Let's imagine that, during your last summer vacation, you briefly felt more like a
traveler than a practitioner of more orthodox conventional tourism. If this is the case, let me tell you that you're probably wrong. We're all tourists, let's not kid ourselves, even if we don't wear flip-flops with white socks. However, many people have, for quite a few decades now, flirted with the idea of
taking the leap to a more adventurous, freer way of traveling, outside the rigid and worn-out framework of travel guides. Today we want you to leave the map at home and embark on the chimerical route of alternative tourism—or even anti-tourism, if such a paradox is possible.
The birth of tourism
There are hundreds of ways to do tourism. But the most well-known, the one we all think of when we hear the term, was born during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, when workdays began to be eight hours long and paid rest systems were established. However, it wasn't until the contemporary era that tourism as an industry truly developed.
In this process,
Thomas Cook, considered the father of tourism , played a fundamental role with his
Tourists' Handbooks travel guides. He also created the
first organized tourist trip in history , in 1841, and his 222-day round-the-world trip with a group of nine travelers.
Later, travel agencies emerged, including Thomas Cook itself, and with the advent of the automobile, the tourism sector began an unstoppable growth.
In Spain, the boom began in the 1960s , with the arrival of the Seat 600, beachfront apartments, and what became the new summer mecca: Benidorm.
Retracing our steps: Questioning tourism as a hegemonic form of travel
Getting to know a city through the precepts of a guidebook soon lost interest for
some dissident travelers . Going here and there, exploring this or that, implied obligations that constrained tourists, diminished the adventure of the trip, and established points on the map that seemed obligatory to visit and fulfill. Although, let's be honest, raise your hand if you've never experienced this type of tourism.
In 1921, Dada organized a group tour in Paris to the most untouristy and banal places in the city to remedy the incompetence of guidebooks and discover places that had
no reason to exist. A few years later, the Surrealists would inaugurate a new form of urban wandering and wandering: strolling without purpose or direction, allowing oneself to be guided solely by chance to discover the unconscious areas of the city. With this wandering, the Surrealists also revived the figure of the
flâneur , already introduced by the poet Charles Baudelaire, who was understood as someone who wanders aimlessly, open to all the vicissitudes and impressions that come their way.
In the early 1950s, the Theory of Drift, promoted by the Situationists, "would expand this understanding of purposeless walks and turn them into a true act of dissent against a hyper-urbanized society," as Francesco Careri explains in
Walkspaces: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice .
Ways to practice alternative tourism
You don't have to be a true beatnik to travel differently. Especially when what matters is the journey. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, a French artist and writer from the early 20th century, once asserted that
"roads no longer simply lead to places, they are places." Julio Cortázar took this line of thinking even further when he embarked on a trip in May 1982 with his then-partner, Carol Dunlop. The journey involved a Paris-Marseille trip aboard their red Volkswagen van, with the proviso that they never leave the highway and that they stop at two rest areas a day, eventually sleeping at the second—there were sixty-five in total along the entire route. The result was
The Autonauts of the Cosmopista ,
a playful, transmuted, poetic travel diary that would look at tourism through the eyes of a cronopio.
A few years later, in 1990, in Strasbourg, journalist Joël Henry launched
Latourex , the Experimental Tourism Laboratory. This playful tourism movement was born, resulting in the original Lonely Planet travel guide. Latourex inherits many of the premises of avant-garde movements, the
Oulipo literary movement, and the Game Theory of the philosopher Roger Caillois. In a way, experimental tourism understands travel as a game and, as such, establishes invented rules for carrying it out. It has thus launched hundreds of route proposals, such as dodecatourism: traveling around the number 12 and taking a train on the 12th of the 12th month at 12 noon, getting off at the twelfth stop. In Exeter, United Kingdom, a group of
artists and researchers under the name
Wrights & Sights also reinterprets tourism, in this case the city, with the publication of anti-tourist guides. They ask themselves, for example, what would happen if a map of Moscow were superimposed on another city, where the Kremlin would be located, or where one could find the perfect bar for a good vodka.
If we stop to think about it, we can think of thousands of ways to travel so as not to step on the heels of the occasional tourist in front of us. We can look to
Nietzsche's walks , to Henry David Thoreau's art of walking, to travel on foot in the hope of saving something or someone, as
Werner Herzog did, or to begin
andare a zonzo , that is, to wander aimlessly. Or we can also plot a route with no touristic interest whatsoever, other than what we want to give it. We can travel, for example, along the N-II to experience an
adventure between Madrid and France , passing through Barcelona, on a road far removed from what we've seen hundreds of times on the highway. Or we can visit our own city by walking in a spiral across the map to discover it in a different way. And thus fulfill what the Oulipian writer Georges Perec maintained in his *Species of Space*: "Let the place become improbable until we have the impression, for a very brief moment, of being in a foreign city."
And now, having delved into so many different ways of traveling, which one do you prefer? Do you stick with the conventional, or have we given you the inspiration to take the plunge and experience new ways of traveling?
