Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
their global diasporas. Large-scale promotional campaigns, mass clan reunions and the estab-
lishment of tourism ambassadors have been part of their efforts to bring the diaspora home to
Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Hundreds of thousands of people of African ancestry are drawn
to West Africa every year in search of their personal pasts. According to Cohen (1997),
'victim diasporas' are more inclined to have a sense of restlessness and identity crisis in the
adopted land. This appears to be the case among many African-Americans, even several
generations after the abolition of slavery. Their lack of place-based identity in America has
been accentuated by earlier forms of institutionalised segregation and contemporary residuals
of class and racial bigotry. For many African-Americans, a trip to Africa represents a
step toward healing the lingering wounds of historical slavery and racism (Timothy and
Teye, 2004).
Transportation systems and destination development
Historical geographers have long concerned themselves with transportation as a means of
human mobility. Their primary focus in this context is the development of transportation
systems and how these have shaped the lie of the land and infl uenced settlement patterns.
From a tourism viewpoint, research on the historical development of transportation networks
has focused largely on the advent and spread of railways and the popularisation of the auto-
mobile in destination development.
Geographers attribute the growth and success of coastal resort communities, in the United
Kingdom and the United States, for example, to the introduction and growth of the railway/
railroad, which made hitherto peripheral and intermittent regions accessible to the masses
(Sears, 1989). In the mid-nineteenth century, where stagecoaches had long been the main
form of holiday travel, trains began delivering urbanites from New York, Philadelphia and
Boston with relative ease to emerging coastal resorts such as Atlantic City, New Jersey, and
Ocean City, Maryland (Stansfi eld, 1978, 1993). Tourism in Atlantic City began in earnest in
the 1850s with the arrival of train services from Philadelphia. This was a critical turning point
for tourism on the US east coast and the trigger for rapid development of coastal destinations.
Niagara Falls' popularity also grew with the help of rail services in the 1870s. The well-
known resort morphology models developed by Butler (1980) and others in the 1970s and 80s
recognise the importance of railway networks and other forms of transportation in the expan-
sion of coastal resorts and other destinations (Hall and Page, 2006).
Other types of destinations also grew in popularity largely because of the railroad. Visits
to Yellowstone National Park, the world's fi rst national park, were propelled by the arrival of
a railway line in the 1880s. Subsequent rail construction throughout the western USA was
critical to the development of several national parks and monuments. The popularisation of
the automobile in the fi rst years of the 1900s saw the proliferation of paved roads and high-
ways in the western USA, which also made the country's parklands and historic sites acces-
sible to the public (Gunn, 2004; Ioannides and Timothy, 2010). The same transport patterns
and large-scale human mobilities helped establish nature reserves, important cultural sites and
various types of resort destinations throughout the British Isles and Europe.
Urbanisation and rural landscape change
With the rapid urbanisation processes that followed the Industrial Revolution, villages
became towns, towns became cities, and cities became crowded with people in search of
employment. Members of the urban leisure class of the nineteenth and early twentieth
