Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
that these colonial depictions are apt to be reiterative, shaping the experiences of colonial and
contemporary travellers. The example of a British package tourist who has moved away from
the familiar sensations of her hotel enclave in Agra, India, highlights a postcolonial sensory
alienation:
HONOUR (
46, Leeds, UK
): Until you've been amongst it you don't realise how bad
it is. You get fed up of haggling, people come up and touch you, and it was really
crowded, very busy . . . I couldn't handle it at all, it totally upset me. I had to get
away as quick as I could.
(Edensor, 1998: 156)
Though Honour is frightened by the sensual alterity she experiences, other tourists are drawn
to precisely this strangeness. Thus thirdly - and having argued for the salience of serial tourist
spaces, their habitual sensual apprehension and performance, and the persistent infl uence of
sensory values - we assert that there is a tension within much tourism between the desire for
familiar sensations and the desire to move into different, unfamiliar sensory worlds (see also
Wilson and Richards, 2008 on 'suspension'; and Hottola,
Chapter 18
of this volume). Here
we focus on the affordances that draw tourists to particular cultural spaces where they may
immerse themselves in sensory difference so as to move away from habitual sensory realms.
The quest for a surge of immersive sensation seems evident in the sensory whirls produced
by participation in tourist action sports such as bungee jumping and white-water rafting, and
the thrills sought on the white-knuckle rides of amusement parks. The tourist sensorium is
expanded in a host of other bodily challenging touristic endeavours, including lengthy trek-
king adventures, deep-sea diving, mountain biking and canoeing, all practices that promote
visceral excitation and may cause exhaustion and pain (Cloke and Perkins, 1998). Other
ventures towards sensual alterity are inherent in the less vigorous immersion in spa tourism,
the altered sensations promoted by drug-induced dance tourism in Mediterranean venues,
and the emergence of tourist adventures in visiting modern ruins, an alternative, unoffi cial
collection of practices that includes urban exploration, hedonistic pursuits and the perform-
ance of artistic pursuits in spaces that vary enormously from most aesthetic, material, visual,
sonic, textural and olfactory urban and touristic experience (Edensor, 2005).
The search for a more sustained immersion in sensual and cultural otherness is best exem-
plifi ed in backpacking, often allied to the acquisition of cultural capital. Movement through
the often sensually rich, socially diverse, cluttered materialities of 'heterogeneous' honeypots,
with their rough textures, undulating pavements and dust and dirt, challenge the habitual
sensual apprehension of tourists. Backpackers must confront the unfamiliar materialities of
such environments, adapt to squeezing into smaller spaces on cheap local buses, and cope with
springy, dirty and hard beds, cramped restaurants, rough roads and poorly lit rooms. A multi-
tude of unfamiliar sensations may be experienced in such spaces: the noise of people and
animals, religious sounds and loud music; uneven textures underfoot and movement amidst
and across a mass of people, animals and traffi c; a succession of strong smells, both heavenly
and repellent; and a series of unfamiliar sights and the enactment of vision that must attend to
the dangers of obstacles, traffi c and cross-cutting movement.
In the search for such sensual alterity, the tourist body recoils or opens itself out to these
abject and pleasurable sensual stimuli. At the start of their trips through India and Thailand,
many of the female tourist participants in a recent study of backpacking in India do not want to
be sheltered from harsh sensations, expecting, even desiring physical pain and repellent smells,
dirt and noise and their disposition, for to be able to cope with such sensations produces pride.
