Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Toilets like the one yesterday (fi lled to the brim with excrement) are part of the trip.
If you want to see a country like that you have to get on with it. And it's interesting
too, it wouldn't put me off to the point where I think 'oh my god this country is
disgusting, I can't possibly handle it here!' - because you can! Your body can deal
with it.
(Tilly, 25, British, in Haridwar, India, in Falconer, 2010)
I think you are just so much more open to the fi lth and the beauty, and the craziness,
and getting ripped off, and the extreme kindness, and all of those extremes . . . And
for instance being in a bus or tuk-tuk, a couple of times I have bumped my head, and
you are uncomfortable, but at the same time you're fi ne, because it's only your head
you bumped, and if you are in a bus then you are getting sweaty and men are pressing
up against you, but you are still you, and your inner life is still fi ne . . . (you don't)
change because something around you is not so comfortable. So I think for me that
pushes my boundary of what I need in terms of luxury . . . and for me I kind of
wanted it to be diffi cult. Because I knew that I would learn more, you know it's like
it tests your boundaries . . . like growth comes from diffi cult things and experiences,
so the more you're buffered from these things the less you're going to grow.
(Sally, 34, American, in Rishikesh, India, in Falconer, 2010)
Despite this backpacker disposition to embrace the sensually abject and repugnant, we now
discuss how travel over a longer period promotes a tendency to modulate sensory experience.
That is, while backpackers may commence with a desire to plunge into sensory alterity and
face up to disgust, they adjust their disposition towards sensation over the period of travel. For
instance, the discomfort, heat and noise of budget hotels cause them to long for comfortable
furniture, vehicles and beds. This changing sensual experience is best exemplifi ed in the case
of taste, a key area in which cultural capital is acquired (Boniface, 2003) through 'tasting
the other' (Long, 2004).
In reinforcing our insistence above that particular sensory experiences evoke multiple
sensations of place, Ruth Reichl (2009) draws attention to the multiple sensations conjured
by taste:
My best meal always took place while I was travelling. Why is that? I've eaten
equally remarkable meals here at home, but the travel meals were fi rst encounters,
and they linger in my memory, growing more resonant with each passing year.
Now, wherever I take a bite of grilled fi sh, it brings with it the feel of the air on my
skin on that long-ago afternoon, the remembrance of the sun shining off the water
. . . And each time I try a spicy Thai dish, I fi nd myself, just for a moment, in a jungle
listening to high, wild music and inhaling the scent of chillies, coconuts, and limes.
(Reichl, 2009: 2)
While she appositely captures the positive multi-sensual experience of place provoked by a
memory of powerful tastes, such memories can also conjure up the abject. For instance, Emily
associates Thai dishes with the less pleasant sensations she experienced in the café shacks of
Chang Mai in Thailand, associating them with 'frustrating communication, motorbike
fumes, sweaty thighs sticking to the plastic chairs and lack of napkins and tissues to wipe up
your absolutely streaming nose from the chilli . . . My hands while I eat are fi lthy and dusty
and reek of hand sanitizer' (Falconer, Research Diary, Koh Lanta, Thailand, 2011). These
