On Travel & Tourism

Preparing for semester in Bali in the fall of 2000, these passages from Errant Journeys: Adventure Travel in the Modern Age struck a chord with me. Now, some seven years later, I find that they still resonate:

This type of tourist, corresponding to what has been called the adventurer or original drifter rejects his home society and culture and seeks in the strangeness of the world of others, at the very least, experience of real, authentic life. At the most he is in quest of an ‘elective center’ which will become a new spiritual home to him, an alternative to that modern world he has rejected. He therefore travels by himself or in small groups, in an unhurried manner, spontaneously changing his plans according to his interests, disposition, and opportunities. As it was for the traveler of earlier times, travel is ‘work’ and not mere ‘leisure.’ (pg 49)

The edge of travel begins by deconstructing our previously held, loosely fabricated images of places, it continues by establishing new and personal relationships to the places that we visit, and often it concludes by reshaping the place we left and our very notion of it. Such metaphorical journeys, linked to travel in a classical sense . . . are not possible in the short run, nor can they be attained in the commercially programmed tours or in the sightseeing clichés that produce the tourism landscape that we now find scattered around the world. Therefore they remain inaccessible to mass tourism – literal tourism which produces such landscapes. (pg 92)