The Traveler's Intentions

After reading the first two paragraphs of Erik Cohen’s "A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences," I got ready to choose a side of the issue, but found that my opinion fell somewhere in the middle. As I read on, I realized that that the author’s opinion and mine essentially aligned. We both believe that tourist experiences vary and that instead of arguing over the meaning of tourism, perhaps we should argue about the different types of tourists. He goes into great detail analyzing his five modes of touristic experiences, which I don’t disagree with. However, I believe each tourist travels with uniquely different intentions and has different experiences and reactions, and touristic experiences cannot be separated into five groups.

I think the nature of the tourist experience depends on the traveler’s intentions. It seems obvious to me that if a traveler is going to a country to experience a new culture, to try to immerse themselves in the culture without judging, they are different than a traveler who is only visiting a foreign country because it’s something they think they should see: looking at the surface without digging deeper. It seems more important to focus on the individual traveler than to generalize traveling by saying each tourist wants the same things out of travel.

Despite the tourist’s intentions, however, I don’t think it’s easy to be a “good” traveler, the kind that I mentioned first: one who is in search of understanding in a new culture. It’s easy to fall into the tourist traps, to see only what the tourism department wants you to see. It takes less planning and can cause less stress, but the big reason why one may stick to the well trodden path of tourist attractions is for fear of being too fully immersed in a foreign culture. I believe setting foot in a foreign country gives forth immediately a strange feeling, one of unbalance. A tourist grasps onto things that will ease them into the foreign land (such as a hotel or any place frequented mostly by other foreigners), whereas an ideal traveler, despite their fears, doesn’t hold onto anything from home, and lets themselves settle into. I think most tourists fall somewhere in the middle on most trips. It depends on where the tourist is, whom they are with, their intentions for the trip and how they are feeling at the time.

The travel novels we read in class are helpful when discussing because they all showed different types of travelers. Each protagonist has a different motive behind their travel and a different result because of it, so they illustrate my point. Port in the Sheltering Sky is a pure traveler, one who easily gives up all sense of home, and someone like Winterbourn is on the other side of the spectrum, despite his being an expatriot, not willing to be immersed in a culture other than his own.

I think all tourists and touristic experiences are unique, and I certainly don’t find tourism as a whole objectionable. I do however, prefer certain tourists, those who don’t disrupt the culture that they are visiting.