move from her suburban home with its swimming pool and other upper middle-class comforts. She, like most others, did not dramatically, or even modestly, seek to reshape her life outside the discourses that constructed home following her travels. For most of those I interviewed, as is evidenced by the comments that I noted in the previous section, being home was often an amazingly muniWcent experience that afforded “a good life.” Travel separated these tourists in varying degrees

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from the structural and discursive realities of their normal lives, leaving them in a position to tolerate, accept, or further appreciate them. Returning to what Rojek (1997, 70) has said, their “everyday life routines [were] contrasted and developed” through their travels. Home was afWrmed as a desirable place, no matter how anxious they had been to depart from it. It has been argued that such anti-structural touristic behaviours are “carnivalesque” in the Bakhtinian sense (Shields 1991).13 Rather than simply an effort to step temporarily outside the constructs of home, some touristic behaviours can be interpreted as mocking the discursive realities of home, and in such mockery, resisting them. Activities and behaviours seen to be outside Canadian norms challenged the accepted structural order of life. Sandra noted that when travelling, “All of a sudden you don’t have to conform to any kind of basic social mores. If you want to do something that makes you look idiotic, there’s no one to look at you except someone else who you’ve never seen, and it really doesn’t matter. It’s always in great fun and joy.” She further told me of how she, Albert, and their sixteen-year-old son Philip insisted they should all be able to go on the trip they had selected on the Inca Trail in Bolivia and Peru, even though Albert was older than the maximum age speciWed for participants, and Philip younger than the minimum. They wanted to be assessed as individuals, not by arbitrary age categories. Both son and father felt physically and emotionally strong enough to deal with the challenges of such a trip. Such resistant behaviours allowed Sandra and Albert, as well as others who indulged in such thinking, to imagine, if not experience, a life without some of the discursive burdens or restrictions of home.14 Other stories of resistant behaviours I heard most frequently focused on individuals putting their bodies to the test on trekking trips or other physical excursions. A related and common theme in this regard, which coheres with Bakhtin’s “grotesque realism” or the “incorporation of images depicting the material functions of the human body” (Gardiner 1992, 47), emerged in the many bathroom, toilet, and defecation stories I was told. Clark and Holquist (1984, 312) suggest that “valuing” such things “jolts us out of our normal expectations and epistemological complacency” (see also Gardiner 1992, 47). I heard from nearly everyone stories of using vile and Wlthy facilities that one would never consider using at home, of relieving oneself without any facility at all in response to dire urgency, and of incapacitation from severe bouts of diarrhoea. But confronting such realities ultimately allowed a few of the travellers to

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imagine their lives at home, their degree of physical activity, their social mores, their standards of cleanliness and hygiene, or their bodies in new and liberated ways (see DeMello 2000, 30-1).

Home: A Set of Relationships and Feelings Robert’s idea of home had very little to do with being away, and more to do with being in the company and security of the bonds he shared with his immediate family. Family, in fact, was synonymous for home for several, if not most, of those I interviewed. Such connections offered security, stability, and structure in their lives.15 Rachel, who often experienced a great deal of anxiety before any trip, took this family security with her on her trip to Egypt by going with her mother. As she said, “What can go wrong if your mother’s there?”16 When Robert elaborated on his thoughts about home, he said that it was a place where he could really be himself, a metaphorical place of freedom and complete physical, emotional, and spiritual comfort. He had looked for home in various places around the globe, something that Jennifer had also done. To both of them, home was a place where one did not feel “restless,” where one would feel “warm and safe.” A place where, as Robert said, “I would be free, and indeed encouraged to really become fully myself.” But in the case of these two individuals, home was not a physical place that they had found but a personal space. Their search for home prompted their travels to particular places. Coincidentally, both had gone to New Zealand as part of their search: Robert because of the place he imagined it to be (but he found it to be quite the opposite); Jennifer because she had lived there as a child. Her subsequent trips to England, her birthplace, were also in part motivated by the fact that she was “still looking for me.”

Home: Not Physically Fixed Mary Douglas noted that while home is “located in space . . . it is not necessarily a Wxed space . . . It can be a wagon, caravan or a tent . . . There has to be something regular about the appearance and reappearance of its furnishings” (1991, 289). Bruce would wholeheartedly agree. He commented of his travels in Europe and Russia, Wherever we set that tent up, that was our home. And no matter

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whether it was in the nice Western European, Norway or somewhere, which is beautiful to camp in, or especially in Russia because it was so alien. They wanted [us] to sleep in the [permanent tents]. We could have done it but we wanted our own little home set up. It was very nice to do that. It’s very comfortable. And you need it. Believe it or not, as adventuresome as I was, it was nice to have that security blanket, you could call it. It’s something familiar, and we could set it up in about Wfteen minutes or so.

Monica summarized her sentiments about home by retreating to the same cliché Robert used about “hanging hats.” She felt that home could be reconstructed even in a hotel room, by symbolically situating physical objects and mimicking habitual patterns. She said, Your hotel room is your little corner of the world. You are so much in awe of what you’re seeing around you. You could still go back to your little hotel room, and say, “OK, this is my magazine, and this is my bathtub, and this is where I’m going to hang my robe.” You have to create your own little environment within the scope of things. Because otherwise you’re roaming, but you’re not living, you’re drifting. I love to be cloistered in a little hotel room somewhere. And now these are my walls, and this what I have to work with, and this is where I get to know me, and tomorrow I can leave these walls, but this is home where [it] is [now]. So that’s why I say [home is] “wherever you hang your hat.”

When away Monica claimed some space, temporarily demarcating her home amid the unfamiliarity and strangeness of the unknown world that surrounded her. She mimetically found home in her hotel. This grounded her in time and space, and stopped her, as she said, from “roaming” and “drifting.” Subsequent conversations indicated that in her world there exists “home” and “Home,” and she was not alone in this implicit distinction. The former she can reconstruct in her hotel; the latter exists more Wxedly in a small town in Ontario, where her children remain while she and Lawrence go away, where her childhood was spent, where their small business is based. But Monica’s comments and actions suggest that both home and Home are about groundedness or rootedness, either temporary or long-term. This is a theme that I will return to shortly.

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Home: The Mundane/The Ordinary Elaine’s ideas of home emphasized its mobile, discursive nature, as she, like Robert, understood it in terms of relationships, rather than anything physical or tangible. She felt that she could travel “virtually forever” since the advent of e-mail, as much more of what was home to her could come with her as she travelled. This “extra baggage” did not impinge on her travels. Prior to global access to e-mail, she had to return home to catch up on the “very tedious details of everyday life,” the mundane events that comprise the fabric of life at home. Postcards, phone calls, and letters often gloss over or completely ignore the minutiae of daily life. Their summary nature determines that they concentrate on the high points of recent days or weeks, and as such they erase the complex texture of Elaine’s life at home. But e-mail allowed her to keep in regular, if not daily, contact with family and friends, so she could keep up with their day-to-day activities as well as share with them the details about her life on the road. E-mail enabled Elaine to keep well informed about, even if not directly involved in (one might assume happily so), the texture of the lives of her adult children, other family members, friends, and co-workers. On the other hand, being away allowed Louise to escape the ordinariness of everyday life. It allowed her to temporarily escape the demands of work, her ongoing responsibilities for her family, and her commitments to associations and professional groups. Internet cafés would not be places where she spent much time while travelling. Home to her was a place where “everything is known. I don’t have any choices. It’s sort of laid out.” As a result home did not allow for the introspection that she desired. When she is away, “everything is new, everything is open. There’s no given. There is nothing that I have to do. There’s not the pressure.” Travel allows her, as she said, “to be on my own”; it allows her to alter her “state of mind.” Monica concurred. As soon as she smelled the ocean and felt the warm humid air of the Caribbean on her skin, the tensions of life at home left her; she said that it was as if her mind let out a sigh and slipped into another dimension as she stepped off the plane.

Home: Family, Security, Stability, Place While it could seem that both Louise and Monica had rather negative views of their life at home, they acknowledged that, in fact, it was just the opposite. As Louise said, echoing Monica’s comments about Home,

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home gave her “roots, history. I like Thomasville because people know that I am [Ruben March’s] daughter. I like being part of the history of [this] place, being part of the fabric. It’s where I grew up; the values are the values that I know.” Family, roots, and belonging in a place were very important to her. She still lives very close to the town where she grew up and teaches in the local high school. Despite her connectedness to family and place, her husband does not join Louise on her travels. In fact, she comes from a family that she described as “not natural travellers.” She categorized her father as mildly agoraphobic. She is, however, regularly and consistently away from home. In one twelve-month period, Louise excitedly reported to me, she managed to touch Wve separate continents on Wve separate trips. Much of Louise’s travel, however, has been to Korea, which she has visited six or seven times, often staying for two to three months. She has become Xuent in the language, and has cultivated what she calls her “Korean family,” which speaks of her desire to feel connected. In order to share her love of travel with her “real” family, she had taken (or was about to take) each of her Wve nieces and nephews on a major trip. When we talked, she had taken two to Korea and two to Mexico (not a place Louise really wanted to visit, but they did), and was planning a trip to Australia with the Wfth child. In recent years she has periodically convinced her mother to travel with her as she shares her love of travel with her family members. Her family always keeps her coming back to home. She and her husband have not even seriously considered moving to another province in Canada, as that would take her away from her family and the rootedness in a particular place that she shares with them. Fred noted the same stability in his life at home. He said that he and Susan were “kind of archaic,” as they had been “married for forty years, I had worked for one company for forty years,” and they had lived in only three houses in all that time. Susan agreed they were “stick-in-themuds when it comes to normal life,” which contrasted with their regular and varied global travels. Being rooted or grounded in a place, whether by physical surroundings or emotional networks, is generally understood to be natural. Taking this statement to its full extension, national orders (or borders) are also consistently assumed to be natural. Malkki (1997, 65), building on this idea, makes the case that “uprootedness/displacement” is thus, in contrast, pathological. Far from constructing pathologies, however, the journeys of the travel enthusiasts ultimately rooted them at home to a

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degree that might not at Wrst be imagined. Their experiences grounded the meanings they attributed to home, and for most of those I interviewed, to Canada – although these two ideas were not always identical. The validation of rootedness by their touristic travel ultimately, as Malkki (59) argues, fostered a “heroization,” or valorization, of the “indigenous.” “Indigenous” implies a local (as opposed to global) and thus naturalized character, which in popular discourse takes on its own moral, even noble resonance. Growing roots takes time, and thus those who know where they belong are bound together in space and time. It is good to feel connected to a particular place, and to have felt that way for a long time. People fundamentally need to know that they belong in a place to avoid the pathology of displacement. This is the assumed tragedy of the migrant, the refugee, the exile, or the transnational, whose experience is very different from that of the tourist. Such an assumed pathology suggests that people should forever stay in their places. Such positioning helps to nurture the aesthetic of difference (see Chapter 3) that was valued so strongly by those I interviewed. These questions are embedded in the struggle between twentiethcentury liberal values of “universal tolerance versus particularistic nationalism” (Lutz and Collins 1993, 245, passim). In the case of Canada, some would ask how much multiculturalism the country can tolerate before it loses its “particularistic nationalism.” Is difference best seen away from home? Does the valuing of home – Leslie’s sense when she returns home that she is “very lucky” to have been born in Canada – automatically prompt a problematic unilinear evolutionary ranking of places and people? Or can her comments also be read at face value as a response to the fact that the basic quality of life for the majority of Canadian citizens is better than in most other countries, despite the slippage in the social safety net that has occurred in recent years? Are Leslie, Albert, Gwen, Monica, and others only ranking progress, and not in some way accepting difference, by such nationalistic statements?17 The dialectics of tolerance and nationalism, of ranked progress and acceptance of difference, prompt the question of who decides who belongs where in the global landscape – a landscape that has recently, if not throughout much of human history, been very dynamic, continually reimagining its national and thus its natural order. In this chapter I have looked at the inward gaze towards home and Canada, something assumed to have its own national and natural order, even if some might argue it has never really had such qualities. But to more fully make one’s

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place meaningful, one must understand it in relation to the rest of the global landscape, particularly as the discourse of globalization repeatedly reminds us how integrally we are connected and reconnected to the world beyond our national borders. I will turn my attention now to how the tourists I spoke with made this other landscape meaningful through their travels and how they used their travels to make sense of the globalized world.

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chapter 5

Colouring the World’s Map Although everyone lives a local life, phenomenal worlds for the most part are truly global. –anthony giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity

The measure of mapping is not restricted to the mathematical; it may equally be spiritual, political or moral. By the same token, the mapping’s record is not conWned to the archival; it includes the remembered, the imagined, the contemplated. –d. cosgrove, Mappings

W

hen President Clinton stepped out on to the White House lawn in March 1999 to announce that the Americans would be participating in the NATO air strikes on Kosovo, he had set up beside him a map of the Baltic region. He took the time to explain to the American people the location of Kosovo, a Baltic state that few had heard of until armed conXict erupted there in 1998. The conXict in Kosovo, like that in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia earlier in the decade, was an enduring headline news story throughout 1998-9. These conXicts were being fought in a region that, from the end of the Second World War up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, had been incorporated into the nation of Yugoslavia. If known at all in the popular Western imagination, Yugoslavia was understood as a more liberal and tolerant example of Communism. As the Cold War ended, signalling the loss of control of the former USSR over many of its own territories, and the concomitant fall of Communist regimes in other Eastern bloc countries, new nations sprang on to the global stage as more and more ethnic and nationalist groups announced their desire for autonomy: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Slovak Republic, for example. The complexities of modern history in Eastern Europe and the 164

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former USSR bafXed many in North America; most had little sense of where these new countries were, never mind their long-suppressed desires for nationhood. The relevance of these events to the travel enthusiasts did not hinge on the deterrent to travel presented by such military activity, civil strife, and political unrest. None had imagined travelling to places that they had not known existed until very recently. When these countries emerged from often rather tumultuous situations, they were not given serious consideration as potential travel destinations as there were many other more stable, more peaceful places to go. However, these places are important to my discussion here for the sense of loss they elicited. Yugoslavia was perceived as “lost” by several I interviewed, who felt that in some small way they knew it through their travels there in the 1980s and early 1990s. Those who had explored the winding cobbled streets of the beautiful coastal city of Dubrovnik, or marvelled at the Dalmatian coast, treasured their memories of the place they understood to be Yugoslavia. Such a place was far removed from the bombed-out buildings, the accusations of unimaginable inhumanity sanctioned by ofWcial policies of “ethnic cleansing,” and the endless streams of refugees driven from their homes, which newspaper, television, and radio reports brought into the homes of these tourists daily throughout much of the early 1990s. In the summer of 1995 Susan recalled their trip to Yugoslavia in the late 1980s: “We had a wonderful tour and trip . . . and now the headlines that just make us sick . . . every day to read about the places that we know.” Michael expressed a similar sentiment. “I don’t suppose anybody will ever see Dubrovnik again the way I saw it.”1 On what I am calling the tourists’ personalized “maps” of the world, Yugoslavia, a place formerly known, faded into a distant memory as the political, social, and military strife began, and any sense of it as a contiguous whole diminished. These tourist maps existed in some measure literally, but most of my comments in this chapter speak to the metaphorical map the tourists drew of the world with their travels. Sandra and Albert sadly reXected on the devastation of another place they once knew when earthquakes wrought havoc and devastation in Turkey in 1999. It was particularly painful to see some of their favourite places so shattered, and they found it hard to imagine Turkey as a place they knew following the quakes. In a slightly different vein, Linda and Neil were anxious to return to Berlin after the Wall came down in 1989, to see how the city had changed. They felt this dramatic event would

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have radically transformed one of their favourite cities, familiar to them after several trips there. The tourists’ metaphorical maps of the world, which highlighted the places that they had visited, were constantly in Xux due to war, politics, and natural disasters. In addition, as I shall outline below, these maps were reconWgured by the continued travel of the travel enthusiasts, their ever-changing wish lists of yet-to-be-visited destinations, and their changing perceptions of places. As I outlined in Chapter 1, those I spoke with were generally well educated, the majority having had at least some postsecondary education. They were regular readers of newspapers, followed world events on television or radio, preferred to watch “educational” television programs, and many were interested in art, music, and theatre. Through all of these media, the world is brought into their daily lives. But journalistic sound bites, Wltering, and headlining construct a fragmented and disconnected picture of the world. The media takes little time to situate current stories in the discourse of history and the other contingencies necessary to grasp a news headline’s full impact. One thing some found helped make sense of all the news and information that bombards them was their travels. As Rachel said, “You see it on TV every day, [but] it does not really impact you until you go there.” MacCannell made this point early in his examination of the tourist. To him, the tourist through the “act of sightseeing is . . . constructing totalities from his disparate experiences” (1999, 15). Through travel, the world became a better-understood place, even if what they knew was limited to the perspective of a tourist. Such personalized mapping of the world is one strategy those I interviewed used to make sense of the often confusing, ambiguous, globalized world of the last few decades. Mapping the world as it became known to them through their travels, I suggest, is an appropriate description of what these tourists were engaged in, and gave meaning in some measure to their travels. “Mental maps of the world,” as geographer David Harvey calls them, were one way in which these tourists organized their “understanding of places . . . [that was] invested with all manner of personal or collective hopes and fears” (1993, 22, emphasis added). Maps, Harvey notes elsewhere, are devices that “order phenomena in space” (1989, 242), and as such, they are “totalizing devices” (252; see also de Certeau 1984, 115-30). These maps allow for the “homogenisation and reiWcation of the rich diversity of spatial itineraries and spatial stories.” Harvey continues that all too readily maps erase bit by bit all traces of the practices that produce them (Harvey 1989, 253).

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The metaphorical maps drawn by these tourists were more than just devices to “order phenomena in space,” however. They charted not only the spatial dimensions of their travel but also various dimensions of time. The amount of time spent in some places, having arrived just in time ahead of the “tourist wave,” and Wnding the place and people visited positioned in the time that the travel enthusiasts imagined them to be, often prompting a sense that the tourists had travelled back in time, were some of the temporal dimensions that annotated these maps. Such mapping constructed a place, both in space and in time, that often had little connection, either historically or contemporaneously, to the place and the people who actually live in the locations marked on the tourists’ maps. I will return to this point below. The tourists with whom I spoke were both engaged participants in, and trying to escape from, what David Harvey (1989, 240) has called “time-space compression.” This phenomenon, which has grown in intensity with the increase in the capitalization of the world, is characterized as a “speed-up in the pace of life, while . . . overcoming spatial barriers [so] that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us” (ibid.). Fred and Susan’s decision to venture to Africa on their third trip out of Canada exempliWes this time-space compression. As Susan said of their planning, “We were reading at that point more and more about the decimation of all the animals of East Africa. The elephant was already going way down in number. Even then they were already talking about how poor the animal population was compared even to ten years prior. If we were going to do a major trip, our next one should be maybe to something like that. It’s obviously changing very radically, and maybe we should go while it’s still got that sort of feeling to it that you’re really seeing the world at its best.” Before going to Africa they had travelled internationally only as far as Bermuda (to stay at a beach resort) and Britain (to visit relatives). But the safari parks in Kenya rapidly became a place they could consider visiting, in large part due to the reasonably priced tours they found “through our research.” Susan and Fred started to imagine the African continent as spatially closer, as accessible to them, and as something they should see soon, because the “real” Africa was fast disappearing. Time-space compression had a somewhat different character for Michael on a three-day camel trek in northern India. This journey allowed him to travel back in time, if somewhat uncomfortably. He described it this way:

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We went off to Jaisalmer. Jaisalmer is a fascinating place. It’s on the edge of the Great Indian Desert. Beyond, it’s just desert, desert, desert as far as Pakistan, off towards the Middle East. This is a traditional trading route of the caravans from the Middle East. There’s this great fortress up on the hills of the city. Then, of course, all of these cities were fortiWed. And we went out on this camel trek for three days. By the end of the Wrst day [everyone was sore]. They are awkward beasts. Their gait, I never quite get used to the [rhythm]. They do something that’s equivalent to a horse cantering, it’s just jarring, jarring, jarring [laughter]. And the second day, oh, it was quite difWcult. But it was fascinating because there’s little villages out in the desert, and people who live out there and make their living out there. And then we caught sight of Jaisalmer, this great city and the fortress. I thought, this is a sight that these caravans have seen for centuries. The people that came, the spices from the Middle East and whatever trading goods they were bringing back and forth. They’d have been travelling for weeks and months across these – through the Middle East and the desert – and Wnally, they would see this city. It was quite a thrilling sense. And it’s a very old, just like a medieval city. You know, winding, narrow, cobblestone streets.

Monica and Lawrence travelled to South America to Wnd places where they imagined time to have stood still, where they would “see people unaffected by tourists . . . [people in] their more natural state . . . [and] where you do not have to bump into a lot of people.” Such places, in Monica’s words, were where the world was not rushing forward to “become one.” Like others I interviewed, their metaphorical mapping demonstrated a “free-wheeling denial of the complexity of the world, and a penchant for the representation of it in terms of highly simpliWed rhetorical propositions” (Harvey 1989, 351). Malkki (1997, 54) maintains that the discourse of the “contemporary national order” implies the rhetoric of a “normal or natural order of things.” In this rhetoric it is “self-evident” that nations are “‘real’ . . . Wxed in time and space and ‘recognizable’ on a map” (Anthony Smith as quoted ibid., 55). This perspective frames how the tourists I spoke with mapped the world they came to know through their travels. They “territorialized [it] in the segmentary fashion of a multicoloured school atlas,” although their maps were ordered and coloured with somewhat more nuance and complexity than the “yellow, green, pink, orange and

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blue countries” of that same atlas (ibid.). Furthermore, unlike the atlas, the world as mapped by the tourists had “vague . . . ‘fuzzy spaces’” (ibid.). Some places, particularly home and places travelled to, were clearly deWned with solid borders. Such units had no “bleeding boundaries” (Tambiah 1985, 4; Trinh 1989, 94) unlike other units on the map whose boundaries were much more ambiguous, except where they butted against the bold black line of known territory. These mapping strategies were part of the tourists’ effort to “order phenomena in space” as they “attempt[ed] to carve out . . . [a] knowable world from the inWnity of possible worlds which are daily shown to [them] on the television screen” (Harvey 1989, 351).2 Through their travels they worked to construct an “ ‘ordered disorder’ of the world in a [manner similar to that] of the carnival, fair, music halls, spectacles” of the nineteenth century, and the theme parks and malls of the late twentieth (Featherstone 1996, 286-7). Like these spectacles, travel allows tourists “to construct an identity[;] to know who you are you need to know who you are not.” What is conWned to the boundaries in this process continues “to exert a fascination or allure,” prompting a quest by the tourist to position what is marginalized within the dynamic relationship that binds the local to the global (Featherstone 1993; 1996, 286-7). Bourdieu would imagine them coding and reproducing social relations on a global scale by their chosen movement through time and space (1977; Harvey 1989, 247; see also Chapter 2). At its most successful, this mapping process fostered among the travel enthusiasts some degree of postmodern appreciation for “community and locality, place and regional resistances, social movements, respect for otherness and the like” (Harvey 1989, 351; see also Bruner 1994). As I argue throughout this book, this appreciation ameliorates, at least in some small measure, Harvey’s negative claim that although travel is intended to “broaden the mind . . . [it] just as frequently ends up conWrming prejudices” (Harvey 1989, 351; see also Bruner 1994, 1995). In addition to metaphorical maps, several of those I spoke with kept actual maps on which they tracked places that they had been and places that they wanted to go. As Michael said of his map, “I decided I wanted to see a lot of places in the world, and I started jotting down where I wanted to go. A lot of people laugh at me about this. I put this big map of the world up in my study, upstairs. And I got some map tacks, and I put one colour tack in places I’ve been and I put another colour in places that I really want to go. It covers the whole world and there are a lot of

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tacks.” Other people’s maps noted the dates and duration of trips to various places. Some may not have kept actual maps to track their travels on, but used the metaphor to speak of their travels. As Monica said of her visit to Cuba, “It’s another pinpoint on the map and you can say, ‘Well, been there.’” Everyone noted how important real maps were in their efforts to get to know a place. Jennifer gets a map as soon as she gets to a new place, “so that I don’t have to spend too much time not going the right way.” Samuel and Donna mapped their time and space in the villages they visited in England in a particular pattern. Samuel laid out for me how they begin to make sense of a new place: Generally speaking, if we’re driving we try to arrive at the local tourist bureau no later than 3 o’clock in the afternoon to get them to nominate a half-decent B and B for us within a price criterion, but the Wrst question is, what is the going market price? This is normally available. And then the second criterion is, it must be within walking distance from the town centre. And have parking so we can park then take it from there. [Then] the Wrst thing you do is take the round-the-town tour. Most cities have either a walking tour – if it’s a small city there’s a pamphlet of a walking tour – or a bus that goes round. And you take that. And you listen and you make notes. And then you decide what you want to go back to see.

Rachel marked her travel destinations on the world map a little more subtly, yet in a manner embedded in the dominant capitalist discourse that could be said to reduce them to commodities. On her trip to Angel Falls in Venezuela, which she felt was very distant and remote from her own world when she visited as a young university graduate, she was keen to buy something with her American Express card in the small town near the falls. Upon her return home, the listing of this purchase on her monthly statement veriWed for her that she had “really been there,” and that a small part of this distant place had become part of her world. O R GA N I Z I N G T H E M A P

The metaphorical mapping engaged in by the tourists integrated, or more properly began from, their understanding of home and Canada (see Chapter 4). At the time that I did my interviews with these people, they all called Canada home, and thus Canada was central to all of their

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maps. It was the departure point of all of their travels; it was where they returned to. And while not all those I spoke with had seen all of Canada, they knew it in complex ways. By virtue of their residence here for all their lives, or for lengthy periods if they were immigrants, they had a nuanced understanding of Canadian life that far exceeded their knowledge of any place they visited as a tourist. As such Canada would have a unique colouring on their maps, distinctive in its intensity, even if it was not necessarily identically shaded by everyone. Besides places known through residence3 and travel, and places on a wish list of future destinations, other broad categories were noted on these maps. This included places once known but now transformed by political, economic, or natural upheavals; places understood as undesirable, unappealing, or inaccessible to tourists, which I call “black holes”; and places with no really attractive or repellent image or seen as undesirable to visit at present, but more ambiguous than the black holes. Benjamin and Elaine called these “empty spaces.” But the shading of the map was not as straightforward as these six categories might imply. The complexity, or sometimes the ambiguity, of an experience in a particular place already visited would add nuance to its shading, a point that I will discuss in depth below. Places on wish lists were more concretely imagined, yet often shaded differently depending on how urgently someone wanted to go there. Places that had been transformed or were in a state of transition were marked relative to places visited, empty spaces, or black holes. Empty spaces, and in some measure black holes, held the potential, in due course, to move on to the wish list of desirable places to visit, which emphasizes that none of these categorizations were permanently Wxed. Places could shift from category to category in response to a wide range of factors, such as changes in the local political climate, the development of tourism infrastructure, and changing personal travel tastes and expectations as individuals moved through their travel careers. Susan, for example, noted in a letter to me that she and Fred had become more willing to go on more restful trips as they grew older. Monica and Lawrence, on the other hand, were starting to look for “good diving sites” as their interest in the sport had grown. CAT E G O R I Z I N G P L AC E S

Africa, outside the safari parks of East Africa and some regions of North Africa, was one place that was frequently imagined as an empty space.

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Sandra said, “Africa is just politically unstable, diseases are rampant . . . It is just not a good time.” And Olivia said, “Africa doesn’t attract me. I’m always a little afraid of [it] . . . of all the upheaval and . . . you hear so many awful stories.” To Rachel, who had already travelled twice to Africa, Asia (that is, Japan, Korea, and China) was not very appealing to her at the time of our conversations, largely due to her concern over the numbers of people there, and the language barriers these countries presented. Elaine and Benjamin, while they said that they knew nothing of South America, felt for some reason “it did not appeal.” They attributed part of their disinterest to the fact that there was much for them yet to learn about the parts of the globe they had already visited. Neil and Linda were not really interested in travelling to places that did not have what they understood as history, which to them was a European phenomenon.4 In Europe, Neil said, “The history is there standing right in front of you. There’s a cathedral, a thousand years old. The people who built those had the faith and the technology to build all those marvellous structures that are still standing today.” They had, however, travelled to India, because their daughter was living there. This trip took them to a part of the world that they previously never imagined visiting. It confronted them with a history that they found somewhat disorienting, due to their lack of familiarity with it. The international moves of family and friends generally contributed to the dynamic mapping of places by those I interviewed. Besides the desire to visit people, these familial moves often made travel to an area more feasible; if accommodation was available, the cost of the trip became more affordable. Some places also became more desirable destinations because family or friends living there would have some degree of local knowledge of the place, and be able to act as informal tour guides. The fall of Communism in much of Eastern Europe and the USSR at the end of the 1980s opened up destinations for some that had previously been seen as black holes. These places had largely been difWcult to travel through and accessible only in very prescribed itineraries. The oppressiveness of the Communist regime and its status as an enemy of the West during the Cold War further made these places undesirable to visit. It was these factors, I have to note, that had the opposite effect on Bruce, who camped in Russia in the 1960s. He told me, “I’d always wanted to go to Russia, too, because of it being so different – another political system, under Communism. I was so curious about it.” Several tourists

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expressed a desire to go to Prague when we spoke; others had recently been. The Czech city is an example of a destination that opened up due to recent political changes. Timing also kept the map dynamic: it was the time to see Prague now, before it became too modern, too Western, and too many other tourists got there. Several I interviewed noted that Europe, Australia, and Canada stimulated little interest at present, but were places to visit in the future. As I have mentioned, travel to these destinations could be delayed because they were easy places to travel through. In contrast, large sections of the globe, including the Asian steppe, parts of the continental United States, some of the Middle East, and many regions of the former USSR, did not appear to enter the consciousness of most of those I interviewed as potential destinations. When asked, most said that they knew too little about these areas, did not see them as accessible, and did not imagine them as very appealing to a tourist. It was assumed that there were few tourist facilities there, and little to see and do. They constituted black holes on the tourists’ maps. M A R K I N G P L AC E S A S K N OW N

What made a place real, clearly marked on the map, and known to the tourists was a complex, highly personalized phenomenon. Many things contributed to such knowledge, including the barriers of language, the cultural conWdence and travel experience of the tourist, the length of trip, the mode of travel, the degree of travel fatigue, and how appealing a destination was. In addition, some places were simply more knowable than others. Some resonated a greater familiarity, particularly destinations in Canada, Europe, Australia (to some measure), and the United States. Neil contrasted his ability to know Europe with his disconnection to India: “And of course [India’s] a complete right about turn, because in Europe where the history is Christian, you feel as if you know a little bit. You go to India and there’s nothing there you know. So that was a whole new experience, a wild new culture shock, and of course it’s very shocking for middle-class people.” Susan anticipated similar things about India, and thus wanted to make sure that they had a good guide to help them understand their experience. She commented, “We realized India was going to be like nothing we’d ever seen before. No matter how much you’ve seen of the world, I think India’s unique.” Others grounded their sense of knowing a place in their ability to

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comprehend it across multiple dimensions. In Frances’s terms, Europe allowed her to get a “feel of the whole culture,” because she could “eat the food, learn the history, see the art.” Monica described her European travel as an opportunity to see “the world’s greatest art . . . the world’s greatest architecture, [to] shop, [to] eat until we’re pigged out.” On the Xip side she felt that, travelling outside of the Western world, she was likely to encounter “paradise”: a place of great natural beauty, a place of no stress and worry, a place of relaxation and indulgence, a place where people lived in a “more natural state, unaffected by tourists,” a place that seemed to exist entirely outside time-space compression. To her and others, Europe had Culture with a capital C, as opposed to places like Belize that had “a culture,” something grounded in difference, more naturalized, and distinct from, yet ideally sharing parallels with, her own life experience. She mused with me about the women she saw in such places who she assumed worried about the same things as she did: the health of their children, what the future held for them, whether they would know how to act in a proper manner. Places where one went to experience a culture were often more difWcult to “feel the whole culture” of, as Frances would have said. But the curious nature, exoticism, or even primitiveness of such places fed the intensity of the way they were marked as known on the tourists’ maps. Trips to such places were often the ones that tourists were most anxious to tell me about, a point that I will return to later. Some of the travel enthusiasts came to know places because of strong personal connections. On one trip to England, Jennifer visited the house where she was born. She commented, “It was just fabulous. I almost felt like something would happen. [Something] I could not handle. It was like coming full circle. I really felt my roots when I was over there.” Some places were known as the birthplaces and homes of personal heroes or heroines. Susan was thrilled to see the statue of Edith Cavell on their travels in England: “I remember reading the story of her when I was a kid. She was a true heroine for me. I was really thrilled to see her.” Similarly, Gladys treasured memories of her trip over the White Pass in the Yukon. She had been fascinated since childhood with the stories of those who had travelled the route in the nineteenth century, hundreds dying in the process. She was very keen to see the place where foolishly “so many died in pursuit of a little bit of gold.” Robert identiWed other intangible, almost spiritual linkages to places. Such feelings greatly affected how he came to know some of the places

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he travelled, and he believed these linkages often unwittingly led him to visit certain places. He told me of how he and Annelise found their way to a small coastal village in Italy: We were interested in seeing a bit more of this area and asked somebody in a café, or maybe somebody working in a café offered to suggest [a place to visit]. They suggested, if we’d like some nice beaches, there’s this tiny little village that nobody knows about called Bonassola. So we took the little milk run train that goes to Bonassola and loved it. Stayed ten days. It was absolutely magniWcent. It’s just at the foothills of the Alps. It was really a magical place for us. Especially for me. [Annelise] and I [had gone earlier] to see a hypnotherapist that does regression therapy and past life regressions. And I discovered that, in some other existence, some other life, I had apparently been a travelling Roman tutor, or a travelling tutor during the Roman era, and I indicated just [this] place [that is, Bonassola] on the map as being where I had spent most of that life. I don’t remember whether I was consciously intending to revisit that place on this leg of the trip. If I wasn’t intending it consciously, I was very probably intending it unconsciously. In any event, we ended up there and I felt a connection with the place, and it was very special.

Robert later commented that his sense of knowing places was strongly connected to his emotional or spiritual response to them: “I have no real emotional connections with [some] cultures. I have visited, for instance, Mexico and Cuba, and although they are lovely countries, I don’t enjoy them the same way that I enjoy France or England, because I don’t feel a sense of connectedness. It is a profoundly important part of my enjoying a place that the spirits that speak to me are Western European spirits.” His sentiments echo those of others – Jackie’s “mystical” experience of southern Africa, Gwen’s unexplainable desire to visit and revisit India – mentioned in earlier chapters. Comparison is central to so much about how we know things, and the travel experience is no different. It allows for a comprehension of difference and similarity. Places and people are implicitly compared to home. Treasured moments for Elaine in Morocco were remembered because “there was nothing to rush to,” a contrast to her life at home, which was scheduled by the demands of her family, job, and other professional activities. Further comparisons between places visited previously were

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another way people came to gain some understanding of new places. Rachel compared her experience of the temples in Yucatán with those she saw during her visit to Egypt: “I wanted to see the ruins, the Mayan ruins. And that was a really good [experience]. I think that [they] had a bigger impact on me than I thought [they would], because [of] the comparison between the Egyptian pyramids and the Mayan [ones].” A comparative frame frequently privileged what was different about places the travel enthusiasts visited. It constructed a logic that helped them distinguish one place from another, thus letting them shade each place uniquely on their maps. Any distinctions made, however, could be framed only within the tourists’ own cultural logic, a point I have made in earlier chapters. It was largely impossible for the tourists to step outside of their own cultural sense-making logic – even well-trained anthropologists at times struggle to accomplish this. Any cultural logic is inherently ambiguous and contradictory, although from the insider’s view these realities are either blindly ignored, or simply accepted as what is done. But there was understandably often little space for such inconsistency or Xuidity in the tourist’s brief encounter with an Other’s cultural practice. It takes long association with a culture other than one’s own to develop such nuanced understanding. Donna and Samuel’s obvious frustration with the explanation they received about residence rules on the Chinese tea plantation they visited is a good example of their efforts to try to understand Chinese practice in terms that made sense to them, terms that they understood as the way the Chinese think things through: donna: They were explaining to us that each family is an economic unit. It is . . . assigned a certain area of the plantation to take care of. And the unit is the mother and father. Children move into the unit, as they are [allowed] one child and one, normally one, grandparent. And they live in one house. But they were telling us that the farmers all own their own houses. And that when a couple marries, the girl goes to live with her husband’s family. And, of course, immediately came the question from somewhere in the bus, “What happens to the economic unit ultimately, to the economic unit that that girl leaves? Because the parents then become elderly and are unable to fulWll their duties as an economic unit.” Interestingly, the answer was, “Well, if the girl’s economic, if the girl’s house is better than the boy’s, then the boy will come to the girl’s. And we said, “Well then, what happens to the boy’s house?”

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samuel: We saw that question became almost incomprehensible. donna: They couldn’t understand [what we were talking about]. “Well, they give it to a nephew.” samuel: What happens to . . . [the nephew’s house]. What happens there? donna: We found that we could not . . . this had not . . . did not seem to have been worked out. And I’m surprised. Because the Chinese are not known for going into things without thinking it through. The metaphorical maps the tourists developed were clearly not simple constructions. Multidimensional, in constant Xux, with a wide range of nuanced shading, in the end they implicitly reXected the tourists’ efforts to impose a logic on the ambiguities and complexities of the world. In the following sections I take a closer look at some further dimensions that added even greater complexity to these maps. I M AG I N I N G S CA L E

If scale is central to any map, what was the scale of these metaphorical maps (Cosgrove 1999, 9)? They were all divided into six basic categories – home, places visited, places transformed, places on a wish list to visit, black holes, and empty spaces – but whether these places were on a map of an ever-shrinking global village or an ever-expanding world varied with how different individuals imagined the scale of the world they lived in. For Jackie, coherent with Harvey’s idea of time-space compression, the world appears to be shrinking to a global village. She saw this process intensify in her own lifetime: When I was a little kid I had a maiden aunt who was a schoolteacher, and every summer she used to do something like go to Europe. And she’d show us her slides. And all my relatives would moan and groan and say, “Oh God!” I loved it. I thought it was great. I thought someday, if I was lucky, maybe I could go to Europe. I mean once. And, the world has become such a small place, I’ve been able to go so many places. I’ve made it, you know, I’ve tried to make it my business to take up the opportunities. [emphasis added]

Monica told me of her conXict with her Wrst husband, who “spent money on computers and stereos” while she wanted to save for travel. She used

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to think, “If I can only get to Europe once.” She has since been there six or seven times, often staying for up to three months. More recently she and her second husband, Lawrence, have travelled repeatedly to the Caribbean, Central America, and parts of South America. The world, despite the constraints of a family and owning a small business, has become a much smaller place for Monica. Michael, on the other hand, felt that no matter how much he travelled, he would never be able to see the world in his lifetime because it was “just so big.” So had the world become compressed through dramatically improved travel technologies and rapid development of many different facilities for tourists in the second half of the twentieth century, making a trip to Europe seem like a simple undertaking? Or had the same processes made the world larger by making so many places more readily accessible to tourists? Michael had recently travelled to Irian Jaya, which he had never heard of before he read about it in the travel literature. Being able to travel ironically seemed to have increased the size of the globe to him in some ways. C H A RT I N G T H E R E A L / D E L I N E AT I N G P O S T M O D E R N I T Y

Travel guidebooks, travel literature, and other forms of promotional material were central to the experience of many of the travel enthusiasts. Michael commented to me that “that guy, Frommer, really knew what he was doing, and helped me a lot in the early days of my travel.” He attributed much of his understanding of how to travel “affordably” to Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day. He and his wife had used this guide on their Wrst trip to Europe in the 1960s, and he still proudly owned his original copy. Gwen commented to me that while on her extended trip to India, she “followed closely the Lonely Planet guide.” Many of those I spoke with were very adroit readers of such guides and other travel literature, deconstructing as a matter of course the commentaries offered in them. I noted in Chapter 2 that the travel enthusiasts often developed a sense of having a conversation with the authors of these different texts. Leslie commented about her ongoing study of travel materials, “I think that there’s a way to read brochures and I think I can do it now. Still, it surprises me, but the pictures are way wrong: you have to read into the paragraph what it actually says.” She knew travel brochures could not always be trusted as they often painted too rosy a picture of a place. No destination could be presented in such deWnitive terms. She,

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along with others, did “signiWcant interpretive work” on these materials, rather than “simply receiving them” (Lutz and Collins 1993, 217).5 Leslie and others I interviewed used their well-honed skills in the reading of travel literature to accomplish one of two things: either to design a route or Wnd a destination that suited their desired experience; or to select what was meaningful to see in a destination, allowing them to imagine getting beyond the touristy sites. In the latter selection, they managed their engagement with what the dominant discourse deWned as being satisfying to their touristic “gaze.” Many of the tourists I spoke with greatly valued the brief glimpses of local culture that they might get at a local market, well beyond what they saw and learned at designated tourist sites. However, such readings and engagements, no matter how resistant they were imagined to be to the prescriptive experiences laid out in tourist guides and promotional literature, were never “precultural or entirely idiosyncratic” (ibid.). In fact what the travel enthusiasts saw and experienced rarely took them far beyond Goffman’s (1959; cf. MacCannell 1999) “front stages” of the places they visited. The close reading skills demonstrated by many of the travel enthusiasts and the knowledge base they gained from being seasoned travellers were central to the processes whereby they selected where and how they travelled. They studied promotional materials and guidebooks, and took the advice of trusted travel agents, who had learned by trial and error what kind of experience these individuals would be looking for. Most did their own extensive research using newspapers, magazines, television programs, and more recently, Web-based resources. As this material is intended to lure prospective customers, and to suggest that foreign travellers are very welcome, any disjunctures that may contradict this are very muted and, as Leslie said, to be detected only through careful and experienced reading. Even travel guides such as the popular Lonely Planet series, which describe a range of experiences one might have in a certain destination, resolutely promote only the positive dimensions of the travel experience. These publications, according to one analysis, highlight mainly the aesthetic nature of a place or experience, and, in turn, afWrm accepted imaginings of the Other (Bhattacharyya 1997; Silver 1993).6 Several authors have suggested that most travel literature implies to prospective travellers that something is missing from their lives in the modern world. It is thus through travel that one can leave the apparent vacuousness of modern life behind, to visit a world rich in aesthetics and

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old, if not ancient, history. Alternatively, one can visit the world of the exotic (be it landscape or people), or the primitive, naturalized Other, a place where Western culture is rooted, but from which it has subsequently, for better or for worse, progressed forward. Such destinations were described by MacCannell in the 1970s (1999, 91) as being the location of the “real life” that modern tourists desire to visit in their effort to counteract alienation from their own world. Silver (1993, 307), nearly twenty years later, reiterated the same sentiments. Travel, to him, is “an attempt by post-modern subjects to neutralize the alienation in contemporary societies, by holding on to disappearing elements of pre-modernity.” According to the travel literature, such real life or premodern experiences are to be found in quaint English villages, the romantic towns of the Italian and French countryside, the white sand beaches of PaciWc islands, the ancient monuments of Greece and Egypt, the melange of cultural worlds in India, or among the remote, primitive tribes of Papua New Guinea. It is not found in the suburban sprawl of North American cities, or the urban redevelopment of postwar Europe, or even in the urbanized perimeter of Australia. With some searching, real life can be found in the historic architecture, art galleries, and winding cobbled streets of the old cities of Europe or parts of the Orient, the latter being the visible evidence of the magniWcence and genius from which Western modernity progressed (Said 1979). It is also found in the magniWcent wonders of the natural world: Ayers Rock, Mount Kilimanjaro, the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon Basin, the Costa Rican rainforest, or, ironically, East African safari parks. These “real” places are primarily imagined as quite distinct and separate from anything experienced in the modern or postmodern world. They exist in one of two pasts that can be readily visited: the immediate past of the modern world; and the time before history, when humans, if they existed at all, were much closer to nature (Fabian 1983). Almost polar in their opposition, these two pasts (summarized in Table 1) construct fundamentally different destinations for the tourist. However, they are ironically parallel in their opposition to alienated (post)modernity.7 Bhattacharyya (1997, 388) holds that only “when there is research on actual tourist praxis will it be possible to understand the role of guidebooks in the complex process of mediating a tourism destination.” When I talked to these tourists about their praxis, I found that they were not really troubled by what some might see as the ambiguities of their visits to these imagined premodern or real life places. The travel enthusiasts

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felt that many of the places they travelled to were much better places to visit than to live. Places were seen to be particularly nice for a visit when they were “clean” and offered at least modest places to stay (some asked for somewhat more than modest), good food to eat in comfortable surroundings, good weather, interesting things to see and do, and reliable transportation back home. In other words, some facilities were available, and tourists were expected, if not anticipated and welcomed. The tourists were happy, if not very desirous, that these modern realities juxtapose the premodern, real worlds they wanted to visit. They wanted to stay in such places only for a limited time, and wanted to know these places only in certain ways. They did not necessarily want to know the in-depth details of local political dissension, oppressive governments, environmental problems, or the degree of poverty in the area.8 They desired to visit, for a deWned period of time, a world that contrasted in some way with their daily lived reality, a place that gave them a point of reXection on their own world but did not overly challenge their accepted standards of comfort. MacCannell (1999, 11) suggests that the tourist, from this point of reXection, is looking for “differentiation [which] is the origin of alternatives and the feeling of freedom in modern society.” Furthermore, the tourists wanted these distinctions to remain. Donna, along with several others, lamented some of the “distinctiveness” that places such as China were losing to “modernization”: “We just felt that, that, they were taking in everything American or Western and rejecting so much of their own, and this concerned us because they do have something to offer. But we’re concerned that they’re taking too much of the worst of the Western [world].” Table 1 The past as destination Immediate past

Before history

civilized historical familiar West rich developed heritage have Culture

primitive prehistoric/ahistoric exotic East poor undeveloped paradise have “a” culture

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The adoption of Western goods and ideas could be seen to “threaten the white middle-class . . . sense of position on the evolutionary scale,” a sentiment that Lutz and Collins (1993, 250) attribute to National Geographic readers’ responses to the appearance of modern Western goods in the journal’s photographs. But this sentiment does not necessarily underlie Samuel and Donna’s disquiet. They more clearly feared homogenization and the loss of difference, or distinction of one group from another.9 Desmond proposes that the touristic emphasis on difference is “ultimately [a] gesture of inclusivity” that naturalizes hierarchies, facilitating the maintenance of “the material and epistemological structures which support them without contestation” (1999, 257-8; see also Chapter 3). Donna remarked on the amount of imported polyester clothing that she saw being worn by local people in China, which she felt a most uncomfortable fabric for the 37-degree, high-humidity weather at the time.10 She and Samuel rejected clothes made from “synthetic Western fabrics” when travelling in such conditions, preferring “natural cottons.” From her perspective, certain technologies and ways of doing things suited different places, and were best kept separate. There was, at least, a nominal recognition that not everything about Western progress was good. Critical reXection on what was being gained by such wholesale acceptance was primarily what Donna and Samuel desired. Their comments can be read as a plea to learn from our mistakes, not just as an expressed fear of too much evolutionary progress towards us. The juxtaposition of premodern and modern was seen as much more benign in places such as Britain. It somehow seemed less of a threat to global cultural diversity, possibly because Britain is already a central player in the Western world. As Susan and Fred noted, “That’s the silly thing . . . well, not silly, but it’s a most remarkable thing about Britain: you still feel you can walk back into time and yet, a mile down the road you can be in some sort of suburban jungle.” In a similarly unquestioning manner, Tony indulged in the chocolate fondue he and his fellow trekkers were served one night for dessert midway along the Inca Trail in Bolivia. Such a treat did not seem out of context to him – in fact, he greatly enjoyed it. If the modern had to mesh with the premodern to give him good food along the trail, then he was in total support of such intertwining. To enjoy a rich dessert of Swiss origin,11 on a journey promoted as one where you could experience the world of the ancient Inca who travelled the arduous route centuries before, demonstrated the malleability of the imagined ancient world he

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was visiting, emphasizing its ultimate postmodern reality. On the other hand, this incongruity, so pleasant to Tony, contrasted with the lives of the people who live along the route, the descendants of the Inca, who have few opportunities to enjoy either any parallel decadence from their own world or the luxuries of the world of the tourists. Visiting the premodern often fell into the category of the most favoured or most interesting trips I was told about. For example, Michael called travelling through Irian Jaya “the best of all trips.” In his narratives about this trip, the premodern was emphasized as central to his experience. He described for me some of what he saw: [The local people] come in [to the market] very early in the morning. Although it’s right on the equator, up in this higher elevation it’s quite chilly in the morning. And you see them walking in with virtually nothing on, just bare, except, in the case of the women, this tiny little grass skirt, and the men with their penis gourds. For an anthropologist, it must be just a fascinating place. They still have practices that we Wnd just abhorrent. One of them being that in the case of bereavement, they cut off a woman’s Wnger at a joint. And you see women with very deformed hands. This has been cut off, and this one and this one, and it’s a crude tool [they use]. A villager showed us their mummy, this ancestral mummy. It was all in a fetal position, but the guy brings it out for us. It’s supposed to be hundreds of years old. It’s scenically a beautiful area. It was fascinating seeing all these people.

He had earlier noted in passing that many ambiguities in the primitive world had confronted him in Irian Jaya, though these were not the memories or images he chose to emphasize. The reading he had done before he went stressed how “isolated, how truly stone age” it was; how people in Irian Jaya somehow lived in a distant, ancient past. Yet Michael described his Wrst impressions at the airport: “You will see some of them wearing the T-shirt that says ‘Miami Dolphins’ on it or something. Next is a woman in a little tiny grass skirt about this big [holding his hands about Wfteen centimetres apart], and then there’s somebody else with Adidas shorts or somebody’s old thrown-away runners, and others in bare feet. They have a lot of their old customs that are still a part of their life, and it’s kind of mixed with what’s going on.” Initially, he had stayed just across from the airport, in a small hotel “right on the sea, [with] palm trees” all around. Few of his photographs

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highlighted the signs of such modern touristic intrusions, however. Rather, his photographs reinforced the stone-age images of the tourist literature. His souvenirs included a penis gourd – the singular item of clothing worn historically by men in the region – and a woven net bag – an essential, traditional, all-purpose item made and used by women in the region. The perceived minimalism of these items further situated the Irian Jayans in some distant primitive past.12 Michael, like others, rarely highlighted the people and places he visited in what he saw as the more exotic parts of the world as part of the fragmented postmodern reality of the late twentieth century. Often, ironically, the tourists had observed but not highlighted the fallacy of such representation as postmodern. Frequently, what Tony, Michael, and others wanted to see in places such as Irian Jaya, Belize, and India offered little space for the ambiguous realities or the power dynamics that frame the lived experience of many of those who are subjects of the “tourist gaze.” Such a perspective keeps those visited, those whom van den Berghe (1994) calls the “tourees,” Wrmly locked on the right-hand side of Table 1. It somehow keeps the tourees disconnected from the modern/postmodern world. Few of the tourists I interviewed were able, or wanted, to see what MacCannell (1992) has called “ex-primitives,” assumed to be frozen in time, who simply perform primitiveness for others, while having incorporated into their daily lives many dimensions of the modern/postmodern world. Such ex-primitives have for a long time engaged with the larger world system though trade relations, either as a labour pool or by virtue of being colonial subjects. More recently, much of their engagement with this larger system has come to centre on the tourism industry (Taylor 2001). The discourse of the tourism industry emphasizes the authentic primitiveness of such people and places, ignoring its performed nature (MacCannell 1992). Such popular discourses fuel the tourists’ ongoing search for the primitive, premodern, or real person, a pursuit which, ironically, escaped much of the close critical reading given to other travel texts by those I interviewed. Despite the Wxity that these tourists seemed to attribute to such individuals and the places they lived, many spoke of the urgency they felt to get to some places. They wanted to see them before they were altered by the encroachment of the modern world. They wanted to get there before they could not escape observing the questionable modernization that Donna and Samuel lamented in China. They knew major changes, for better or for worse, were on the way in many places. But they chose to

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imagine such changes as about to happen, not as something that had already happened (or more correctly, had been happening for several centuries, or millennia). This parallels, in some measure, the view of the tourists whom anthropologists Deborah Gewertz and Fred Errington encountered on a luxury cruise on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea in the late 1980s. They noted these luxury tourists, when they acknowledged cultural changes among the locals, perceived them within a unilinear evolutionary paradigm. To these cruise tourists, Papua New Guineans were “backward, but on the road” to the better, more “developed and advanced” way of life (1991, 43). So as not to dispel this perception, Gewertz and Errington had been speciWcally told by cruise organizers “not to over-emphasize the extent to which change had already taken place” among residents of the Sepik river villages, as those on the cruise did not wish to hear such things in their lectures (39). Although less rigid in their adherence to an evolutionary paradigm than the tourists encountered by Errington and Gewertz,13 many of those I interviewed sought to visit places still connected to an imagined past, a purer time, before other tourists got there, and somehow outside time-space compression. Their experience of a place was often diminished, as Benjamin noted of Thailand, if they were not able to do this. When he and Elaine arrived, they found that things had changed rapidly in recent years, most directly because of the large number of tourists who had come into the area. In contrast, Vietnam, in his view, had so far been “saved” from a massive inXux of tourists – ironically the group seen as the most polluting force by most of those I interviewed. The thousands of American troops who were in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s, the devastating twenty-year war, and previous colonial regimes obviously had a dramatic impact on the country. But such inXuences were more readily accepted as part of the story of the place, and these historical forces were imagined as less destructive than a burgeoning tourism industry. Benjamin commented that Vietnam, unlike Thailand, hasn’t been touristed to death, yet. I don’t think there’s that many years left. We might be able to see something of the real Vietnam before it’s too late. We might already be too late. We’re certainly too late with Thailand. I liked Thailand, I must say, but I kept thinking when I was there, I wish I’d been here twenty years ago. You go and see these remote hill tribes who supposedly have seen very few Westerners, and you sit down with them and they start

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singing all the songs you grew up [with]. I mean, so, they’ve seen a lot of Westerners.

Others recognized that a range of forces could radically alter the reality of a place. They commented with a certain degree of pleasure that they had managed to get to places before, sometimes just before, any kind of major upheavals occurred, as the laments about Yugoslavia noted earlier demonstrate. Sandra commented, “There’s always been a standing joke with my colleagues. ‘Where are you going to go this year, because next year there’ll be some kind of a civil war or [one] will break out!’ Then the big thing was one year we went down east in Canada and, of course, Oka broke out. So they said, ‘You’re a bad omen. Stay out of Canada.’ For about ten years everywhere we went, the following year [something happened]. We just got out of the Middle East, Kuwait, the day before war broke out, the Gulf War.” Clearly those who travelled wanted to see places in a relatively unspoiled, Wxed, inWnitely peaceful state, isolated from any natural or human disasters, even if the latter was constituted only by the presence of many more people like themselves. Albert and Sandra worked hard to escape other tourists, even though sometimes they signed up with package tours. As Sandra said, they sometimes wanted to “take advantage of” the easy transportation, preliminary accommodation, and overall low cost such tours offered. But such tours “herd people. We’ll wait until the Xurry dies down and then we’ll go into the local village and we’ll hire locals if there’s something that we wish to see [and not be] obstructed by hordes of people. [In the end] large tours demand a very high price for very limited access. We’ve booked places where it was cheaper to book airfare with a Wve-star hotel and we just left the hotel and went our own way.” The desire to escape fellow tourists took Sandra and Albert, as they said, to “the grassroots,” places that some might consider unsafe. Sometimes they found themselves in tense situations, but such encounters were part of their commitment to see the real thing, to see how people really lived. Sandra noted, “We’ve been in Turkey, where they’ve blown [up] people. We were in Egypt, where you’ve got the fundamentalists [who have attacked tourists]. We were stuck in Bali and Indonesia with the overthrow of the government and all the military. When we were in the Philippines . . . they were having elections. They were having elections in Malaysia [when we were there]. Well, you don’t want to be in a country with elections, because it’s not like Canada.”

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Mapping the reality of the world – whether imagined as premodern or encountered as postmodern – was obviously a complex task. Perceptions of what the world should be, along with the larger political, social, and economic forces at play, ensured that this was the case. The tourists were trying to pin these ambiguous forms in place on their metaphorical maps to allow them to make sense of the contemporary globalized world. Their sheer desire to accomplish this task in some small measure determined that what was mapped was highly distilled, and as I will discuss in the next section, these maps paralleled the charts that have been produced by travellers for at least two centuries. REMAPPING AN OLD MAP

Mary Pratt (1992) identiWes three tropes of travel writing through which the world became known to those in Europe and America in the period 1750 to 1850. These are the mapping of a “planetary consciousness,” an orientation towards “interior exploration and the construction of globalscale meaning through the [Linnaean] apparatuses of natural history” (15); the “rhapsodic invocation of a Xourishing primal world,” which Pratt calls the “poetics of science” (126); and the “monarch-of-all-I-survey,” which spoke of geographical discoveries seen from the promontory and “won” for the colonial power (201). Over two hundred years later, these tropes describe with surprising accuracy how many of the travel enthusiasts came to know the world. They used many of the same frames as these early travel writers did to map the world as they explored it through their travels. However, many of the early travel writers disseminated their knowledge of strange lands and foreign peoples through the publication of their writings and public lectures. This transformed their personal, local knowledge into national, if not continental knowledge, allowing a greater sense of ownership of these newly discovered places in the mind of the state and the general populace. The tourists’ travel knowledge is never made public in quite this way. It could be said that the contemporary media do it for them. Some did publish in the travellers’ information exchange magazine Travel Scoop, but articles in this publication generally focused on the “how to” of travel and accommodation in a particular destination, rather than detailed discussions of local landscape, people, and culture. Michael also published some travel articles in a regional newspaper, and he taught a recreational night course through the local school board on what adventure travel

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actually entailed. Most of the tourists, however, kept their local knowledge of far-off places more private, conWned to limited circles of family, friends, and in some cases co-workers. Relative to the public speaking and reporting of the writers of earlier eras, a more diffuse, tentative, and personal sense of ownership of the places they had visited was fostered. This sense was counterbalanced by an ever-growing number of local assertions encountered by the tourists that all that they saw during their travels was not theirs for the taking (see Chapter 1).

A New Age of Planetary Consciousness For 300 years before the 1700s, global exploration was dominated by a “maritime paradigm,” but with the launching of the Wrst major scientiWc expedition in 1735, a new orientation began toward exploration of the interior regions of newly discovered continents, moving into what Pratt calls “the carpet beyond the selvage” (1992, 23). Armed with the classiWcatory framework laid out in Linnaeus’s The System of Nature, published in 1735, Europeans found that the challenge of penetrating the mysterious continental heartlands transformed the way they understood both their own world and the one beyond them. Rhetorics of classiWcation and the hope of scientiWc study fostered their curiosity and encouraged Europeans to look beyond the “thin track of a route taken” along the coastal shores and river deltas. Yet such paradigms fostered what Pratt would call a “rationalizing, extractive, dissociative understanding” (30, 38) of these places. The imposition of order mirrors a characteristic that geographer David Harvey (1989, 253) also attributes to the making of maps. How and why such representations of places are made becomes detached from the ideas that drove them, and the representations take on a life of their own. Pratt describes an historically consecutive process whereby one exploratory paradigm overtook another. I believe, however, that both paradigms can be applied to twentieth-century travel. Touristic travel immediately after the Second World War could be characterized as metaphorically mapping slender lines on blank paper, while since the 1960s tourism has shown connections to earlier desires to see the interior. The contemporary tourists I interviewed were actively replaying both of these exploratory paradigms simultaneously. Some were anxious to go “beyond the selvage”; others were content to map the “thin track of a route taken” as they moved around the globe, brieXy visiting one

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highlighted destination after another. In a very classic sense of drawing lines on blank paper, Beth always emphasized in our conversations the routes and details of the journeys that she had taken. Map in hand, she laid out the framework of her trip to western Australia for me: We had two nights in Darwin. And then down to Katherine. And that was a one-night stop in Katherine. Then from Katherine, we went to Kununurra. We’re now coming south and west. And we had an overnight in Kununurra. From Kununurra to Halls Creek, which is down here. From here, I took an optional Xight. The coach went on down the road. The Xight was over the Bungle Bungles, which is a very interesting natural phenomenon. The coach was on the road headed for the Argyle Diamond Mine, because we had a tour of that and our luncheon stop. Some of us were able to Xy over the Bungle Bungles and come back to meet the coach just short of the Argyle Diamond Mine. This was one of the side trips. A well worthwhile one, actually. Very interesting. Overnight at Halls Creek, and then the next day on to Fitzroy Crossing. And although you’ve got tarred roads around here, you’ve also got a certain amount of grit. This is why this is not a very good map. We were mostly on the tarred road. But, we did a fair amount of dirt road as well to get to some of the more interesting places. Fitzroy Crossing is where we went off into the bush on grit road. We went down a gorge there and took that road into Derby. That’s one of the main grit roads that might at some time get some tarmac on it. But it’s the shortest distance between Wyndham and Derby. From Broome, the next stop was Port Hedland, on that coast road. And that was probably one of the longest days. Six hundred and thirtysix kilometres. While Xat and dull the road is not on the edge of the sea, because it’s sand duney there and the dunes move – so that was a long Xat day. And overnight in Port Hedland. From Exmouth then our next stop was Carnarvon, down there. The next night we were down at Geraldton, further down the coast. And then the day after that into Perth. We had a couple of nights there.

Beth’s mapping of the “thin line” continued the tradition of travel of the earlier twentieth century, which echoed the period of early maritime exploration.14 Cruises, an increasingly popular travel experience, emphasize the journey as central to the enjoyment of a holiday – so much so that some

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travellers rarely leave the ship when it comes into port. The absence of any knowledge of the texture of the landscape between destinations or beyond the perimeter of the port of call also suggests parallels with early maritime exploration. A cruise brings one, as Donna and Samuel said, to a series of “disconnected destinations.” Donna said, “You wake up each morning in a different place,” and Samuel thought that the experience does “give you a misplaced sense of geography.” Harold, who was interested in going to as many countries as he could, noted that he was “running out of countries, [having] been to eighty-six,” even if some visits lasted only an hour or so. He willingly accepted that in such Xeeting visits, often as part of a cruise, he learned none of the political or social details of a place. He was clearly not seeking intimate understanding of places. Since the 1970s, touristic travel has been characterized more by tourists seeking to see beyond established destinations, moving into areas not historically accessible to them, and recently, journeying more intimately over the landscape by such means as cycling or walking. Some of those I interviewed preferred to cover less ground more slowly. Michael and Tony opted for walking or cycling tours whenever they could. Fred, Susan, Robert, and Annelise, among others, regularly chose to base themselves in one place, allowing them to experience more closely life in a particular community, and to tour more thoroughly the surrounding region. They were attempting to move “beyond the selvage.” But no matter which earlier paradigm describes their travels, those I spoke with were all armed with the ideology of the Linnaean “global classiWcatory project” (Pratt 1992, 27). Like early travellers, the tourists were engaged in “specimen collecting, the building up of collections” (ibid.), but their collections took the form of photographs, souvenirs, or countries on a checklist, rather than plant specimens. Natural history specimens had been extracted “from their organic or ecological relations with each other . . . drawn out from the tangled thread of their life surroundings” (31). So were the specimens collected by the tourists, which were ordered in albums, or around their home, where they served as mimetic cues for their travels. Like the natural history specimens, which became understood through nomenclature and their proper positioning on “labeled grids” (30), places visited were situated on the tourist’s metaphorical map of the world. The early natural historians and the tourists were all engaged in an effort to structure “order out of chaos” (25). In the end, however, like the natural historians, the tourists constructed a system of knowledge about the places and peoples they

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visited that was largely disconnected from local “economies, histories, social and symbolic systems . . . and rewove [them] into [their own] patterns of global unity and order” (31). Pratt calls the project of natural history simultaneously “innocent and imperial, asserting a harmless hegemonic vision that installed no apparatus of domination” (34), at least no visible one. The project assumed the world was “accessible, collectible, recognizable, and categorizable” (120). Similarly, the tourists’ knowledge could be imagined largely outside of any ambiguous or fuzzy postmodern reality.15

Colouring the Map with Passion: The “Poetics of Science” In Pratt’s second trope of travel writing, which she calls the “poetics of science,” nature is portrayed as “dramatic, extraordinary . . . a spectacle capable of overwhelming human knowledge and understanding” (1992, 120). Nature is something “in motion, powered by life forces many of which are invisible to the human eye; [it] dwarfs humans, commands their being, arouses their passions, deWes their powers of perception” (ibid.). The scientiWc explorers of the eighteenth century “codiWed in the European imaginary [the] new continents [as places of] nature . . . unclaimed and timeless space,” not as the locations of “societies and economies” (126). The world, to some of the travel enthusiasts, was similarly codiWed into lists of potential destinations waiting to be claimed in some small way, and ideally locked in some form of timeless space. Walking Inca roads to Machu Picchu, treks to Mt. Everest base camp, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, cycling in Vietnam, and hiking in the High Atlas in Morocco are modern examples of trips seen to dwarf the human experience and arouse passionate response. Tony saw the world as a list of destinations, some of which he had visited and others of which were on his wish list. In fact, the world that existed outside of the places classed as destinations was not of primary concern to him. He, like the early travel writers, did not see these places as economies, histories, or social and symbolic systems. In a concerned tone he told me of the dilemma he was facing in the weeks following our Wrst conversation. After a couple of trips that he had arranged fell through due to cancellations, escalating prices, and the unexpected commitments of his regular travelling partners, he found himself with three weeks booked off from work, money in the bank, and nowhere to go. Although there were places that he wanted to go, he had to Wnd a trip

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that Wt his designated time frame, budget, and his desire to visit a place sooner rather than later. (Some places, such as Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Europe, he wanted to visit “later,” when he was somewhat older, and presumably less adventuresome and mobile than at present.) But beyond his desire to go somewhere new, he simply wanted affordable Xights, a decent itinerary, a trip that included hiking or cycling, and a place deWnitely worth visiting due to its spectacular scenery or distinctive character. Other details of the place were less important. In a further parallel with the “poetics” of these early writings, places were inscribed by the tourists with drama, mystery, and even magniWcence. Such places aroused passions and elicited unexpected emotions. As Jackie said of her visit to Victoria Falls, “Just seeing [them]. I could not have imagined them. It’s like a sense of grace. It’s just the most amazing thing to see. I can just imagine what it would have been like for Livingstone to stumble across this. I’m sure nothing I have ever seen would have prepared me for it.” I described in Chapter 2 Jackie’s other emotional experiences on her trip to southern Africa, Donna’s parallel response to Israel, Albert’s unbridled fascination with the mere idea of travelling to Zanzibar, and Judith’s amazement at seeing Angel Falls. On another trip, Judith marvelled at the Great Wall of China. She found this engineering accomplishment very “impressive,” and the fact that she actually stood on something that “the astronauts saw from space” was a powerful experience for her.

Claiming Ownership: The View from the Promontory The third genre of early travel writing described by Pratt (1992, 201-5) is the “monarch-of-all-I-survey.” Writers claimed geographical “discoveries won” for the colonial power, assertions best made from some raised and distant viewpoint. The manner in which such “discoveries” were claimed, despite the heroic physical efforts often taken to reach them, ironically was often largely “purely passive . . . that of seeing” (201-5). A direct parallel is found in the “gaze” of the tourist (Urry 1990; Chapter 3). Beth summed up her “gaze” succinctly: “seeing a place was what made it real.” She could not imagine a place until she had seen it, no matter how much she knew about it from other sources. Places remained “essentially featureless” until she set eyes on them, when they became something tangible to her.

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Value was attributed to what was surveyed in similar ways by the early explorers and these tourists (Pratt 1992, 204-5). Aesthetic valuation was central to both. Judith and Henry and Richard and Gladys periodically travelled together, and our conversations largely centred on two such trips.16 They independently told me anecdotes about their assessments of their hotel rooms when they were travelling in China. Each night they had a friendly rivalry about who had the best view. Judith said, “We went crazy. We’d go, ‘Oh, you can’t take a picture of our view.’ Sometimes we had the good view and sometimes we did not have the good view. We kept racing back [between our rooms]. Each night, we’d say, ‘What is your view like?’ [laughter] And sometimes we got the good one and sometimes we didn’t.” The “best view” was judged by the visibility of the expanse of the sunset, the activity of life in the street, or important architectural landmarks. A view fell short if it looked out on a blank wall, piles of garbage, or service activities for the hotel. They each light-heartedly claimed what they saw out their window as “theirs,” and hoped it was better than the claim of their friends. It was agreed that the score of the friendly competition was tied by the end of the trip. In another vein, Monica told me of the disturbing view from their cabana in Belize that she and Lawrence did not want to claim. In fact, to escape it they moved to a much smaller, dingier room, which “had no view at all.” From their Wrst room they looked out upon a graveyard, “so close that you could touch the grave markers.” Lawrence’s father had died just before their trip, and the idea of gazing upon graves when they stepped out of their door was most unsettling to them both. The “density of meaning,” as Pratt would have called it, gave value (and in this case, discomfort) to what they surveyed.17 The photographs that the tourists took of the scenes, images, and people whom they saw while travelling were, like the perspectives of early writers, “ordered with reference to [their] vantage point” (Pratt 1992, 205), and in the process reiWed their subjects as static. By such actions, the tourists claimed “mastery,” the third way in which Pratt suggests early writers transmuted local places to places known. In this process these places could be inscribed on their maps. If the static nature of a place began to waver, like Yugoslavia in the 1990s, it could be shifted to a different category on the map, retreating closer to the unknown or yet to be explored empty spaces and black holes.

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Obviously the places that the tourists visited, imagined, and saw were highly subjective spaces. They jockeyed between the premodern, modern, and postmodern worlds, and were endowed with deeply personal, even spiritual, meanings. They were compared and evaluated against home. As Harvey points out, places become “invested with all manner of personal or collective hopes and fears” (1993, 22). Power relations further imbued these understandings of place. To clarify this relationship and to highlight how complex understandings of place can be, I found it useful to position the places the tourists identiWed on their maps, particularly those that they had travelled to, in a framework outlined by David Harvey (1993, 22, 17; see also 1989, 220-1). He suggests it is necessary to think through three things: 1 how places are constructed and experienced as material artifacts, that is, “as constellations of productive forces open to capitalistic use or as bundles of use values available to sustain particular ways and qualities of life” (22) 2 how they are represented in discourse 3 how they are in turn used as representations, as “symbolic places” (17). Following Lefebvre (1993, 38-9, 42, 45), Harvey recognizes that situating any idea of place is a complex task, as these three elements need to be contextualized in the relations of “distanciation (presence/absence and spatial scale), appropriation, domination and production,” elements themselves embedded in “social relations of class, gender, community, ethnicity, or race” (ibid.). No matter how limited their knowledge of the places they visited, what the tourists saw and experienced can be seen as a complex combination of material artifact, discursive representation, and symbol. The contexts identiWed by Harvey added further complexity and nuance to the perceived reality of these places. Class, gender, and race issues in particular were never as silent as the tourists would in large part like to have imagined, nor were issues of appropriation and domination, for example. Acting, however, from a belief in the moral good or neutrality of what they were doing when they travelled, they rarely acknowledged these qualifying dimensions of place.18 I will return to this silencing in the Wnal chapter. In the following section I discuss how the travel enthusiasts marked

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places as known, understood, or imagined anew to demonstrate the variation and nuance of this marking. Although my discussion uses only selected examples and is structured around ideas of place as material reality, discursive representation, and symbol, I in no way assume that any tourist came to know a place as only one of these three things. My separation of the discussion functions only as a heuristic device to show the varied ways these three elements manifest themselves in the tourists’ personalized knowledge of places.

Knowing the Material Reality of Place As a civil engineer, Samuel was interested in seeing the engineering wonders of the modern world, those technological accomplishments aimed at harnessing natural resources to make them, in the capitalist discourse, more productive. His desire to see these things was an important factor in the selection of places he and Donna travelled, and such sites were Xagged as highlights of some of their travels. To see these places, they were willing to make special arrangements outside of an organized tour, or to adjust an itinerary. As Donna told me, [We had] two weeks in Luxor where we had a chance to go to visit the tombs and go to the temple of Karnak. Travelling with a civil engineer [laughter], you see all sorts of interesting places that you would not normally see. [Samuel] wanted to see the Aswan High Dam and the travel rep from Thompson, because she knew what we wanted, had introduced us to a taxi driver whom we hired for a day. And he drove us from Luxor up to Aswan. [Samuel] had as long as he wanted at the dam. And then he brought us back and stopped at various places that he thought we might enjoy. It was absolutely wonderful.

In addition to the Aswan Dam, other engineering wonders they had seen included the Panama Canal, the Iron Bridge at Telford, England, the Suez Canal, and even the Rideau Canal in Ontario. They both reiterated that if engineering masterworks constructed before the modern era, such as the pyramids at Giza or the Colossus at Rhodes, were part of their itinerary, they were equally anxious to tour them, but they did not have a checklist for these. More mundane engineering accomplishments, such as aqueducts sighted along the roadside in Turkey or the design of the sewer system at Ephesus, were also worthy of note.

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The fascination that these sites held for Samuel follows what MacCannell noted in his early reXections on the touristic experience. Work, labour, and production have been regularly transformed into objects of touristic interest (MacCannell 1999, 6). MacCannell’s (57-76) analysis of two twentieth-century guidebooks to Paris highlights these texts’ identiWcation of the supreme court, the stock exchange, the mint, the government printing ofWce, the tapestry weavers, the tobacco factory, the morgue, the slaughterhouse, and, of course, the sewers, as tourist attractions. He concludes that in exploring such “locations of work” in “the West’s most seductive city” the tourist sees “beneath her fancy skirt . . . [to] catch a glimpse of her basic functions” (76). Judith, Henry, Richard, and Gladys felt as if they were toured endlessly around Chinese temples, and “more gardens” and “more gardens” – what MacCannell might call China’s “fancy skirt” – but they were also taken to see “lots of manufacturing,” which was presented to them as the “basic functions” of life. Judith said of the latter, We all noticed this was deWnitely pre-nineteenth-century industrial, where they had one person attending many machines. When they were doing the silk weaving they were busy all the time, moving among their machines. The whole look of it was sort of old-fashioned factory, I call it . . . We saw silk being made. We saw jade being carved. We saw wood being carved into those little [Wgures] that you can buy. And they did not have much in the way of safety. We thought, ah! . . . I didn’t want to watch. I did not because I thought, I’m frightened to death. One slip and you’ve lost the top of your Wngers. Nothing like that with our factories. It’s obligatory. You take your hand away, the thing comes down, and it goes up. Of course, a lot of [our] workers would . . . bypass it to be quicker. But that was their choice. These people, in China, it wasn’t theirs. The silk weaving was safer. I don’t think that they particularly needed the safety improved. When they were cutting they wore goggles. The pearls, that was really interesting. They grow freshwater pearls and so they took us through the process. First you learned about the process . . . and we then saw how they cut the pearls out of the oysters. And with freshwater pearls, you get many pearls, as opposed to the ones we saw down in Australia, you get one pearl per oyster.

Judith’s response to the factory tours Xagged China as somewhat premodern, particularly in terms of technological development. She understood

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factories in her own world, that is, the modern if not the postmodern world, to be more attentive to the safety of the people who worked in them – an image that stands in contrast to the dehumanized alienation that the tourist has so often been assumed to be escaping. To Judith, the modern technologized world is a more human place than she found in China. In addition, it is a place where individuals can make more choices about how they perform their work. She talked in other contexts about the tedium, military rigidity, and banality of the work of the doormen they encountered in their hotels, contrasting it with the more varied nature of the work of bellhops in Europe or North America. The work of such people in China afWrmed for her the dehumanized work life of the masses there. Judith and her travelling companions also willingly acknowledged the performance aspect of the factories they were touring, leaving her to question whether they did, in fact, reXect “basic functions” of life. This was not particularly troubling to Judith, an attitude that Feifer (1985; see also Urry 1990) attributes to the “post-tourist.” Judith said the pearl factory was obviously “a place where tourists were meant to learn these things.” Susan and Fred noted that in Thailand, the performance of work in the factories they visited was a façade for the adjacent shop, through which the tourists were channelled.19 As Judith described it, after every factory tour, “Then you go into the shop. The shops were very similar. The shops attached to the factories were usually focused on what they had made there. For example, if [it was a pearl factory], there were pearls, but everywhere you went, you could buy the silk and the fans and the carvings. [I] bought some pearls . . . I was not too sure about that [but] I found it awkward not to buy [emphasis added].” Fred and Susan described their experience: fred: In Thailand, you go [to] the umbrella factory, the furniture factory, the silk factory. susan: They’re famous for the silk, of course, the Thai silk. [I] bought a housecoat, like a robe. [Fred] bought a suit of Thai silk and all handmade. [We visited a] pottery [factory]: water jars and that’s all they make. That one little village, that’s all they make are water jars that all the villages use, and they’ve never deviated from the pattern for centuries. The productive forces in these places were sustained by the tourist system, itself a product of capitalism’s production of leisure time for many

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in the Western world. The production and acquisition of these commodities became signiWers of places visited for these tourists, more so than the commodities themselves. For example, Judith had worn her pearls “only once or twice” since returning home. She wasn’t sure she really liked them. They spent their time in a box in her dresser, more evidence of the private, if not closeted, nature of the souvenirs many of these people bought (see Chapter 2). But she had been quick to tell me, in talking of their trip to China, of the discomfort she experienced in feeling pressured to purchase them. Rachel emphasized similar feelings. On her second trip to East Africa, she carefully organized to be part of a larger group, so that she would not repeat the experience of being in a private minivan with just her and the driver, as when she visited Kenya a few years earlier. On her Wrst trip it had been “like I was in a cruise ship, and I was the only one in the cruise ship [where the captain said], ‘Oh, I think that’s a port [let’s stop].’ Prices must have gone up 500 percent [when we drove up].” In a quite different manner, the material reality of the rainforest of Costa Rica, as a constellation “of productive forces open to capitalistic use” (Harvey 1993, 22) was implicitly part of Leslie’s knowledge of it. Her husband had bought her an honorary title to several acres of the rainforest through the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) one year for Christmas. The gift prompted her desire to go to Costa Rica to see her “real estate,” and she returned several times, as she found the region very appealing. This WWF fundraising strategy was intended to identify the biodiversity of the rainforest as vital to planetary health, and emphasize that it must be saved from the logger’s saw and the miner’s shovel. But this and other campaigns also accomplished something less desirable: creating a greater awareness of the region stimulated touristic interest in going there, an activity that potentially threatens the local rainforest’s viability.20 Translating the rainforest into a saleable, thus visitable, commodity fuelled ideas of access and the right of exploration by Western tourists, and it has become an increasingly popular destination. Leslie commented that she had previously been on several cruises in the coastal waters of Costa Rica, but before she was given her acreage, she had never really heard of the place. The material reality of the Costa Rican rainforest was entangled in the ideology of white, upper middleclass tourists through their support of the WWF campaign, which embedded their discourse of that place in capitalist ideas of property,

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appropriation, and domination, as Harvey (1993, 17) maintains is part of any contemporary representation of place.

Representations Being There Exactly how individuals form ideas of other places and people is, as I have suggested, a complex and multidimensional process. For the tourists I interviewed, several factors were central to the process of representation of the places they visited: their own travel histories; the myriad travel promotional materials, guidebooks, travel section clippings from newspapers, and articles from travel information magazines they collected and studied; to some degree selected television programs, particularly those on the Discovery Channel; and impressions gleaned or reinforced in magazines such as National Geographic. Tour guides on location were another Wlter through which places were represented. But as Benjamin said of these representations, they were “always someone else’s ideas about what a place is like.” He continued, “And even though it’s so superWcial travelling through some place and being in some place for a short period of time, it still at least is yours. The closest you come to having some sense of what the food is like there and what the people are like and that climate is like and the politics. There’s something that I Wnd really exciting about that, and just the fact that there’s so much of the world that I don’t have any idea about at all [emphasis in original].” Actually going to a place, seeing the people and architecture, hearing the sounds and the language, eating the food, and smelling the market for oneself had a dramatic impact on previously received representations. As Judith commented about walking up the steps of the Sydney Opera House, “It’s a funny feeling . . . you’ve seen it so often and then here it is, the real thing.” Experiencing the “real thing” themselves challenged, reinvented, conWrmed, or enhanced what a place had been imagined to be. Leslie’s preconceived negative notions about Britain and the British were challenged by actually travelling there, seeing the landscape, and meeting the people. Judith’s skeptical view of Communist China was validated by her observations that some individuals seemed to live in absolute mansions, while others lived in small hovels. As she said, “They’re supposed to all be equal, aren’t they?” Visiting a place affords a greater sense of knowing it at a more personal, intimate, presumably real level.

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Samuel and Donna noted how their experience of actually being there connected them to the mythic representation of places in the Holy Land. Self-described “church people,” they told me of “a very personal memory. We were at this church, which is on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. We were there after Easter. Then the Wrst Sunday we were back [home] the reading was about Christ coming to cook breakfast for the disciples along the shores at that [very] point, [or] at what is purported to be that point. And it really hit us both: we had been there ten days before. And it was really, really wonderful.” Travel also allowed for a representation of place where a void had existed before. As Elaine and Benjamin said, after their travels through southern Asia and Indonesia, elaine: I Wnd now that I know a lot about politics in Indonesia, in India, in all the countries we travelled in. I [also] found a sense of geography. I have a sense of what that spot looks like on the map, which I don’t have in other parts of the world. I have no sense of South America at all. Absolutely none. No matter how many times I look at the map, no matter how many times I become interested in something about South America, nothing [comes to mind as we have never been there]. benjamin: [We have] no picture, but, you know, you read something about Indonesia and immediately now pictures come to mind. Elaine and Benjamin had had plenty of opportunity to learn passively about South America through the many representations of the continent available in Canada, but none resonated with them. Similarly, Rachel could have learned a great deal about Asia by simply reading about it. But as she said, “Reading about it [does] not make it less foreign . . . It’s just something that I have to go and learn.”

Making the Make-Believe Real: Two for One It struck me in doing the research for this project how often I was told that particular places the tourists visited had Wgured in Wlms, television, books, even in popular music. Many discursive representations of these places appeared to be, as Lutz and Collins (1993, 268) put it, “mediated by media Wction.” For example, those who had been to Casablanca always noted it as the setting of the famous 1942 Humphrey BogartIngrid Bergman movie. Other details about Morocco’s second-largest city were rarely mentioned, or at best were quickly glossed. Other places

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were also given an identity by virtue of their role in some form of “media Wction.” These included the Summer Palace in Beijing, where the throne where the last emperor sat is found. Essaouira, the Moroccan city from which Jimi Hendrix took his inspiration for the song “Castles in the Sand,” was often noted for this association as much as anything that those who travelled there experienced while there. Other people mentioned walking through the miasmic winter fog in Venice and smelling the pollution in the canals, which triggered images from a Thomas Mann novel, or following the route of Agatha Christie as she wrote Death on the Nile, or strolling the main street of the English village where the movie Pride and Prejudice was Wlmed. Such experiences afWrmed the character of these places as simulacra if not myths, as well as verifying their existence as actual places (see Chapter 1). They become two places at once. Being a movie location does not, however, become central to every representation of place; witness the many Wlms that have been set in cosmopolitan cities such as London, Paris, New York, or Chicago. But movies, television programs, classic works of Wction, and popular songs that feature places seen to be in distant, remote, exotic, isolated, or quaint locations in relation to the modern Western world often become central to the representational discourse of such places, particularly as they are highlighted in the tourism literature. Frances, a long-time fan of the television program Coronation Street, toured the set for the show while in Manchester, England. She explained the photographs of her visit there: There’s the street itself. This is the pub that’s down below. They have a pub you can actually go into and drink in, and then this is the actual set they use for the TV show. Apparently every Monday they Wlm outdoors, so I guess they don’t do the tours on the Mondays. When they’re Wlming they do all the outdoor scenes there. These are the bookies, but they don’t use it much now in the show, but at [one] time they [did]. But all it is is a front. You can go into the door. And I think the same thing, I guess, with these houses. They could actually go in and you could actually shoot from inside somebody going out the door, but [to] some place else entirely different. They’ve got these [inside] sets built. That’s the inside of the bookies, and that’s how it works. Now, they claim they use these sets, but I didn’t believe everything they told us on the tour. But I think they were just made up for the tourists because they ran tours all the time.

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Ironically, the place where Coronation Street looks the most real to Frances was television. False fronts were its true nature, something she was intrigued to learn and willing to accept. What she could not accept so readily was that these were the actual sets, believing instead that these were representations of the sets, which were in turn representations of an imagined reality.21 In the end, moving through these “back regions,” as MacCannell (1999, 94-9; see also Goffman 1959) calls them, and experiencing a representation of a represented reality, only afWrmed for her the reality of what she watched on television. The artiWciality of the physical Coronation Street contrasted to what she understood to be the reality of the characters who moved through these sets – it was all ultimately about people and the entanglements of their daily lives. The place was completely imaginary, but still readily identiWable on her map of the world, if only because of the discursive representation that it allowed of the characters in the show.

Symbols of Place and Symbolic Places Symbolism is central to any discussion of place. Various experiences, encounters, even material objects became symbols of place for the travel enthusiasts. Judith summed this up nicely in her comments about bicycles in China, an example that I will use here to be symbolic of many others related to me throughout interviews and conversations. She observed that bicycles were “everywhere you look” in the streets of the large cities in China. She claimed that the number of bicycles stuck in everybody’s [that is, her own and her travelling companions’] minds. And their peculiar patterns of driving. I mean, there’s a horde of bicycles and they just put their hand out and go. And the cars kind of weave their way between them. It’s really fascinating to watch that. The chauffeurs we had were really, really good. I mean, we were saying [whispering], “And I wouldn’t want to do that. He’s going to knock one of them over,” but you know, he just sort of [moved by them]. They seem to Xow, the people on bikes. And they seem to work. We didn’t see anybody falling off and we saw enormous loads being carried on these bikes, which was quite impressive.

The number of bicycles mirrored the number of people in the country. The careful and orderly way the cars and the bicycles negotiated the

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roads, the adeptness and skill with which the bicycles “Xowed” together spoke of some degree of unity among the population. The apparent symbiosis of technologies of different eras in the cities symbolized China as Judith came to know it.22 But possibly more importantly for my discussion here, every place on a tourist’s map became a symbolic place. Any representation of places as black holes, empty spaces, as places on a wish list, as home, and particularly those marked in some manner as known because they had been visited, was loaded with a density of meanings. This density added the texture to the shading and categorization of every place. The symbolic values imputed to places on the tourists’ maps were at the same time contradictory, ambiguous, ethnocentric, superWcial, profoundly moving, and embedded with feelings of compassion, joy, wonder, and unfortunately, often implicit violence (see Chapter 3). These places were symbolic of much about the tourists’ own lives: their ability to travel, their travel careers, their curiosity about difference, their love of life, their desire to learn more about the world, their desire to always see more, their privilege, and their good fortune as they imagined it. Places were also symbolic of much about the rest of the world as they perceived it through their travels: its difference, its similarity, its naturalness, its process of modernization, its potential for change, its rush towards homogeneity, its history, its Culture or culture, its physical majesty and magniWcence, its poverty, its riches, its instability, its receptiveness, or its hostility. Some places came to symbolize the barbarity of the human spirit – a characteristic most regularly symbolized to those I spoke with by sites associated with Nazi Germany.23 Others symbolized the grace, aesthetics, creativity, genius, and imaginative capacity of human expression – characteristics most frequently mapped onto an earlier period of European history, or to places outside the Western world. Places seen to be fully modern and Western were symbolic of technological sophistication, ordinariness, comfort, and sometimes banality. Home was symbolic of comfort, security, fairness, honesty, family, and friends, and in general marked technological sophistication and creature comforts. Black holes and empty spaces were symbolic of fear, uncertainty, hostility, or sometimes a generic unknown. The metaphorical maps constructed through the travels of those I interviewed as devices for making sense of the globalized contemporary world were, in the end, complex and highly nuanced representations. They were far from neutral, being implicitly entangled in world political,

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social, and economic relations of the late twentieth century. At the same time, they were in large part morally innocent representations, a point I will turn to in the next chapter. Such a dichotomy highlights the question of how much the tourists can be held accountable for the implicit erasure of the questionable historical and contemporary practices that underlie the tourists’ maps. These practices are embedded in a global political economy that suggests that they should stay home, and in a competing moral discourse that demands that they keep on travelling.

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chapter 6

Coming Back A culture cannot hope to know itself without knowing the other societies and cultures that share its world. –t. symons, To Know Ourselves

I

stated at the beginning of this book that it was about being a tourist. In the preceding chapters I have offered one set of interpretations about what gives the touristic experience meaning to a small group of Canadian travel enthusiasts. This project stemmed in part from a desire to restore some dignity to the notion of being a tourist, as one of my graduate students once indicated he wanted to do in his thesis research. He was responding to my comment that the academy has often seen the tourist as “the enemy,” when, in fact, that enemy “is us” (Harrison 2001). We have all been tourists or travellers at some point in our lives. Why are we so disparaging of the experience? I, like many others I know, plan a few annual days of holiday away from my working life, and anticipate going away somewhere and being a tourist. The repeated assertion in the literature that we really know little about what the tourist actually experiences, and why so many thousands, if not millions, of Westerners and other First World citizens Wnd travel a meaningful experience, fuelled my confusion about why many in the academy, and other critical voices, speak so disparagingly of the experience. As I worked my way through the writing of this manuscript, I began to wonder whether, in concurring that there has to be some dignity in being a tourist, I was not simply setting up a straw person, which, once understood more thoroughly, could be attacked even more vehemently. Would this be the inevitable outcome of my efforts to recognize the cultural worthiness and moral value of the touristic experiences of those I interviewed? Could I simply ignore in my reXection the naïveté evident in the touristic experiences I was told about? Considering that many of the travel enthusiasts are relatively well educated and occupy privileged 205

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positions in the global spectrum, can they not be justiWably criticized for proceeding to explore the globe merely for their pleasure and ediWcation, with blind innocence? One could cynically and simply say, “yes.” But when our historical traditions, our dominant hegemony, and our cultural values validate the virtues of the touristic experience – in a discourse oozing from the travel sections of the country’s respectable newspapers (which many of those I spoke with diligently read and clipped) and a range of other media – and legitimate it as a rich, rewarding, welldeserved, even educational way to spend one’s time, energy, and money, are such harsh judgments warranted? Obviously travel can be the pleasurable, learned experience that the media suggest it is, as anyone who has travelled can corroborate. But as many have argued, and I discussed in Chapter 1, there is often a dark side to the experience of tourism. It is a dehumanizing experience for many who work in the industry, who must at least witness, if not participate in, a process by which their culture is distilled down to a few readily translatable commodities, and who are often paid trivial wages for doing such. Others, such as those in sex tourism, can suffer more extreme cultural and personal degradation. Tourism can also be destructive to local physical environments by depleting fragile local resources, challenging the very survival of communities. On the other hand, despite these and other devastating impacts of the industry, there are many who argue in favour of the potential economic and social stability tourism can offer communities. How does one communicate these often contradictory complexities of the tourism experience to travellers such as those I have interviewed here? How does one prompt travellers to engage in a critical reXection on the realities of their intrusion into the communities of those who are, willingly or not, the tourees? Furthermore, how can one encourage this reXection without promptly causing these individuals to abandon their desire to travel? In the short term, at least, it is imperative that they continue to travel to ensure that local economies now adapted to tourism thrive, offering stability and ideally some space for reXection on how closely tied to the tourism industry any community or individual wishes to be. I have to say now that I have no miracle formulas as to how to engage tourists with these issues. In conclusion I offer only suggestions for frameworks in which such thinking, at a very preliminary stage, can be fostered. I would like to return for a moment to the distinction many make between travellers and tourists, a point I raised in Chapter 1. I did not

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make such a distinction in this book. Some of those I interviewed would identify themselves more as travellers than as tourists, like nearly all the students whom I have taught in various courses on tourism in recent years. Tourists, I am told by people who call themselves travellers, are people who go on cruises. Travellers travel much more independently, and make every effort to get closer to the local culture. I maintain that these differences are much of a muchness. In any context, tourists or travellers have only a modest ability to step outside their own cultural blinders. Such a move is far more complex than most realize – ask any cultural anthropologist. If one further distinguishes between these two groups on the basis of their local impact, that is, implying that travellers cause less disruption due to their efforts to Wt in with the local community, the argument quickly becomes Ximsy. Tens of thousands of travellers trekking annually along the Himalayan trails into the Everest Base Camp are no less disruptive a force than the thousands who are brought weekly by cruise ships to various Caribbean, Mediterranean, or Alaskan ports.1 Travellers, in fact, are notorious in their efforts to stay on the road as long as possible, visit as many distant locations as they can, and spend as little money as possible along the way (see Cohen 1973).2 Both groups, wherever they may congregate, have transformed local economies, often prompting dramatic changes in local social and political relations. But I have said that regardless of these disruptions, all travellers and tourists had better, at least in the short term, keep on travelling to these places. A Papua New Guinea woman, trying to sell shell necklaces to the tourists in Dennis O’Rourke’s provocative Wlm Cannibal Tours (1987), asks how she is supposed to get the money to send her children to school – which she knows they need to survive in the modern/postmodern world – if the tourists who come to her stall do not buy her wares? On the other hand, one wonders how she will feed her children if she no longer plants her gardens, but rather spends her time making souvenir necklaces for which she did not appear to have many buyers. Her heartfelt and plaintive plea speaks for thousands of locals around the globe. As much contemporary social theory informs us, any separation of the political, social, economic, and moral realities of the touree and the tourist is simplistic, if not foolish and naïve. The entire nature of the touristic experience emphasizes the entanglement of the local and private with the global and public. The touristic experience is far from neutral, even though it is highly ambiguous and often contradictory. As those I interviewed told me, each trip satiates, but inspires the quest for more.

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Tourists “gaze” both inward and outward, even if what is seen “out there” is heavily clouded by what is “in here.” The touristic experience is one largely of ocularity, and yet is a fully embodied undertaking. None of the tourists I spoke with was totally transformed by the sights and experiences of travel, but at the same time none returned unchanged. Away from home the tourists imagined reaching out to a common humanity, and yet their encounters regularly underscored the magnitude of cultural difference among peoples around the globe. Home became both something grounded in a particular place and something that can be recreated while away. Travel is rewarding and pleasing, yet often difWcult and stressful. Coherent with the complexity of the tourist experience are the ongoing discussions about MacCannell’s (1999) early ideas of the tourists’ search for the authentic. I applaud the contribution prompted by MacCannell’s work on the tourist, but such discussions need to be put aside. In postmodernity they have little validity: few believe that there are pristine corners of the globe, and even fewer want to go to such places, which would have no space/place for tourists. I take heart from the recent writing of people such as John Taylor (2001), who maintains that both the tourist and the touree are looking for “sincerity” rather than “authenticity” in their cross-cultural touristic encounter. When Benjamin expressed his dismay at realizing that he and Elaine were just two of thousands, if not tens of thousands, who had visited the hill tribes in Thailand in recent decades, or when Sandra and Albert manoeuvred to get to places that few tourists had been, to Wnd what they called the “grassroots,” they were driven in part by the fear that those they met would no longer be capable of making a human connection with them, because the locals had become actors performing for the tourists. A desire to make sincere connections established Benjamin, Elaine, Sandra, Albert, and the others as authentic selves, not anonymous Others, in the global landscape, all as part of their search for intimacy. Authentic locals were those who understood the importance of this sincere engagement, not people who wore vintage clothing and lived a lifestyle that long ago stopped being viable in the modern/postmodern world. People, be they tourists or locals, rarely conduct themselves in the way stereotypes would suggest, as Harold found when he visited India. He declared himself “a believer in Gandhi’s approach . . . and so I thought of Indians as being all peace-loving people, and that turned out not to be so.” He realized that the people he met in South Asia were not the

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unrealistic stereotypes he had imagined. They were individuals with their own characters and idiosyncrasies, which he came to understand as being obviously culturally embedded but not blindly determined. Such sincerity, such touchstones of reality, was also what the tourists desired in the local responses to themselves; they wished to be known as much more than the stereotypes that the tourees often held of them. This book is only a small contribution to what some have suggested is sadly lacking in the literature about one of the most potent forces in the world today, that is, some qualitative understanding of what the touristic experience means to those who partake of it. It highlights a small group that had some cohesion in terms of race and class, the latter being deWned in contemporary constructs that reach well beyond, and at times ignore altogether, socioeconomic categories. Those I talked with were not isolated in terms of gender, age, or ethnicity. Canada was their home, but not all were born here, and as I write this conclusion, not all continue to live here. They did not all partake in one kind of travel experience, but whether in any one year or throughout their travel careers they undertook many different kinds of trips to a wide range of destinations. They did, however, all love to travel and deWned their personal identities in large part in relation to that passion. And despite their evolving travel tastes, and the factors that deWned their differences, those things that I described as giving meaning to their travels remained generally consistent across the group. Noticeable variation came in the degree to which they recognized any of the social, moral, and political context in which they acted out their leisure practice. In light of their commitment to this practice I am forced to ask, is there any hope that the violence of repeated waves of foreigners swarming local communities can be ameliorated? Will every corner of the globe eventually Wnd its way onto a tourist wish list? I see some hope for change in the models of alternative, sustainable tourism currently to be found on a small scale around the globe. These models will only work, however, if tourists recognize that their travels are entangled in political, moral, and economic, as well as spatial, webs. Such new ways of thinking will not readily be adopted, either by many of those I interviewed or by the millions of others who travel the globe for pleasure every year. Large corporate and political forces in the tourism industry keep telling them that they are always welcomed and appreciated in far-off lands. This encouragement, linked with Western values, and in some measure the fallout from Canadian multiculturalism

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policies, promotes the idea that a curiosity about other places and people is a good, responsible, potentially even enlightened cultural value.3 The Canadians I interviewed saw themselves as sharing their wealth and were honest in their desire to learn something about the places they visited. The previous chapters have also indicated that there are other, more implicit subtle dimensions that entice individuals to invest signiWcant time, energy, money, and emotional resources in travel. Lutz and Collins (1993, 283) might suggest that in their travels these tourists are engaged in the ultimately destructive process of “superWcial humanizing” of the Other, a process that is part of a “utopian fantasy of crossing boundaries while simultaneously reinscribing them” (Desmond 1999, 257). Put another way, these tourists want to experience some sense of human connection across difference, but they also want to retain all that keeps that difference alive. Some would claim them to be positioning the touree along an evolutionary paradigm of progress. But I posit that they offer some critique of their own world in desiring to see difference retained. They do not necessarily make the assumption that the ways of the West are viable in all contexts; at times much about the West was seen to be highly counterproductive to improving or maintaining a high quality of life in the places they visited. Despite all this, as someone who has talked to these people extensively about their travels, how do I draw them into the complex debates about valuing, but not fetishizing, difference? How do I make them realize that tourees cannot be incarcerated in the space and time in which the West has imagined them to exist (Appadurai 1988)? In the end, how can I expect them to get beyond the public, highly symbolic, some would say commodiWed world of the Other, and learn to respect the complexity of what constitutes its difference? And to do all of this without violating the last vestiges of privacy and intimacy that the touree may have? In Spivak’s terms, how does one begin the process of getting tourists to unlearn their privilege and confront the complexities of the voices that they say they want to hear (1988, 295-6)? In the short term, most critically, recognizing the economic realities of the tourism business for many communities, how is it possible to keep the fascination with difference alive among the tourist/traveller population while maintaining, or in some cases restoring, the dignity and integrity of the lives of those who live in tourist destinations around the globe? How does one also allow them the space and time to decide if they want to move away from being the object of the “tourist gaze”?

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These are heavy questions to entertain, particularly for a group of people who are seeking a pleasurable, in some measure educational, but overall unproblematic experience – they are engaged after all in a practice of leisure (Rojek 1985). For those I spoke with, almost without fail, their travels were overwhelmingly positive experiences. But while deeply meaningful to them, the travel enthusiasts were not motivated to deconstruct them at great length. Certainly those I interviewed did not see themselves as engaged in acts of violence. This does not mean, however, that they were not without any self-reXection. Most recognized the limitations of what they could absorb and grasp from their encounter with the Other, the native, or the local. Although they were generally resistant to any signiWcant homogenization of global cultures, at the same time they wanted some place to be created for them in the Other’s world. They all implicitly knew, however, that their own world and those they were intent on exploring were on a collision course; they wanted to get there before the crash. In fact, the crash happened long ago, and as Jackie found out, the tourists and tourees were now sitting down at the same table to digest the spoils, to share communally the new globalized, postcolonial world. During her visit to Thailand she found unsettling the imbrication of the violence and destruction of the West’s recent intrusions into Southeast Asia with the lived experience of the present, something the local political and economic reality did not allow the local people to directly question. When her tour group visited a restaurant, she came face to face with this troubling disjuncture. She told me the story of “the one time we let [our hostess] do the ordering . . . She ordered all kinds of stuff and it was mostly pretty good . . . In the centre is the soup bowl . . . and as she’s dishing out the soup she’s proudly saying, ‘This is a freshwater soup; this Wsh is from the Mekong River.’ [A fellow traveller], who remembers [the] Vietnam [War] turns . . . and says, ‘Oh, I’ve never eaten Agent Orange before – that’ll be fun!’” There is an irony in the fact that Western tourists and local residents were all sitting down to share the same bowl of soup, which symbolically or otherwise embodied the fear, desolation, and genocide that the West has wreaked upon the region. Such intrusions long ago challenged any utopian fantasies of Southeast Asia as a distant place, around which borders could be drawn to separate it from the Western world. In the globalized world of the twenty-Wrst century, we can no longer ignore the fact that we are all now metaphorically, if not always literally, sitting at

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the same table, no matter where it is situated. The foods being served may taste different to each person seated around the table, but we are still all there to partake of what it has to offer. Some will Wnd the repast unpalatable; others, a feast. Some dishes will be the staple foods of generations past; some will be complex interminglings of ingredients with challenging new tastes; some will be so strange to the palate that they cannot readily be digested by those who have not had them before. Some people will claim a privileged position at the head of the table where all the choice dishes are located; others will simply ask for a place to be found for them and take what scraps are left. As those who travel know only too well, we all have to Wnd a place at this table, as in the end, we all have to eat. The difWculty comes in getting everyone to acknowledge that it is the height of rudeness, if not aggression, to refuse what is served, and that the food must be equally shared. All must learn that a place there can never be taken for granted. Privilege must be “unlearned” if necessary (Spivak 1988). And all must remember that once seated, they will be required to eat of the past to satisfy their requirement for nourishment in the present, and their hope for their health and prosperity in the future. Food is something to be thankful for, as it nourishes one’s body and soul. Accordingly then, one should approach a meal table with humility, and the metaphorical global table of the twenty-Wrst century is no different. Those who arrive in the posture of a tourist should not assume their right to be seated. They are there by invitation only. They may not like all that is served, but they must partake of this nourishment to help themselves and others grow past the present inequitable global realities, towards hope for the future sustainability – cultural, social, economic, environmental – of the world in which we all live. If tourists approach it in this manner, the connections they make and build could be stronger; the beauty and aesthetic value of each moment enriched; and they will understand and more deeply value both their own nation, and what really constitutes a good home. The global landscape will be seen as a place where complex and diverse people live, all with a deep attachment to their homes, and not only as a confusing, constantly changing, political chess game played out on television sets. Such will be the authenticity of touristic travel experiences if they assume such a humble posture. Making this journey, however, is going to be one of the most difWcult that these tourists and thousands like them have ever undertaken. But the people whom I spoke with are not the buffoonish nitwits that tourists

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have been stereotyped as. They are individuals who try to conduct their lives with dignity, who see their purpose as a worthy one in the world. Frequently, however, they act out of ignorance of local circumstances. The devastation of local cultural traditions by tourist development is often strategically silenced, as it is essential to local economies that tourists not be troubled by the realities of the lives of the displaced, poor, and marginalized, or the degree of environmental pollution, or issues of corruption and political unrest. I recently published a short article in a local newspaper that was a rather scathing commentary on the impact of tourist development on many Third World communities. One of my university colleagues, a woman I respect and admire greatly, wrote me a note declaring how eye-opening and provocative she found this short piece. It made her think of things that she had never thought about before. Even this well-educated woman was no more informed of these issues than the ordinary citizens with whom I spoke. Such is the seduction of all that underlies tourism and travel. Facing an alternative reality of these experiences is not easy. It means asking very difWcult questions about privilege and position. But if the sincere moments of connection desired by these tourists are to take place, if the aesthetic character of visiting a world beyond their own is to be enhanced, if what home is, is truly to be understood, and if spaces/places are to be found for peoples across the global landscape, then everyone must be given the same invitation to sit at the metaphorical global table, to decide what will be offered, and ultimately to feast equitably on the riches and magniWcence that places at home and away have to offer.

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I met and enjoyed the company of thirty-three individuals in total. I treated the experience and voice of each as a distinct and discrete contribution to our conversations, even though some of those I interviewed were married to each other. The names are pseudonyms, and I have changed identifying details in some cases. A L B E RT A N D SA N D R A

age: Late Wfties (Albert); mid-forties (Sandra) combined annual income: $125,000-$140,000 education: BA/BEd (Albert); BA/BEd (Sandra) family: Married, one child occupation: Teachers origin: Albert was born to missionary parents in China; Sandra was born in Canada to a Polish immigrant father and Wrst-generation Polish immigrant mother. history: Albert spent his childhood moving around Canada and to various other countries where his father was posted. As an adult he continued to travel in Canada, to Florida, and to Greece. Sandra’s parents had no interest in leaving home, but they did send her at age sixteen to visit relatives in Poland. She also travelled after university to China and took vacations to places such as Cuba. In recent years Sandra and Albert have always tried to get away during spring break, as well as for at least three weeks in the summer months. Most of their extended travel has been without their son, although they did take him on their 214

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recent year-long trip to South America and Asia, which included Tibet, Nepal, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, parts of Southeast Asia, and Indonesia. Other travels have taken them to Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Central America, Europe, and the Caribbean. They characterize themselves as “travellers” as opposed to “tourists,” based on their efforts to “get close to the locals.” History, art, architecture, and sites of natural beauty are part of what attracts them to certain locations, in conjunction with a chance to “experience a different culture” – and doing all of this on a limited budget. They like to take active holidays that include hiking, trekking, and camping, and will take an organized tour if it can facilitate their access to more distant places. On these tours they Wnd they often meet people of “similar intellect and interest.” Otherwise they like nothing more than to venture out on their own. Travel to them, as Albert said, is “to be challenged physically, intellectually . . . spiritually . . . coming to grips with one’s mortality.” BETH

age: Mid-sixties annual income: $100,000-$140,000 education: PhD family: Twice widowed, no children occupation: Consultant, semi-retired origin: Immigrated to Canada thirty years ago from the United Kingdom history: Beth’s father travelled extensively when she was a child, a pattern her parents continued in their retirement. Her Wrst international trip was to the Netherlands to stay with a friend of her parents when she was fourteen. Beth’s work often required that she travel, and some of her Wrst vacations were extensions of these business trips, which took her to different parts of the United States and sometimes Australia. In semi-retirement she began to travel more widely. Twice widowed, much of her travel has been on organized trips, either bus tours or cruise ships, generally restricted to Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, and recently through former Eastern bloc countries. Someone who loves to walk and is a keen photographer of Xowers and scenery, she tries to avoid “high season crowds” and to Wnd peace, quiet, and relaxation in her travels. While in cities, she seeks out art galleries, and loves the adventure of wandering off on her own, allowing her to meet local people and “see things in more depth.”

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Travellers’ Biographies BRUCE AND MARIA

age: Early seventies (Bruce); late forties (Maria) annual income: Not given education: High school (Bruce); secretarial training (Maria) family: Married, no children occupation: Retired civil servant (Bruce); secretary (Maria) origin: Bruce emigrated from Britain as a young child; Maria emigrated from Mexico in her late twenties. history: Travel was not central to the childhood of either Bruce or Maria, but it became so later in life. Returning to work in England with his Wrst wife in 1959, Bruce saw a brief note in a newspaper about the “new opportunities” to camp in Russia. This idea captured his imagination, and the adventure, excitement, and people he met on that 1960 trip cemented a lifelong desire to travel. Maria, who shares this love, met Bruce on one of his trips to Mexico. In recent years their travels, mainly in Europe and North Africa, have often been planned to reconnect with people whom Bruce met on his 1960 trip, or others they have met on their travels around Europe. When Bruce retired in the late 1980s they spent a year touring Europe and North Africa with their car and trailer – their preferred mode of travel, which they store at a friend’s place in the Netherlands. In addition to establishing and renewing personal connections, travel offers, as Bruce says, a chance “to learn about the political and economic situations, history and current affairs” of different countries, and to gain “new perspectives on our lives in Canada.” Most of their annual trips are two to three weeks long. Periodically they return to Mexico to visit Maria’s family. D O N NA A N D SA M U E L

age: Late sixties combined annual income: $55,000-$70,000 education: BA (Donna); engineering degree (Samuel) family: Married, two children occupation: Homemaker (Donna); retired civil engineer (Samuel) origin: Donna was born in Canada to English immigrant parents; Samuel was born in Ontario to Canadian parents (naturalized for several generations). history: Although her family never travelled much, as a young woman

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Donna journeyed to England in the early 1950s. Samuel’s family also travelled only locally when he was young. The couple did not travel until their children were young teenagers, and “salaries reached the point where we could afford to.” Initially they took their family across Canada, and then made a family trip to England in the early 1970s. After retiring, they lived in England for a year and travelled to the Continent as much as possible during that time. They keep returning to London as they love the theatre, but they have also travelled to Turkey, Mexico, Israel, China, Japan, Hong Kong, and various points in Europe and the United States. They always travel on organized tours, and have also taken cruises to Alaska, the eastern Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Panama Canal. Seeing various engineering accomplishments has been one objective of their travels, but in general, they want to go where there is “something to stimulate their minds,” which includes places of historical or biblical interest. They enjoy walking tours and exploring a city on foot. Their travels are well organized, and their trip diaries document that not a moment is wasted while they are away from home. E L A I N E A N D B E N JA M I N

age: Late Wfties combined annual income: $80,000-$100,000 education: MSW (Elaine); BSc (Peter) family: Married, two children occupation: Social work administrator (Elaine); various computerrelated jobs (Peter) origin: Elaine was born and raised in Prince Edward Island by Canadian parents; Peter emigrated from Britain as a young adult. history: Although she had a modest income, Elaine’s mother managed to travel across Canada and as far north as Alaska as a young schoolteacher. She often talked of her travels and her desire to do more, and loved to hear of the travel of others. Elaine found her mother’s love of travel infectious, and she left PEI as soon as she could, desirous of seeing more of the country and Wguring out “who she was.” Benjamin’s family, like other postwar English families, travelled to see relatives more than friends, as his parents came from two different regions of the country. He grew up in a resort town, so was very familiar with the idea of a “holiday.” He left England to “see the world,” but

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adds that he simply “ended up in Toronto.” Elaine and Benjamin took their children on various trips within Canada, the United States, Central America, parts of Europe, and Britain, going as far as money and the “children would let them.” As soon as their children were old enough to be left with relatives, they took short trips on their own to various parts of Canada. In recent years, travel has become a high priority in their lives, including seven weeks in India and Nepal, and a seven-month round-the-world trip to revisit these countries as well as Turkey, Egypt, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Australia, and New Zealand. Recent shorter trips include visits to Morocco, the Czech Republic, England, and the Canary Islands. Both Elaine and Benjamin prefer extended trips of about two months, but any that they take in future will probably include more organized tours, run by companies such as Explore. Travelling, for them, gives a “reality” to the “geography, politics, and culture” of distant parts of the world. FRANCES

age: Early forties annual income: $50,000-$65,000 education: BA, BEd family: Divorced, no children occupation: Teacher origin: Born in Canada to English immigrant parents history: Frances’ parents, elder brother, and sister emigrated from England in the late 1950s, and as a result her family was interested in seeing Canada on their vacations. After the death of her mother in the early 1990s, she and her sister travelled to England. It was the Wrst time for her, and her sister’s Wrst return trip since she left as a child. An integral part of this trip was to visit relatives, something that is a draw for Frances in planning her trips. Previously Frances had travelled to Europe with her former husband. A trip initially prompted by her desire to see a major art exhibition in the Netherlands, it expanded to include several other countries. A cruise to the Greek islands was another highlight in her travels, a trip prompted by her long-standing interest in Greek history and mythology. In general her trips are about three weeks long, and are fuelled by her interest in “visiting family, local culture, history, food and language of other countries.” She has a curiosity to “see how different the world is from home and to search

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for common roots.” She prefers to spend her time in cities, as opposed to sojourns in the country. Visiting art galleries and museums, enjoying local foods, and “simply walking for miles looking for a real sense of life” occupies her while away. She has travelled both independently and on organized tours. GWEN

age: Early Wfties personal annual income: $80,000 (estimate) education: BA, BEd family: Married, two children occupation: Counsellor origin: Born in Canada to Canadian parents history: Growing up in a small town in northern Ontario, Gwen travelled only to see relatives in a neighbouring province, with her parents always unwilling to deviate from the fastest route while she wanted to explore the back roads. Her Wrst international trip was when she was in university, where she studied geography, a subject that only fuelled her desire to travel and see the world. India held a particular fascination for her, and in the early 1990s she spent eight months there and in Nepal, without her husband and children. She did not travel with organized groups as a rule. All of her travels, she says, are motivated by her desire “for adventure.” Outside of her trip to India, where she would not return unless she was able to spend several months there (something she plans for her retirement), her trips are generally with her husband and last about one to two weeks. Sailing in the Caribbean, particularly to islands not overly developed, is one of her treasured travel memories. Beyond this she has travelled extensively in the United States, throughout Europe, and in southern Africa. When deciding where to go she prefers places that are “very different from home, [and considers] how much time I have, if I can get a last-minute deal, what the climate will be, and how much the trip will cost.” Exploring without the pressure of a schedule, with the intention of meeting local people, is what appeals to her about travelling in general.

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Travellers’ Biographies HAROLD

age: Late sixties annual income: $50,000-$65,000 education: MEd family: Unmarried occupation: Retired corporate manager origin: Immigrated alone to Canada from the United Kingdom at the age of seventeen history: Before Harold left postwar Britain for Canada in search of more opportunity, he had never been more than thirty miles from home. In Canada he became very involved in the youth hostel movement, which took him, for example, cycling through the Rocky Mountains – when the roads were still unpaved – as well as into the eastern United States. He made sporadic trips back to England to see his mother, and as soon as he could afford to started travelling internationally at least once or twice a year. His recent trips are never more than three weeks in length, however, as he “loves Toronto” and does not want to miss what is going on there. He claims to be “running out of countries”; he had been to “eighty-six last count” (even if only visiting some for a day), and has been to nearly every part of the globe. He has returned more than once to Cuba as he Wnds the people very friendly; otherwise he prefers countries where Buddhism is the dominant religion. In all of his travels, his desire is to “Wnd something new and different.” Watching people, walking the streets, visiting art galleries, and “seeing what a place has to offer, seeing what it is known for” are the activities that occupy his time while travelling. Harold has travelled independently and on organized tours, as well as basing himself at selected resorts while in the Caribbean. JAC K I E A N D DA M I E N

age: Mid-forties annual income: $80,000-$100,000 education: PhD (Jackie); Wne arts diploma (Damien) family: Married, one child (from Jackie’s Wrst marriage) occupation: Doctoral student, now professor (Jackie); graphic designer (Damien) origin: Jackie emigrated from the United States as a young adult;

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Damien was born in Canada to Canadian parents (naturalized for several generations). history: The world of Jackie’s parents was largely circumscribed by a few states on the eastern seaboard of the United States, where they both grew up and had family. When she was twelve, they made a road trip to California, something Jackie remembers as a “forced march” across the country. It was not a leisurely journey, but one that was measured out by lengthy stretches of driving. This trip did fuel Jackie’s desire to travel more, but in future “it was to be on her terms.” Damien’s family took regular summer cottage or camping holidays, highlighted by a cross-Canada tour. His father travelled with the UN to the Middle East in the 1960s, bringing back tales of his adventures. Jackie and Damien decided early on in their marriage that “travel might be more fun than children.” (Jackie already had one daughter from a previous marriage.) A central trip in their travel history was to southern Africa, particularly the safari excursion they had arranged with a private guide. Although both admitted that they could ill afford it, they knew that they could readily pay it off in time, and it was “worth every penny.” Jackie felt as if she belonged in southern Africa, loving the people, the music, the landscape, and the wildlife. Many of their travels were extensions to professional meetings that Jackie attends. Other important trips include New Zealand and Morocco, where they have returned more than once. Their trips cover the spectrum from intensively researched and planned independent expeditions to sojourns at Club Med. A recent move to the west coast, a change in jobs for both of them, a drop in salaries, and the purchase of a house are things that they feel will curtail their travel for a while, but never indeWnitely. JENNIFER

age: Mid-forties annual income: $30,000-$45,000 education: High school diploma family: Married, one child occupation: Administrative clerk origin: Born in Britain, immigrated to Canada via New Zealand when she was Wfteen history: In her childhood, Jennifer’s family moved among various places

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in Canada and New Zealand after leaving England. Visiting family and taking her own family to places she has lived or visited earlier in her life have been important aspects of her travels. But she has also travelled to the Caribbean and the United States with her husband “simply for holidays.” Travel for her is a time to connect with people. If she is not travelling to see family or to relive memories, “the weather” is an important draw. While in a new place, she enjoys the nuances of daily life that make a place “different from home.” Her trips are never formally organized and are structured around visits to people and places of importance to her. J U D I T H A N D H E N RY

age: Mid-sixties combined annual income: $100,000 education: Two MA degrees (Judith); BA, graduate business diploma (Henry) family: Married, three children occupation: Computer software development (Judith); information systems management (Henry) origin: Emigrated as young adults from Britain to Canada history: Travel was not part of Henry’s family life in England. Cultural tradition, the Depression, and the Second World War eliminated any real opportunity for him to do so. Judith’s father, however, worked for British Rail, and her family travelled on free passes throughout the UK after the war. Judith and Henry travelled as a couple in Europe as much as they could before they moved to Canada in the 1960s. They toured Canada with their family, then began to travel internationally, often with their adult children or with friends. They travel both independently and on organized tours. Important trips include Venezuela, Australia and New Zealand, and China – the latter two with the same friends. All of their trips are very carefully planned to make the most of their resources, while ensuring that they see all that they want to see. Taking in the sights, exploring the city, eating local foods, and going to the theatre and local cultural performances are what they like to do while away. Visiting relatives may prompt interest in a trip, but it is not the sole reason that they select a particular destination.

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LESLIE

age: Late forties annual income: $65,000-$80,000 education: Two BA degrees family: Married, no children occupation: Retired executive assistant origin: Born in Canada to Russian immigrant parents history: Every summer in her childhood, Leslie’s family spent two weeks at a friend’s cottage in northern Ontario, as well as making other trips to relatives who lived around the province. She said her family “did things,” unlike many of the other families in her small southwestern Ontario town. Her Wrst international trip was as a young adolescent, when she and her mother travelled to New York City to see the World’s Fair and to visit relatives. Another watershed in her travel history was her Wrst solo trip in her early twenties, proving that “I could do this alone, I do not need someone to travel with me.” Now her trips average about two weeks in length, and she travels out of the country at least two to three times a year. Europe, including Britain, initially was not a place she wanted to travel, as it was Wlled with “old stuff,” and because of discrimination she suffered as a child from those of English ancestry. Furthermore, it was her priority to see Canada Wrst. But having made a trip to France to take a friend away for a “break,” she returned thinking the old world was “fabulous.” Her annual travels have a range of priorities: one is to take her mother on an holiday, which usually Wnds them in the Caribbean, in a resort environment that is comfortable with a hint of luxury; another is to relax with her husband somewhere warm and reasonable, maybe to play some golf; other trips are made independently with friends, who know that she is always keen to depart, even on short notice, to wherever their whims take them. Europe, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Brazil, Central America, and Mexico are some of the places she has travelled in recent years. She loves planning trips, and has written about some of her travels for small travel magazines. L I N DA A N D N E I L

age: Mid-sixties combined annual income: $55,000-$70,000

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education: BA, teaching certiWcates family: Married, two children occupation: retired teacher (Linda); retired principal (Neil) origin: Born in Canada to Canadian parents (naturalized for several generations) history: Linda and Neil both grew up in rural Ontario, and both had very little chance to travel when they were young. When they married in the early 1960s they were working as teachers, jobs they promptly quit to go to Europe for a year. During that time they both fell in love with “history, which is there standing right in front of you” in the cathedrals, monuments, and architecture of Europe. Most of their travel has been in Europe, but they have also travelled to India, as their daughter lives there, and to Australia to visit long-time friends. While in the southern hemisphere they also visited New Zealand. They took their children to various parts of Canada when they were young, and have continued to travel within Canada, to new places or to visit friends and family. While they were still teaching, they attended several summer educational seminars in Germany and elsewhere, visiting other countries as well. Since retirement, most of their trips have been about Wve to six weeks in duration. Accompanied by friends, they have spent recent winters in Portugal to escape the Canadian winter. Researching their trips is a favourite pastime that often continues after they return home as they try to grasp the complexities of European history. They have taken several organized tours, particularly when they travelled to India. Wherever they go they like to visit sites of historic interest, to seek out museums and galleries, and to attend local cultural activities. Cruises are unappealing to them, as they view them as passive and quite expensive. Neil said that they were “living proof that you do not have to be wealthy to travel.” They have a list of places to visit in future including Turkey, regions of Spain, Russia, and the Baltic states, as well as various points in Canada. LOUISE

age: Late thirties annual income: $50,000-$65,000 education: BA, BEd family: Married, no children occupation: Teacher

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origin: Born in Canada to Canadian parents (naturalized for several generations) history: Growing up in rural Ontario, Louise had never really been out of the province until, encouraged by school friends, she took a job as a nanny in Paris after high school. She travelled as much as she could during that time, mistakenly thinking that “it would be my only big trip.” In university, out of an interest in the Korean language, she spent a summer in Korea helping out in schools with Englishlanguage study. This began a long association with Korea, where she has travelled many times, eventually becoming Xuent in the language and making lifelong friends there. Her Wrst contacts in Korea were through someone she knew in Canada, a pattern that she has followed in many of her trips. Her six-week trip to Nigeria was prompted by stories a Nigerian boyfriend told her while they were in university. Other trips have taken her to different parts of Canada and the United States, Israel, Ecuador, Argentina, Bermuda, Egypt, and Belize. The challenge of a foreign language draws her to travel, as well as staying long enough in one place to get a sense of the daily lives of ordinary people. She is keen to visit schools wherever she goes, and has gone on various summer teacher exchange programs. She is systematically taking each one of her nieces and nephews on a major trip. For her, travel cultivates an independent spirit, and gives her the “seed to plant in the minds and hearts of my students and nieces and nephews,” an excitement about of the rest of the world. She does not take organized tours. MICHAEL

age: Mid-Wfties annual income: $125,000-$140,000 education: BA family: Married, four children occupation: Retired federal civil servant origin: Born in Canada to an English father who immigrated as a child and a Canadian mother (naturalized for several generations) history: Michael’s family was “fairly comfortable,” and he travelled more than most of his childhood friends, taking regular summer holidays to Cape Cod or regions of the Gaspé. After high school, he went on a trip to Europe organized by a university professor, for which his father insisted Michael pay at least in part. A superb experience, it

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showed him that travel does not have to cost much, and ultimately he became “chronically addicted to travel for over thirty years.” Between 1959 and 1999 there were only two “dry years,” in the early 1960s, when he did not make at least one trip. Since retirement, he takes at least four international trips a year, frequently without his wife, who does not enjoy his “adventuresome” travels. Much of his solo travel is on organized tours, at most three weeks long; is focused on hiking, cycling, or some other form of moderate physical activity, with the intention of spending limited time on buses; and is designed to avoid popular tourist destinations. With his wife he travels somewhat more luxuriously, mainly by car or train. A highlight of his solo travels was a hiking trip into Irian Jaya shortly after the region was opened up for tourism in the late 1980s. He has also been to many parts of Europe, the United States, India, Nepal, Central America, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, parts of the Caribbean, and most regions of Canada. A keen photographer, his pictures are his most prized souvenirs. He has tried his hand at travel writing, publishing in newspapers and small travel magazines. To him, “travel is simply an exciting adventure.” M O N I CA A N D L AW R E N C E

age: Late thirties combined annual income: Not given education: College diploma (Monica) family: Married, three children occupation: Small business owners origin: Born in Canada to Canadian parents (Monica) and German immigrant parents (Lawrence) history: Monica’s early exposure to travel was regular trips to her family’s cottage, which her family frequented even outside of the summer months. She remembers “always being on the move . . . loving to watch the world go by out of the car window.” Her Wrst international trip was at the age of twelve, when she went to Ireland with her grandparents, who had emigrated as a young married couple. Her grandfather had entertained her in her childhood with stories of the magic of Ireland. Lawrence’s Wrst international travel experiences were with his mother on her return trips to Germany, where she was born. When he was young his family travelled across Canada, and as a young adult he toured through much of Canada and the eastern United States. Both

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had travelled to Europe in their Wrst marriages, even though for Monica, the trip was clearly much more of a priority for her than her former husband. Due to family and professional responsibilities Monica and Lawrence have restricted their annual travel to a week or so with their children, and then a week to ten days during the winter in the Caribbean, or South or Central America. Generally they base themselves at a resort during these trips. Travel for them offers an exposure to other cultures, peoples, religion, and food, a chance to better understand history, to appreciate the natural wonders of the world, and to expand their personal horizons. Monica stated, “I want to experience as much of the world as I can before I die.” Sightseeing, hiking, snorkelling – which Monica called “soft adventure” – shopping, dining, dancing, visiting galleries, or simply trying to “see and do as much as we can” occupy them while away. An avid researcher of their travel destinations, Monica looks for places that appeal to their “sense of adventure,” are sites of “unspoiled beauty,” have lots of seafood, and generally have “lots to do.” OLIVIA

age: Mid-Wfties annual income: $15,000-$25,000 education: Fine arts diploma family: Single, one child occupation: Freelance graphic designer origin: Emigrated from Germany as a young adult history: Olivia travelled around Europe with her family on summer holidays as a child. After high school she studied in France for a year to improve her French, having already learned English at school. She then worked in England and Italy in an effort to improve her language skills. Her Wrst major trip was her trip to Iceland, a place that she thought would be Wlled with glaciers, “something which fascinated me.” She eventually became a tour guide there, taking various European groups around the island country. She then travelled to New York City, and eventually immigrated to Canada. Through her work, she has established many international contacts, and a desire to see these people “at home” has provided the impetus for some of her travels. Such connections often provide her with lodging and inroads into local community life. She has also travelled under the auspices of

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various NGOs, which allowed her extended stays in some locations. When her daughter was a young teenager, Olivia took her on a roundthe-world trip incorporating visits to friends in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Her memorable travels include England, Ireland, Alaska, Belize, Greece, Chile, Vietnam, Laos, and a journey searching for details of the life of a distant relative that took her to Poland, Finland, Denmark, Russia, and on the Trans-Siberian railroad. All of her travel is independent. The length of her trips varies, largely depending on her resources; her challenge is making them extend as far as possible. Olivia said, “My life is totally established by travelling . . . I just cannot imagine [life without it].” R AC H E L

age: Mid-thirties annual income: $50,000-$65,000 education: MA family: Single occupation: Urban planner origin: Born in Canada to Dutch immigrant parents history: Rachel clearly remembers the tears in her grandfather’s eyes the Wrst time he saw Niagara Falls, a place that he had heard about all his life. Inspired by this and by a Grade 5 teacher who “made all the world seem such an interesting place,” she wants “to see it all, I want to see the places I have heard about.” She says, “There are so many wonderful and intriguing places to experience” in the world, she cannot understand “why someone would not want to travel internationally.” Her parents often took their family on “road trips” to the United States, but she is the only one of her siblings who seems to think that travelling is “the only thing to do with your money.” Her Wrst international trip was to visit relatives in the Netherlands when she was seventeen. During university, she started to travel with friends to the Caribbean, Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela. Subsequent travels, on her own, with her mother, and sometimes on organized tours, have taken her on a safari in southern Africa, a camel trip in the Sinai, a cruise on the Nile, and to different points in the United States. Patagonia is high on her list as her next destination. Her recent trips vary anywhere from two to four weeks in length. Travel allows her to visit friends, to

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escape to the sun, to snorkel, to visit places she has heard about, simply to “gain an understanding of the geography, politics, culture, and cuisine” of a different place, or to meet new people. Photography is an interest of hers, and she is always looking for “good pictures” when she travels. She keeps journals of each of her trips. R I C H A R D A N D G L A DY S

age: Early sixties combined annual income: $125,000-$140,000 education: Engineering degree (Richard); some university and teacher’s college (Gladys) family: Married, four children occupation: Engineer (Richard); federal civil servant (Gladys) origin: Emigrated from the United Kingdom as young adults history: Richard and Gladys’ travel for several years focused on seeing Canada, their adopted home, and returning to Britain to see relatives and show their children their ancestral home. More recently they have been farther aWeld to France, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia (twice), and New Zealand. Their trips are generally very thoroughly planned – Richard said, “Planning a trip is part of the excitement of taking a trip” – and often include some form of organized tour. An exception was their trip to the Bahamas, which they took “on only three days’ notice” as it sounded like a good idea, and was a “good deal.” A recent trip to Taiwan was prompted by friends who were living there temporarily. For Richard, travel “gets all the senses activated simultaneously” and allows him to see cultural differences. They take local tours where they can spend hours Wnding their way around a city on foot and on local transportation. Particular interests draw them to some destinations: Gladys had always been fascinated by the stories of the nineteenth-century gold seekers in Alaska and the Yukon, Richard will travel anywhere to take a ride on an interesting train, and both of them love to go to the theatre. Just recently retired, they also travel to experience other cultures and to learn how “to improve ours.” R O B E RT A N D A N N E L I S E

age: Early forties combined annual income: $30,000-$45,000

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education: College diploma (Robert); teaching certiWcate (Annelise) family: Married, one child occupation: Graphic designer (Robert); teacher (Annelise) origin: Robert was born in Canada and raised by adoptive Canadian parents; Annelise emigrated from France as a young adult. history: Robert never felt comfortable in Canada and wanted to live and work somewhere else where he imagined a sense of “greater connection.” His Wrst choice was New Zealand, but it proved not to be as he had expected. Subsequently he, Annelise, and their daughter moved to England, France, back to Canada, and most recently, back to France. Every major move was accompanied by extended travels through Europe, particularly Italy, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, France, and Britain. Other travels have taken them to Mexico and various parts of the Caribbean. Their favourite place is the Mediterranean coast of France, where they stay for at least a month, to adapt their lives to the pace of the village to which they often return – a village Annelise knew as a child. Stops on their other travels are selected by intuition and serendipity. Historically important sites are a particular draw for Robert, who seeks a sense of connection to the momentous events that occurred at these places. For Annelise, a leisured time to relax, visit with friends and family, eat good food, read good books, and step out of the “hectic pace of life” for more than just a few days is what she desires in a “holiday.” Their holidays are often interspersed with visits from relatives and friends, often met on previous travels; these long-time friendships are kept alive between infrequent visits with letters, cards, and now e-mails. Organized travel does not interest them. S U SA N A N D F R E D

age: Late sixties (Susan); early seventies (Fred) combined annual income: $50,000-$70,000 education: High school diploma (Susan); BA, graduate business diploma (Fred) family: Married, two children occupation: Retired administrative assistant (Susan); retired small manufacturing executive (Fred) origin: Born in Canada to English immigrant parents (Susan) and Canadian parents (Fred)

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history: Susan and Fred, throughout their married life and particularly in the last two decades, have been inveterate travellers. Neither, however, had travelled much when they married over forty years ago. Susan’s family had made several trips between England and Canada, trying to decide where they wanted to live. Once permanently settled in Canada, family vacations were made to local destinations. Fred’s parents had travelled somewhat more extensively to the Caribbean, Hawaii, and Britain, generally without their children. Susan summarized their shared desire to travel as prompted by “insatiable curiosity about our world and its people, their customs, and culture.” Their travels began in Canada, but in recent years have expanded to New Zealand, the Cook Islands, and Fiji, the former USSR, Finland, Holland, Greece, Turkey, Rajasthan, the Caribbean, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Ireland, Thailand, Portugal, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Costa Rica, Grenada, Australia, Madeira, the Azores, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Chile, Patagonia, the southwestern United States, and Cuba. Places of historical interest and places that are in the news interest them. They also desire to see places before they become “overtouristed.” They take many different kinds of trips, some much more energetic than others. They travel independently and on organized tours, and have recently taken to renting small cottages for a week or so then touring the local area in a rented car. Susan meticulously documents their travels with photographs and annotated commentaries, and often writes articles for travel information magazines. Fred used to take an equivalent number of slides, but found ultimately that there was little audience for them. Their home is adorned with mementoes of their travels, and they are known to their friends as “the travelling Langfords.” TO N Y

age: Early Wfties annual income: $45,000-$50,000 education: BA family: Single occupation: Computer technician origin: Born in Canada to Canadian parents (naturalized for several generations) history: Tony’s family travelled extensively in Canada and the United

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States, always “on the back roads so we actually met the people,” which he tries to do on his own trips. As a young adult, he crossed the North American continent in his van. A relative newcomer to the world of international travel, Tony became “hooked on” the experience after he went on a trek to Everest Base Camp six years ago, which he became interested in after hearing a client talk about her recent trip to Nepal. Nepal opened up the world of “adventure travel” to him, travel that always involves some form of physical exercise, normally hiking or cycling. On one trip, he met three people from England with whom he now travels at least once a year. He has also travelled to England to visit these friends, and intends to go to Australia to visit other friends he has made in a similar manner. His work schedule is Xexible, allowing him blocks of time off. His trips, always part of organized tours, are usually about three weeks in length. His travels have also taken him to Egypt, Morocco, Mexico, Turkey, Borneo, Vietnam, India, Peru, and Bolivia. Tony’s keen interest in travel is fed by his determination “not to wait” until he gets too old to enjoy the experience.

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Notes

C H A P T E R 1 : B E I N G A TO U R I S T 1 The World Tourism Organization (2001a) deWnes a tourist as “a visitor who stays at least one night in a collective or private accommodation in the country visited.” 2 This observation, made on the basis of my conversations with a limited number of individuals, is worthy of future study. It is supported by Nelson Graburn’s (1999) discussion of his experiences growing up in a household in which another place, in his case the home of “Malays,” was part of the British colonial reality of his family. He attributes such exposure as contributing to his later professional interest in anthropology – work that incidentally includes important contributions to the anthropology of tourism and tourists. 3 Those with whom I spoke could be classiWed as Bourdieu’s “new bourgeois” in some cases, or “new petit bourgeois” in others. The former is “Wrmly located in the service sector with Wnance, marketing and purchasing as occupational exemplars, a class fraction on both economic capital (Wnance) and cultural capital.” The latter are the “‘taste-makers’ or the ‘new cultural intermediaries’ . . . low on economic capital . . . they ape and popularize an intellectual lifestyle . . . arguably the ultimate in a cultivated, even scholastic and ‘romantic’ Xight from the social world” (Munt 1994, 107). 4 The repeated travels of those I interviewed challenged their class position. This is consistent with Gottleib’s (1982) claim that some tourists from lower middleclass backgrounds choose to go on holidays that allow them to feel elevated in their status. She further argues that those of the upper classes at times choose to satisfy their fascination with the Other by participating in holidays that require them to work, often at physical labour, and live in fairly modest conditions. Such experiences can be seen to mimic, albeit in a very limited way, the life of the lower classes. 5 Dennis O’Rourke’s Wlm The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991) tells the tragic

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story of the lives of some of these women. See also Skrobanek, Boonpakdi, and Janthatkeero 1997 and Seabrook 1996 for further discussion on this topic. Some materials in these latter publications present a rather different, more positive, view of the experience of sex workers in the tourist trade. Although the Internet has facilitated the promotion of sex tours, many sites attempt to counterbalance this promotion, including those of Partners in Responsible Tourism , ECPAT International , Social Watch , Centre for Environmentally Responsible Tourism , Cultural Survival , and Rethinking Tourism . This history is taken from interviews I did in 1991 with the original founder of the show, who was the Eastman Kodak representative in Hawaii in the 1920s. He organized the daytime presentations of hula dancing to allow better photographic opportunities for his clients. Another example of the comic representation of tourists is the Wlm Trobriand Cricket (James Leach, 1976) in which the tourist is mocked in his efforts to photograph the game. The impact of the touristic invasion of local communities can also be neutralized by MacCannell’s “perfect exchange relationship” (1992, 29). Erb (2000, 734) discusses how tourists on the island of Flores are “treated and understood as powerful, privileged guests” by the Manggaraian people. See Palmer 1994 for a good discussion of this point in relation to tourism promotion in the Bahamas. A cursory examination of tourism brochures found many examples of indigenous people in close association with local fauna and landscape. Words such as “primitive,” “exotic,” and “undiscovered” continue to appear in descriptions of places and people to be encountered on various trips to the non-Western world. Historically much writing in anthropology and other social sciences about the actions of individuals saw them as largely determined by the structural constraints of the world they lived in. More recently the fact that individuals and groups can, and do, have a measure of agency in their response to their world has dominated discussions about the motivations and driving forces behind the complexities of social action. As such “power and desire” have been identiWed as “having an effect on the structure itself” (Lambek 2000, 313). It also has been suggested that the actions of these agents must also be considered as being prompted by what is culturally understood to be good moral practice. See also Meneley 1996 for a good example of this point. Nunez 1963 was one of the very Wrst articles in the Weld on this subject. Canadian indigenous peoples experienced dramatic social upheavals as a result of the fur trade, a process well underway by the turn of the eighteenth century. These upheavals prompted many changes in local traditions but in no way destroyed local cultures. See also Picard 1995 for a discussion of this process in contemporary Bali.

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14 See, for example, Hseih, O’Leary, and Morrison 1992 and Tatham and Dornoff 1971 for further discussions of this segmentation. 15 Graburn (1983) notes that cultural conWdence is stronger for members of the middle and upper classes. 16 This is a distinction that several groups of students who see themselves as travellers have given me in the various classes on tourism that I have taught. Sallie Tisdale (1995, 67) summarized the difference as, “Tourists don’t know where they have been . . . travelers don’t know where they’re going.” Some might see the anthropologist as simply a type of traveller, or at worst a long-staying tourist. Others would argue that there are many things that distinguish them from these two groups (Crick 1995; Errington and Gewertz 1989). 17 Urry (1992) challenges some of the critique of his use of the concept of the “tourist gaze,” arguing he used it in a much broader manner than has often been suggested by his critics. 18 See Said 1979 for a thorough discussion of this third point in relation to the Western world’s imaginary Orient. I will return to the latter two points in Chapters 5 and 6. 19 Nash (1996, 49) has argued that this type of analysis, most explicit in the work of Graburn (1977b), implies but does not question the assumption of an almost “universal need for alienation or inversion,” such as that which can be experienced through travel (and other leisure activities). 20 I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer of part of this manuscript for drawing this distinction and examples to my attention. 21 To name just a few, MacCannell (1999) took a largely structural approach, inXuenced by traditional Marxist ideas of alienation and the thinking of semiotics. Thurot and Thurot (1983) drew on a more neo-Marxist paradigm in their study of tourist literature. Culler (1981) argued for a more purely semiotic approach, charging that tourists, in fact, were “amateur semioticians.” Others have drawn on various elements of poststructuralist thinking in their discussion of tourism and the tourist experience (Urry 1990, 1995; Featherstone 1993; Rojek 1997), identifying tourism as a form of consumptive gaze, coherent with the identiWcation of consumption as the deWning metaphor of the postmodern world (in contrast to production in the modern world). Ideas of pilgrimage, communitas, liminality, and the ludic have been essential to other analyses (Graburn 1977b; Cohen 1985), while some see the tourist as engaged in a form of ethnic relation (van den Berghe 1994), or in performance (Edensor 1998). 22 Bruner (1994, 407) in his analysis of a tourist site draws on the writings of Bakhtin, Barthes, Dilthey, and Dewey, the more recent work of Handler, Linnekin, Hobsbawm, and Ranger, the poststructuralists, and contemporary writers of performance theory. 23 See also McArthur 1999 and Desforges 2000. 24 I concluded that the study of these albums and their display of photographs and images constituted a completely separate project to be done at some future date.

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1 Turner uses the term “communitas” to refer to a modality of social relationship characterized by a communion of equal individuals who recognize an essential and generic human bond (1969, 96-7). 2 I will discuss the artistic form of these relationships in Chapter 3. My comments here pertain to the idea of the location of meaning in an encounter between people. 3 French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977) uses the term “habitus” to describe the milieu of individuals as shaped by personal history and social position within a community. 4 In her study on romantic love, Illouz (1997b) noted travel as one experience in which many identiWed having memorable romantic moments. Such moments suggest expression of intimacy. 5 The immigrants of whom Boym speaks parallel Simmel’s “stranger,” that person who wanders “today and stays tomorrow” ([1908] 1971a, 143). The stranger or immigrant is both “far and near at the same time,” and is never perceived as an individual, only as a general category of person (148). I propose that due to the very large numbers of tourists that some destinations now receive, much of what characterized Simmel’s understanding of the stranger can be said to apply to the tourist today. Local relationships with tourists are rife with all of the same tensions that Simmel described for the stranger (149). They, like strangers and immigrants, are both “far and near at the same time.” 6 The tourists’ relationship to home is the subject of Chapter 4. 7 Sennett does not deny that passion infuses both the public and the private realms, but he feels that each is characterized by a different kind of passion (1978, 337-40). 8 Another example is the intimate friendships that nineteenth-century uppermiddle-class women had with other women (a few, it should be noted, were sexual). Marriage in that time and class was not seen as a deep emotional bond between a man and a woman. Moral and spiritual order, Wnancial stability, and social status were what marriage offered. Women, in particular, sought and found affection and intimate connections with close female friends (Illouz 1997b, 45-52; see also Ranum 1989; Fisher and Stricker 1982). The assumptions embedded in the institution of marriage changed dramatically through the twentieth century. Married men and women came to be understood as linked in a relationship of intimacy, fuelled by deep emotional and passionate bonds. 9 McArthur (1999) also found that this was the case for the female solo travellers she interviewed. 10 Swedenburg (2001, 41) identiWed a similar experience of connection across cultural difference occurring at a concert of the Master Musicians of Jajouka (a contemporary Moroccan music group) in Seattle in 1994. He said a “kind of momentary community was created, [with] its unfamiliar and alien vocal styles, modes, and instrumentals.”

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11 Bruce’s Wrst wife tragically died a few years after this trip and therefore her insight into the encounter was not available. 12 Several of my friends were horriWed when I started this research project. They wondered why I would ever set myself up to be held captive by people’s endless slides, photographs, and conversation about their travels! 13 I want to thank Kendra Adema for reminding me of this connection. 14 I want to thank Melanie McArthur for suggesting this concept to me. 15 Although we explored many aspects of their travel experiences, the topic of their sexual lives while travelling was not something that the travel enthusiasts wanted to discuss with me. I respected their wishes.

C H A P T E R 3 : T H E TO U R I S T A E S T H E T I C 1 Featherstone goes on to argue that the collapse of distinctions between high art and mass/popular culture demanded by the postmodern world “can be traced back to the experience of the big cities of the mid-nineteenth century” (1996, 286). He describes nineteenth-century carnivals, fairs, music halls, spectacles, and resorts, and modern-day theme parks, malls, and tourism as sites of “ordered disorder” with an “ever present Otherness” that allows patrons to “construct an identity, to know who [they] are . . . [and] . . . are not” (286-7). 2 See Lakoff (1987, 206) for discussions of the existence at the preconceptual level of “embodied structures of understanding.” 3 I would like to thank Melanie McArthur for making this observation. 4 I would like to thank an anonymous reader for bringing this delightful work of Wction to my attention. 5 See Illouz 1997b for a discussion of the physiological response to travel. 6 The Oxford English Dictionary deWnes rape as an act of “sexual intercourse that is forced upon a person.” This deWnition is appropriate to the metaphor I am using here. A second OED deWnition, although outside the metaphor of sexual intercourse, is also appropriate: “an act of plunder, violent seizure, or abuse and despoliation.” My comments are largely restricted to the description embodied in the Wrst deWnition, although elements of the second are certainly relevant to discussions of contemporary tourism. I would like to thank an anonymous reader for bringing to my attention Solomon-Godeau’s (1992) article “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of the Primitivist Modernism.” I agree with the reviewer that Gauguin’s nineteenth-century response to Tahiti is a much more overt expression of the metaphor of rape than the touristic experience. I believe that the metaphor and its attendant symbolic violence, however, are also appropriate in the context of contemporary tourism, if somewhat more muted in the comments of those I interviewed than those recorded for Gauguin and his contemporaries.

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7 Feminists argue that such linkage is embedded in a phallocentric model, and that female sexuality lacks violence or it is at least less violent (Schechner 1993, 298). Schechner, while acknowledging this, suggests that violence is pervasive in our world, and is a subject of much voyeuristic curiosity, whether it is phallocentric or not. Copet-Rougier (1986, 68) argues that it is the ambiguity inherent in the playing out of violence that leads to the “the idea of beauty (the aesthetics) of violence,” an ambiguity Eagleton (1990, 28) sees generated from the fact that aesthetics can be both emancipatory (pleasurable and freeing) and repressive (painful and conWning). Such judgment-making is emancipatory in that it frees the tourist to experience beauty, but at the same time it is repressive, in that it sets the limits of what can seen as beauty. It is this ambiguity that fuels the beauty, the aesthetic of violence.

CHAPTER 4: JOURNEYING HOME 1 Robert and Bruce, both English-speaking, originally responded to my request for participants, but their respective spouses, Annelise (originally from France) and Maria (originally from Mexico) were integral to our conversations. Olivia was born in Germany. 2 Ironically, John Ralston Saul (1997) suggests that implicitly Canadians know that it is impossible to “conquer” the Canadian landscape; in fact, a central part of the nation-building process of Canada has been the negotiation of a relationship with the landscape. 3 Laxer (2000, 66) makes these points, adding that Canada’s motto, with its emphasis on the physical landscape, is in contrast to the human-centred “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” of the American Declaration of Independence. 4 This metaphor belied the reality that these were never empty lands, and the fact that the extraction of these raw materials denuded landscapes, polluted waterways, and seriously disrupted the lives of many of the original inhabitants of this land. 5 This border, largely the forty-ninth parallel, which since 1818 has demarcated the southern extremity of Canada is, of course, only one border of the country. Our most northerly border recedes well into the Canadian consciousness, as it lies beyond that line where domesticated agricultural lands end. 6 As I prepared this manuscript in its early form, the nation, with a great expression of civic identity, pride, and passion for the country, mourned the passing of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, whom some called the greatest Canadian statesman of the twentieth century. 7 The tourists expressed these images of Canada to me in many of our general conversations about a range of topics, frequently touching on current events in the news.

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8 Joe Clark was Progressive Conservative prime minister of Canada for nine months in 1979-80. At that time he was seen to be a rather ineffectual leader, particularly in comparison to his dynamic Liberal predecessor, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Lacking a strong proWle, he was dubbed “Joe Who” in the national and international media. He served very effectively as secretary of state for external affairs from 1984-91, at the time of Judith’s trip. 9 This Wxity, as I will discuss in Chapter 5, is something the tourists I spoke with attributed to other countries they visited. Such Wxity nurtured their sensemaking of the globalized landscape that infuses their daily life at home. 10 Only two of the tourists that I interviewed would not have reXected this hope. Robert and Annelise (who was a French citizen) found the “Americanization” of Ontario under the government of Mike Harris intolerable, and moved to France. 11 Robert and Annelise subsequently moved to France. Rachel moved to the United States to be closer to her American boyfriend. As well, Olivia, Samuel, and Donna each took an extended volunteer overseas postings with a NGOs during 1998-2000. 12 “Home,” to Tony, was a place where he could eat foods that tasted familiar. He admitted that it was the food that eventually made him long for his trip to end. Thus he never went away for more than three weeks and was often very anxious for a “good meal” by the time he returned. As he said of his travels in Nepal, “There is only so much that you can do with rice.” 13 Shields (1991, 89-99) notes the links between Turner’s notions of liminality and communitas and Bakhtin’s use of the carnivalesque, concepts that he applies cogently to a discussion of seaside resorts in England. 14 McArthur (1999) suggested that some of the solo women travellers she interviewed wanted to escape the essentializing discourses of gender, and at times those of class, age, or ethnicity. As the group that I interviewed was much more diverse in its make-up, it is much harder to generalize about what “baggage” they packed, and what they desired to leave behind. 15 This contrasts with comments that McArthur (1999, 75-101) recorded from some of the women she interviewed, who left homes that were unsafe due to physical violence, incest, or other forms of abuse. 16 Security was not the only reason Rachel was travelling with her mother. At the time of our interview her father had recently passed away and a holiday with her mother was cathartic, helping them to deal with their loss. 17 See Lutz and Collins (1993, 235-42, 245-7) for a discussion of these ideas among a group of viewers of National Geographic photographs. They argue that statements similar to Leslie’s, about privilege and luck, automatically deWne an evolutionary comparison (236-41, 267). I do not deny that such comparisons were implicit in statements made to me, but I do not believe that that is all they represent.

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1 In the late 1990s and early 2000 parts of the former Yugoslavia began to recover as tourist destinations. 2 Several of those I spoke with were stamp collectors when they were young, which can be seen as another attempt to order the complexity of the world. 3 As I discussed in Chapter 1, several of those that I interviewed were immigrants to Canada, and had therefore resided in other countries. A few others had also lived temporarily in other places. These other homes would have a distinct notation on their maps, as they would be known in ways different from those places they visited only as a tourist. 4 European expansion across the globe over the last 500 years was not an arena of history that particularly interested Linda and Neil. 5 This interpretive process is similar to that which Lutz and Collins (1993, 217) propose for those who read National Geographic. 6 Bhattacharyya (1997) noted in her analysis of Lonely Planet Guide to India: A Travel Survival Kit that it offered no ethical assessment of the activities of the traveller, something that stands in contrast to the judgments it frequently made on the moral behaviour of the locals. 7 Some tourism literature still suggests that tourists can travel to see the “primitive” before he makes his last leap to civilization. 8 Lutz and Collins (1993, 261-3) found in their study of National Geographic images that a key reason people liked certain ones was that they elicited or demonstrated “good feelings” between the individuals in the photographs. 9 These statements prompt the question: does a desire for difference necessarily imply an evolutionary paradigm? Lutz and Collins (1993) suggest that this is always the case, but I disagree. A certain degree of ethnocentrism is necessary for even the most fundamental sense of self-esteem and personal cultural conWdence to exist, and individuals cannot be criticized for being unable to completely override these attributes. One could expect, however, seasoned travellers to develop some reXexivity about their own cultural biases. 10 Donna was blind to the other reasons that Chinese people might choose to wear polyester, such as the possible cultural capital gained by wearing such modern fabrics as opposed to what could be perceived as old-fashioned ones such as pure cotton. 11 Although chocolate did come originally from the Americas, it was probably not served in this manner. 12 Michael did not demonstrate any knowledge of the ongoing military suppression of the indigenous residents of Irian Jaya by the Indonesian government, which claim the region as part of its political territory. 13 Adherence to an evolutionary paradigm probably varied depending on where people were travelling. A position along such a single line of progress was something

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18

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less attributable to places, like China, that were generally perceived to have reached a certain level of civilization – albeit different from the civilization of the West. When Beth read my interpretation of her classiWcatory thinking, she suggested that this was perfectly natural to her, as she was a PhD scientist. Lutz and Collins (1993, 263) note that people did not like National Geographic images that were “uninformative or difWcult to decipher.” Since the tourists were engaged in constructing their own images when visiting a place, they largely constructed ones that were informative and made sense to them. I interviewed the two couples separately, as they lived in different cities. When Monica told me this story it did really not surprise me, considering her interpretation of her hotel room as her refuge, as personal space that she claimed as her own while travelling (see Chapter 4). Assumptions of neutrality play out in various dimensions of the tourist experience. Little (1996) argues that representations of native life on Kenyan safari tours imply that they are a politically neutral phenomena. However, they could not be further from such simplistic imaginings. China and Thailand are only two of many countries that have such places of performed work set up as tourist attractions. However, embedding the tropical rainforest in the capitalist system by symbolically selling it and developing the attendant touristic interest in the area, whatever its faults, is overall a much more positive strategy for its preservation than deWning it as an untapped resource for the lumber and mining industries. In the same way, the jade factories visited by Judith and Henry in China and the silk factories visited by Susan and Fred were representations of factory reality. This harmonious relationship is starting to break down as more and more cars appear on the roads in China (Cernetig 2000). In recent years the development of Nazi concentration camps as tourist sites, the opening of Holocaust and Jewish museums and memorials in Europe, and international efforts to return art and other valuable items stolen from Jewish families in the lead-up to the Holocaust have brought the tragedy and brutality of the Nazi move through Europe more readily into the travels of tourists in Europe. It was comparatively silenced in the two or three decades following the end of the Second World War.

C H A P T E R 6 : C O M I N G BAC K 1 It would be worth exploring whether cruise tourists are less disruptive to their ports of call, as they remain in them for relatively short periods of time, and while there, have the potential to spend more money per person than a traveller might. A central question in this research would be how much of the money cruise tourists spend actually stays in the local communities.

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2 I received a postcard recently from a former student describing his travels in Southeast Asia, in particular wading across the Mekong River because he was weary of paying local tolls. He traversed without incident, save for the amusement his actions caused the locals. But I wondered why he, who by some stroke of luck had been born into more security and prosperity than had the locals who ran the toll booth, as his presence on holiday in the country demonstrated, resented paying a small fee to cross a footbridge. 3 Jim Struthers (personal communication, 2001; see also Kymlicka 1998, 46) notes that the basic principles embedded in the original multiculturalism policy, read by Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the House of Commons in October 1971, were aimed largely at inclusion and inclusivity among Canadians of all ethnic and racial backgrounds. The most central principle highlighting this read as follows: “The government will promote creative encounters and interchange among all Canadian cultural groups in the interest of national unity” (Fleras and Elliott 1992, 282). Appreciating difference was thus not so central to the policy. Regardless, the support offered various ethnic groups to produce such things as multicultural festivals and celebrations has promoted, as Kymlicka (1998, 45-6) points out, “contact and exchange between ethnic groups and with the larger society.”

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Aboriginal people (Canadian), 18, 147-8, 234n13; land claims, 141 Adams, Kathleen, 16 Adler, J., 96-7 Adventure travel, 187-8 Aesthetic valuation, 193 Aesthetics: deWning, 94-5; formal, 97, 99-100; sensory, 97, 98-9; symbolic, 97, 99; thick vs thin sense in, 97, 98; violence in, 137-8 Africa, 171-2 Aisthesis, 94 Alternative tourism, 17-18, 209 Anishinabe peoples, 18 Anthropologists: and tourists, 25; travels of, 26 Antigua, 14 Antistructure, of trips, 110-11, 156 Arendt, Hannah, 51 Authenticity: search for, 25, 31, 34, 90, 129, 184, 208; sincerity vs, 208 Bali, 17 Beauty, 100. See also Aesthetics Berlant, L., 48-9 Berlin, 165-6 Bicycles, in China, 202-3 Biological needs, 47

Black holes, 171-2, 203 Bodily experiences, 92-3 Borders, 36-7; communication across, 89 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 94-5, 236n3 Boym, S., 49-50, 91 Bridges, 36-7 Brochures, travel, 178-9, 234n10 Bruner, Edward, 38 Butler, R., 17-18 Calgary Stampede, 16 Calvino, Italo, “Under the Jaguar Sun,” 121 Canada: American/Canadian differences, 143-4; Americanization of, 139; beauty of, 144-5; border with United States, 143; British immigrants to, 146; cultural milieu, 139, 153; far north of, 141; golden age of, 146; history of, 145; ideas about, 151-2; journeys across, 142-3; landscape, 140; mapping of, 140-6; multiculturalism, 153, 210; national identity, 140, 141, 143; natural resources, 142; space of, 141, 145; wealth, 146, 148; weather, 141; wilderness, 140; winters, 141

255

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Index

Cannibal Tours, 207 Casablanca, 200 China, 176-7, 202-3 Chorasters, 33 Cohen, Erik, 17, 25 Colonialism, and tourism, 13-14 Communication: across borders, 89; difference as means of, 54-5, 88-91; and language, 63-5. See also Connection(s); Intimacy Connection(s), 46; across differences, 210; with family and friends, 70-2; with local inhabitants, 56-60, 61-6; with particular geographic areas, 56-7; spatial, 55-6; with travel industry workers, 59; by walking, 56. See also Communication; Encounters; Intimacy; Sociability Constructivism, 38 Coote, J., 98 Copet-Rougier, E., 238n7 Coronation Street, 201-2 Cost, of travel, 116-18, 128 Costa Rica, 198 Crain, Mary, 16 Cruises, 102, 126-7, 129, 189-90, 207, 241n1 Csikszentmihalyi, M., 56, 97, 104, 106-7 Cuba, 60-1 Culler, J., 235n21 Cultural camps, 18 Cultural capital, 11, 104 Cultural conWdence, 30 Cultural logic, of tourists, 176 Cultures, homogenization of, 182, 211. See also Difference(s) Destinations: choice of, 173; core/periphery model, 15; in cruise travel, 190; distance from, 102-3; exotic, 133; idea of, 110; lists of, 191-2; “lost,” 165-6; monumental sites, 111-13; physical wonders, 112,

180; as places of romance, 85-6; political/moral issues and, 19-21, 165, 194; remote, 103-4, 112; sacralization of, 26; separation from, 101-4. See also Places Dialogic relationships, 46 Diasporas, 36 Diasporic intimacy, 49-50 Difference(s): connection across, 210; loss of, 181, 182; as means of communication, 54-5, 88-91. See also Cultures, homogenization of Disasters, 107-8 Disinterestedness, 97 Dislocation, 50-1 Displacement, 91, 162 Distance, 97; from destinations, 102-3 Doors, 36-7 Dubrovnik, 165 Eagleton, T., 93, 238n7 Eco-tourism, 17 Ecuador, 16 Edenic communities, 44 Ehrenreich, B., Fear of Falling, 10-11 E-mail, 70, 160 Empty spaces, 171, 203 Encounters, 44-6; with acquaintances, 68-9; and difference, 65; with famous people, 66-70; with other travellers, 72-80. See also Connection(s); Interactions Engineering wonders, 195 England, 174 Environment, tourism and, 206, 207 Erb, M., 234n8 Errington, Fred, 21, 185 Eudaimonia, 52, 53 Europe, 172, 174 Europe on $5 a Day, 116, 178 Evolutionary paradigm, 21, 182, 185, 210, 240n9

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Index Exiles, 35 Exploratory paradigms, 188-9 Explorers, tourists vs, 22-3 Factories, 196-7 Family: home vs, 158; travelling to see, 70-1 Faubion, J., 94 Fear, in travel, 114-16 Fear of Falling (Ehrenreich), 10-11 Featherstone, M., 95, 237n1 Female identity, 47-8 Flâneurs, 32-3, 95, 101 Flow, 56, 97, 104, 106-7, 135 Food, 121-4, 211-12 Formal aesthetics, 97, 99-100 Form-in-the-large, in travel, 108, 109-19, 135 Form-in-the-small, in travel, 119-31, 135 Freedom, concept of, 135-6 Friends: fellow travellers and, 75-9; travelling to see, 70-1 Gauguin, Paul, 237n6 Gaze, of tourists, 21, 30-1, 37-8, 99, 184, 192, 208 Gewertz, Deborah, 21, 185 Giddens, A., 54-5 Global village, world as, 177 Globe and Mail, 8 Goffman, E., 25 The Good Woman of Bangkok, 233-4n5 Gottleib, A., 68, 233n3 Graburn, Nelson, 30, 233n2 Grand tour, 25, 32 Grassroots, 186, 208 Grazing, 101 Guidebooks, 80, 112-13, 178, 179-81 Guides, tour, 132, 199 Habitus, 236n2

257

Harvey, David, 166, 167, 169, 188, 194 Hawaii, 13-14, 15-16 Health, concerns regarding, 114-15 Holy Land, 200 Home: anti-structure and, 156-7; “away” vs, 9, 155-6; family vs, 158; location of, 158-9; nation vs, 154; places visited compared with, 175; relationships and, 160; return to, 82-3; symbols of, 203 Homogenization, of cultures, 182, 211 hooks, bell, 35 Hospers, J., 97, 98, 119 Hosts and Guests (Smith), 14, 25 Hotels, 81-2, 84-5, 126, 128, 193 Identity: Canada’s national, 140, 141; Canadian tourists and, 150; and intimacy, 52-3; transnational, 35-6; travel experiences and, 87. See also Self Illouz, E., 50-1, 52-3, 83, 236n4 Immersion, in time and space, 97 Immigrants, 9, 35, 50, 240n3 Imperialist nostalgia, 25-6 Independent travel, 74-5 India, 172, 208-9 Innocence: seeing for, 23; of tourism, 23, 137 Interactions: ephemeral, 44; local codes of, 46-7; with women, 47-8. See also Connection(s); Encounters Internet, and sex tours, 234n6 Intimacy, 52; Americans vs Canadians, 51-2; diasporic, 49-50; and friendships made on the road, 78-9; and identity, 52-3; and openness, 1-2; and public relationships, 51, 89; romance and, 83; with self, 86-7; and sociability, 48-9; and worldliness, 51 Irian Jaya, 183-4

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Index

Kincaid, Jamaica, 14 Kodak Hula Show, 15-16 Korea, 62-3 Kosovo, 164 Language, and communication, 63-5 Laxer, G., 238n3 Ledgers, hotel, 81-2 Leisure, 26-7, 211 Linnaeus, Carl, The System of Nature, 188 Literature, travel. See Travel literature Little, K., 241n18 Local inhabitants: connection with, 5660, 61-6, 88-91; tourist encounters with, 15, 65. See also Tourees Lonely Planet guidebooks, 80, 178, 179 Luggage, problems with, 107 McArthur, Melanie, 115, 236n9, 239nn14-15 MacCannell, Dean, The Tourist, 25, 31, 33, 166, 180, 181, 196, 234n8, 235n21 Malkki, L., 161-2, 168 Maori music, 124-5 Mappism, 142 Maps: mental, 166; metaphorical (see Metaphorical maps); personalized, 165; real, kept by travellers, 169-70 Maritime paradigm, of exploration, 188 Market, segmentation of, 27-8 Mass tourism, 18 Media: representations of places in, 199-202; travel enthusiasts’ use of, 166. See also Travel literature Metaphorical maps, 166-9, 170-1; scale of, 177-8 Middle classes, new, 10-12, 149 Modern vs premodern life, 179-83 Monarch-of-all-I-survey, 192 Money. See Cost, of travel Mongolia, 54

Monumental sites, 111-13 Morphy, H., 94, 95 Multiculturalism, of Canada, 153, 210 Munt, I., 10, 11-12, 33 Myth-makers, tourists as, 31 National Geographic, 21, 80, 182, 240n8, 241n15 Nature, 191 Nazi Germany, sites associated with, 203 Needs: biological, 47; Maslow’s hierarchy of, 29; meeting of immediate, 53 Nigeria, 63 Organized tours, 73, 74, 75, 79-80, 113 Pacing, of trips, 113-14 Papua New Guinea, 185 Personal space, 126 Photographs, 193; albums, 77, 84-5, 118-19; taking of, 100 Picard, M., 16-17 Places: attractiveness of, 69; categories of, 171-3; comparisons between, 175-6; connection with, 56-7, 72, 1737; everyday life in, 127; familiarity of, 173; knowledge of, 132, 173-7; representations of, 199-202; separation from, 101-4; spiritual linkages to, 174-5; as subjective spaces, 194; symbols of, 202-4; wish lists, 171, 177. See also Destinations Planning, of trips, 109-11, 119; Wnancial, 117-18 Pope, meeting the, 66-7 Porteous, Douglas, 97, 98, 140 Postcards, 70 Postmodernism, and tourism, 33-4, 8991, 208 Post-tourism, 197 Power relations: and intimacy, 51, 89; and tourist connections, 89-90, 194

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Index Prague, 173 Pratt, Mary, 22, 38, 187, 188, 190-1 Premodern vs modern life, 179-83 Price, Sally, 21 Primitiveness, 184 Principled negotiations, 54-5 Professional interests, incorporated into travel, 132 Promotional literature, 178-9 Prosterman, L., 98 Public relationships, and intimacy, 51-2, 89 Pueblo people, 16 Purchases, 197-8 Quimseña people, 16 Radway, Janice, 12 Rainforests, 198 Rape, tourism as, 22, 93, 136. See also Violence, tourism as Real, the, as premodern, 180. See also Authenticity Refugees, 35 Remoteness, of destinations, 103-4, 112 Resistant behaviours, of tourists, 156-8 Robberies, 107 Roberts, T., 97, 108, 109 Romance, of travel, 50-1, 83-6, 236n4 Romance novels, 12 Roots (brand of clothing), 151 Rosaldo, R., 14, 25-6 Rough Guide guidebooks, 80-1 Sacralization, of tourist sites, 26 Said, E., 235n18 Saul, John Ralston, 238n2 Scale, of metaphorical maps, 177-8 Schechner, R., 238n7 Schudson, M.S., 33 ScientiWc expeditions, 188, 191 Seasons, 85-6

259

Self: afWrmation through travel, 90; intimacy with, 86-7; tourist, 12. See also Identity Selwyn, T., 31 Sennett, R., 51 Sensory aesthetics, 97, 98-9 Separation, from places, 101-4 Sex tours, 15, 206 Sex trade, 14-15, 206 Sexual metaphors, in travel, 136 Shawenequanape Kipichewin, 18 Signs, collection of, 31 Silver, I., 180 Simmel, Georg, 36-7, 43-4, 236n5 Smells, in travel, 124-5 Smith, Valene, Hosts and Guests, 14, 25 Sociability, 43-9. See also Connection(s); Encounters; Intimacy Social relations, 16, 51 Social status, and travel, 10-11 Solomon-Godeau, A., 237n6 Sontag, Susan, 93 Soul searching, 86-7 Sounds, in travel, 124-5 South America, 172 Souvenirs, 84, 118, 130 Space: of Canada, 141; and time compression (see Time-space compression) Specimen collecting, 190 Spending. See Cost, of travel Spice markets, 124 Staged authentic, 25, 184 Stamp collecting, 240n2 Starowicz, Mark, 145 Steele, Shelby, 23 Stocking, George, 21 Stranger, the, 236n5 Strollers, 95 Structuring, of trips, 108-19 Sulawesi, 16 Sustainable tourism, 17, 209

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Sutton, W., 24 Swedenburg, T., 236n10 Symbolic aesthetics, 97, 99 Taste, sense of, 121-4 Television programs, 8, 199 Thailand, 14-15, 185, 197, 211 Thurot, J.M. and G., 235n21 Tilley Endurables, 150 Time, concept of, 106, 134-6 Time-space compression, 167-8 Tisdale, Sallie, 235n16 Toilets, 53-4, 129, 157 Toraja peoples, 16 Toronto, 145 Touch, in travel, 125-6 Tourees, 24, 184, 206, 207, 210. See also Local inhabitants Tourism: alternative, 17-18, 209; and colonialism, 13-14; and curiosity, 30; destinations (see Destinations); economic aspects, 23, 206, 207; and environment, 206, 207; and home (see Home); innocence of, 23, 137; literature on, 39; local autonomy over, 17; mass, 18; morality of, 23-4, 133, 194; negative aspects, 4, 35, 206; political and moral issues, 19-21, 133, 194, 207, 209; and postmodernism, 33-4, 89-91, 208; as rape (see Rape, tourism as); and social relations, 16, 51; sociocultural impact, 25-6; students’ attitudes toward, 18-19; sustainable, 17, 209; violence of (See Violence, tourism as) Tourism industry, 209; growth of, 4, 13, 27; workers in, 206 Touristic aesthetic, 93-4, 95-6, 135 Touristic experience(s), 29; aesthetics of, 96-7; as three-way conversation, 38; variety of, 4, 27-8 Tourists: American vs Canadian, 151;

anthropologists and, 25, 26-7; burlesquing of, by Pueblo, 16; Canadian, 150-4; classiWcation of, 29; cultural logic of, 176; deWned, 233n1; encounters with locals, 15; explorers vs, 22-3; gaze of, 21, 30-1, 37-8, 99, 184, 192, 208; generic, 4; interest in history, 32; invited to local homes, 59; as myth-makers, 31; nature of contemporary, 25; negative views of, 4, 35; perceptions regarding, 24-5, 205; resistant behaviours of, 156-8; search for authentic, 25, 31, 34, 90, 129, 184, 208; “self ” of, 12, 86-7, 90; self-fashioning of, 104; social scale and, 10-11; transnationals vs, 35-8; travellers vs, 30, 206-7. See also Travellers Tours: of factories, 196-7; guides, 132, 199; organized, 73, 74, 75, 79-80, 113 Tradition, commodiWcation of, 26 Trains, 44-6 Transnationals, and tourists, 35-8 Trask, Haunani-Kay, 13-14, 22 Travel: adventure, 187-8; as aesthetic expression, 96; as art form, 94; art of, 24-5; “careers” in, 34; characteristics of, 11-12; commercial aspects, 22; cost of, 116-18, 128; and cultural capital, 11, 104; everyday life vs, 160; familiarity in, 133-4; form-in-thelarge, 109-19, 135; form-in-the-small, 119-31, 135; freedom and, 135-6; home and (see Home); and idea of Canada, 139-40; intellectual stimulation of, 131-2, 133; intensity of emotion in, 130-1; and leisure, 267, 211; and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 29; meaning of, 12; motivation, 12, 27-30; motives for, 24; and new middle classes, 10-12, 149; nuance in, 128-30; others’ interest in, 77; past vs

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Index present, 24-5; for pleasure, 34; professional interests incorporated into, 132; romance of, 50-1, 236n4; romantic aspects, 83-6; self-afWrmation through, 90; sexual metaphors in, 136; small incidents in, 126, 128-30; smells in, 124-5; sounds in, 124-5; special moments in, 126-7; taste in, 121-4; testing personal limits, 128, 157; time concept in, 134-6; touch in, 125-6; visual aspects of, 119-21 Travel enthusiasts: characteristics of, 3, 8; educational levels of, 8, 166, 205-6; employment, 9; immigration history, 9, 240n3; incomes of, 8; interests, 8-9; privileged position of, 149; resilience of, 108; use of media, 8, 166, 199; use of travel literature, 179 Travel enthusiasts, individuals: Albert, 7, 53-4, 56, 63, 74, 77, 80, 85, 103, 112, 115, 117, 120, 123, 128, 129, 131, 132, 147, 151, 157, 165, 192, 208, 214-15; Annelise, 7, 99, 175, 229-30; Benjamin, 7, 63, 65-6, 75, 84, 104-6, 114, 121-3, 124, 128, 133, 147, 150, 151-2, 153, 155, 171, 172, 185-6, 200, 208, 217-18; Beth, 7, 68-9, 101, 103, 113, 114, 120, 125, 129-30, 189, 192, 215; Bruce, 57-9, 60, 68, 76-7, 102, 106-7, 121, 124, 130, 131, 134, 151, 158-9, 172, 216; Damien, 7, 102-3, 220-1; Donna, 7, 79, 99, 102, 111-12, 113, 115, 123, 130, 132, 170, 176-7, 182, 190, 192, 195, 199-200, 216-17; Elaine, 7, 47-8, 63, 65-6, 74, 75, 77, 81, 84, 104-6, 114, 120, 121-3, 124, 125-6, 128, 130, 133, 147, 149-50, 151, 153, 160, 171, 172, 175, 200, 208, 21718; Frances, 7, 8, 57, 66, 71, 75, 82-3, 109-10, 132, 143, 154, 174, 201-2, 218-19; Fred, 7, 59-60, 61-2, 71, 75, 84-5, 92-3, 99, 107, 114, 115, 120-1,

261 123-4, 126, 127, 128, 131, 148, 161, 167, 182, 197, 230-1; Gladys, 7, 44-5, 174, 193, 196, 229; Gwen, 7, 59, 60, 62, 103, 111, 113, 114, 117, 120, 127-8, 141, 147, 149, 151, 156, 175, 178, 219; Harold, 7, 101, 111, 114, 145, 151, 208-9, 220; Henry, 7, 59, 110, 116, 151, 193, 196, 222; Jackie, 7, 55-6, 66, 99, 102-3, 109, 130, 175, 177, 192, 211, 220-1; Jennifer, 7, 60, 86-7, 95-6, 98, 117, 120, 123, 124, 125, 127, 129, 131, 144, 158, 174, 221-2; Judith, 7, 59, 77-8, 101, 110, 112, 120, 123, 124-5, 152, 192, 193, 196-7, 198, 199, 202-3, 222, 230-1; Lawrence, 7, 8, 78, 80, 83, 117, 123, 168, 171, 193, 226-7; Leslie, 7, 20, 66-7, 82, 87, 107, 109, 115, 117-18, 120, 126-7, 146-7, 149, 155, 178-9, 198, 223; Linda, 7, 108-9, 112, 120, 127, 144, 145, 148, 165-6, 223-4; Louise, 50, 55, 62-3, 69, 70, 87, 88, 111, 124, 127, 129, 130, 160-1, 224-5; Maria, 68, 76-7, 102, 106-7, 121, 125, 130, 134, 216; Michael, 7, 59, 72-3, 75, 98-9, 100, 103, 104, 109, 113, 114, 118-19, 120, 124, 126, 128, 133-4, 144-5, 154, 155, 165, 167-8, 169-70, 178, 183-4, 187, 190, 225-6; Monica, 7, 8, 21, 55, 60-1, 78, 80, 83, 85, 100, 101, 110, 117, 123, 130, 132, 133, 149, 156, 159, 168, 170, 171, 174, 177-8, 193, 226-7; Neil, 7, 11, 74, 112, 127, 144, 145, 148-9, 165-6, 172, 173, 223-4; Olivia, 7, 45-6, 64-5, 67-8, 71-2, 120, 124, 130, 132, 172, 227; Rachel, 7, 19-20, 23, 69, 70, 73, 95, 98, 112, 115, 120, 124, 128, 130, 158, 166, 170, 172, 176, 198, 228-9; Richard, 7, 44-5, 123, 193, 196, 229; Robert, 7, 21, 56, 67, 68, 71, 75-6, 86, 99, 123, 127, 132, 147-8, 155, 158, 159, 160, 174-5, 229-30; Samuel, 7,

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79, 102, 113, 115, 123, 132, 170, 176-7, 182, 190, 195-6, 199-200, 216-17; Sandra, 7, 53-4, 56, 63, 74, 77, 80, 85, 103, 115, 117, 123, 128, 129, 131, 157, 165, 172, 186, 208, 214-15; Susan, 7, 59-60, 61-2, 75, 84-5, 92-3, 99, 101, 107, 108, 114, 115, 120-1, 123-4, 126, 127, 128, 131, 142, 150, 161, 165, 167, 173, 174, 182, 197, 230-1; Tony, 7, 60, 72, 73-4, 143, 182-3, 190, 191-2, 231-2 Travel experiences: bodily, 92-3; comparisons in, 175-6; and personal identity, 87; premodern, 180-3; sharing of, 77-8; social scale and, 10-11; variation in, 6-7 Travel literature, 3, 80-2, 179-80, 199. See also Brochures, travel; Guidebooks; Media; National Geographic; Travel writers Travel Scoop, 187 Travel writers, 80; anti-conquest strategies of representation in early, 22. See also Travel literature Travellers: fellow, 72-80; literary, 3; solo, 115-16, 236n9, 239n14; tourists vs, 30, 206-7. See also Tourists; Travel enthusiasts Trips: antistructure of, 110-11, 156; Wnancial planning, 117-18; pacing of, 113-14; planning of, 109-11, 119; structuring of, 108-19

Trobriand Cricket, 234n8 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 140, 238n6, 238n8, 242n3 Tsuu T’ina, 16 Turkey, 165 Turner, Victor, 44 “Under the Jaguar Sun” (Calvino), 121 Urry, J., 30-1, 34 USSR, former, 164-5, 172-3 Valuation, aesthetic, 193 Vietnam, 185 Views, 193 Violence, tourism as, 93, 136; aesthetic value, 137-8; symbolic, 22, 137. See also Rape, tourism as Visual aspects, of travel, 119-21 Volkman, Toby, 16 Westernization, 182, 210 Women: interactions with local, 47-8; as solo travellers, 115-16, 236n9, 239n14 Wonders of natural world, 112, 180 World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 198 Yugoslavia, 164, 165 Yukon Territory, 174