The Best Tourism Places

I just returned from the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Seattle, WA.  This annual geography-love-fest drew some 7000 geographers (mostly university and college teachers and students) and included some 3,500 presentations.  Among those presentations were 107 papers that included the keyword "tourism".  You can search and view the abstracts for those 107 papers here: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/pastprograms.  

These numbers are typical of past AAG meetings and makes this conference among the largest tourism conferences in the world.  I, personally, was involved in 10 sessions in one way or another -- as a session organizer, chair or presenter.  In fact, in addition to the 107 papers with the keyword "tourism", there are discussion panels on tourism-related topics and many more papers that cover tourism in peripheral ways (such as the papers in a session on "Creating Sense of Place").  Given the large number of concurrent presentations, what I typically do is just look at the tourism sessions and try to attend as many of those that I can.  I will be blogging about the AAG more in the future, as I work through all my notes.  

For this blog, however, I want to talk about one of the discussion panels that I organized.  Panel sessions are different from paper sessions in that the presenters do not submit a formal abstract, but instead put out ideas that generate audience discussion.  The panel session that I am focusing on here was on the topics of "The Best Tourism Places".  It was run in a Pecha-Kucha (http://pecha-kucha.org) format, which allows 20 slides and 20 seconds of talking per slide. The format forces the presenter to be highly focused on the presentation (preventing tangents) and highlights the most important themes of their talk.  I first saw this presentation format at last year's meeting of the American Planning Association in New Orleans and though I would try it at this year's AAG.

The Best Tourism Places session turned out to be a blast!  I had asked everyone to make the last slide in their presentation a list of what makes the best tourism places, though not everyone actually read or remembered my instructions. I went first and found it very demanding, exhilarating, and fun. I talked about Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, Malaysia, which is one of my favorite places.  I selected KK because it is a major tourist destination that offers a range of opportunities for different types of tourists, from the recreational-leisure tourist to the avid cultural and environmental explorer. My own conclusions were that the best tourism places had the following characteristics:

1. Sensual Diversity: Sight, Taste, Smell, Touch
2. Landscape Diversity: Physical and Human
3. Experiential Diversity: Both Predictable/Safe and Unpredictable/Risk
4. Mixed Accessibility: Mostly Easy, Some Challenges
5. Local Authenticity: Local Tourists and People at major sites
6. Tourism Incognita: More mysteries around every corner

Much like what I did with Kota Kinabalu, Jamie Gillen (Auburn University) presented the sights, sounds and tastes (in photos, at least) of Singapore, the diversity of which made it one of the best tourism places. And similarly, David Truly (Autonoma Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico) talked about a recent trip he made to Bali, arguing that the best tourism places are those that support and enhance the "vacation" experience, which he associated with the concept of markers specific to the destination: landscape markers, cultural markers and lifestyle markers.  These markers, or iconic symbols and landscapes, reinforce the special qualities of the tourist destination.  (It was just a coincidence that Southeast Asia appeared so prominently in this Pecha-Kucha session, though as one of my major research areas, I can see why!)

Somewhat contrary to the examples of KK, Singapore and Bali, Dallen Timothy (Arizona State University) defined the best tourism places as those without any tourists, for which he used trips he has made to Bhutan, the Shan State of Myanmar (which I was also on), and a private tour of the back-region of the Vatican as examples where tourists never go.   Entrance into the "back-region" has long been argued to be one of the ultimate goals of most tourists because it is considered to offer a more "authentic" experience.

Authenticity, however, is a very personal experience.  Sanjay Nepal (University of Waterloo, Canada) described a trip that he made to the walled city of Lo Manthang in Upper Mustang in Nepal.  For him, this was one of the best tourism place because of its blending of dramatic natural and cultural landscapes, a sense that this was an ancient and timeless place, elements of sacred geography, and feelings of uniqueness, exclusivity (visited by few other tourists), and adventure (in just trying to get there).  In a similar vein, Albina Pashkevich (Dalarna Univesity, Sweden) talked about her research into seasonal workers at the Kiruna Ski Resort in Sweden, and how Kiruna has become a special place for her through her research encounters and personal experiences there.  For both Albina and Sanjay, the places they described became special through their personal existential encounter with a destination.

Dan Olsen (Brandon University, Canada) interpreted my task for this panel as a focus on how we create lists of different types of Best Tourism Places, showing a wide range of examples from the Internet, from the most green destinations to the best travel photographs.  He concluded with the questions: Who creates these lists? Who chooses the criteria upon which these lists are based? Who is the intended audience? Why are these lists developed in the first place? Do these lists “work”?

These questions could also, of course, be asked of all the presenters on this panel session.  And that is exactly what David Weaver (Griffith University, Australia) did as he led a lively discussion of the presentations. A good part of the discussion focused on how we, as tourism geography researchers, perceive and define the places we study and visit.  We tend to be biased toward "allocentric" destinations -- trying to avoid mass tourism and seeking out back regions -- and one wonders how that might bias our research and writing.  I also wonder if the same type of session by business school academics would have resulted in more mass tourism examples?

This blog is cross-posted on the BlogNotions - Hospitality Blog

Tourism Incognita Part 2: Terra incognita and Topophilia Presentation Video

If you've half an hour to spare, here is my recent talk in Martinique on the topic of Tourism Incognita:

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Terra incognita and topophilia : the importance of remoteness and the unexpected in the tourist experience

Contributeur(s) majeur(s) : Lew, Alan, A. Date : 2011-01-27
Production : Université des Antilles et de la Guyane ; CEREGMIA : Centre d'études et de recherche en économie, gestion et modélisation informatique appliquée
Extrait de : Conférence Internationale du Tourisme "The changing world of coastal, island and tropical tourism", 27-29 janvier 2011. Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, campus de Schoelcher, Martinique .
Provenance : Université des Antilles et de la Guyane. Service commun de la documentation 

Permalien : http://www.manioc.org/fichiers/HASH21b79090710bd0474a25b1

Click Here to view and hear most of the papers from this conference.

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Tourism Incognita - The Importance of the Unexpected

My email inbox these days seems to be overflowing with more "all-inclusive" travel deals than I have seen in a long time. All-inclusive experiences are certainly attractive -- no need to think about anything other than getting to your destination resort. They are also very popular -- as evidenced by the continual growth in cruise ships, the ultimate all-inclusive experiences. Unfortunately, they are also the ultimate in predictability, efficiency and control -- the hallmarks of hypermodernity, and what George Ritzer and Allan Liska (1997) called "McDisneyization". While I appreciate efficiency, because it often costs less, and I try to avoid bad surprises as much as possible, I find that what I most enjoy and rememver about travel are experiences that are unexpected , unplanned and sometimes out of control.

A couple of years ago I took an Alaska inside passage cruise, from Vancouver, BC to Anchorage, Alaska. We were on one of the major cruise lines, which my wife loves because we only need to unpack our bags once. For our daily port experiences, however, I wanted to try to get away from the cruise mobs, but I still wanted to make the most of my limited time in each port of call. So I used an company that specialized in working around the cruise lines in booking local tours for cruise ship passengers. I did this for two of our three stops, Ketchikan and Skagway. In Ketchikan we did a rainforest natural area hike with a small group of people (8 to 10), which was nice, but also something that I think could have been easily done on one's own. In Skagway we took the obligatory (and scenic) White Pass and Yukon Train ride, for which I do not think there is a way to bypass the cruise mobs. However, the most memorable experience of the entire cruise was our stay in Juneau. 

Being a relatively larger place, I was determined to rent a car and explore Juneau on my own. They do not make it easy for cruise passengers to rent cars in Juneau! The car rental places are nowhere near where the cruise ships dock. I was too cheap to take a taxi for this one day rental, and instead took a public bus, which got me close, but I still had to hike a ways to get to the rental place. Having the ability to explore Juneau on our own, however, made a world of difference. We visited the Mendenhall Glacier, but we were on our own schedule, and beyond that we just drove north out of town looking to see what we could find. It was an overcast day, with some rain and drizzle now and then, but the scenery was fantastic and there were hardly any other people in sight! Among our stops was the Shrine of St. Theresa, which is a very unique old church on a small island connected to the mainland. And we also found some good, local food places.

So why was Juneau so special? What Juneau offered, that Ketchikan and Skagway did not was an opportunity to explore what geographers have long referred to as Terra Incognita. In the Age of Exploration (16th and 17th centuries) European cartographers marked the yet-to-be-explored places on maps as Terra Incognita. In 1947, the geographer John Kirkland Wright opened his presidential address to the Association of American Geographers with the words:

Terra Incognita: these words stir the imagination. Through the ages men have been drawn to unknown regions by Siren voices, echoes of which ring in our ears today when on modern maps we see spaces labelled "unexplored," rivers shown by broken lines, islands marked "existence doubtful."
 

Today, Terra Incognita still holds an important role in the travelers experiences of place. Travel and tourism today are usually taken to places we know. However, even in these known places, there are many geographies and experiences that are beyond the tourism mob, that are unknown and that offer opportunities to experience Terra Incognita. 

While we focus on the all-inclusive known when we purchase our travel experiences, it is equally important to make room for the unknown and the unexpected. I argue that it is even vital to have such experiences to have a full and deep experience and appreciation of a place. This requires an openness to risk, to serendipity, to personal transformation, to a special kind of Tourism Incognita, which those of us who study and promote tourism need to be more aware of.

As the author and poet Carl Sandburg once said, "Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me". After all, isn't this why most of us, both tourism professionals and tourism consumers are drawn to travel in the first place?

 

References

Ritzer, G., and A. Liska. 1997. "'McDisneyization' and 'Post-Tourism': Complementary Perspectives on Contemporary Tourism." In Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, edited by C. Rojek and J. Urry. London: Routledge.

See also: Robinson, M.B. 2003. The Mouse Who Would Rule the World! How American Criminal Justice Reflects the Themes of Disneyization. Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 10 (1) 69-86. http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol10is1/robinson.html

Wright, J.K. 1947. Terrae Incognitae: The Place of the Imagination in Geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 37(1): 1-15. http://www.colorado.edu/geography/giw/wright-jk/1947_ti/1947_ti.html

Nostalgia for the Family Holiday Vacation

Nostalgia for the Family Holiday Vacation

by Alan A. Lew, Department of Geography, Planning and Recreation, Northern Arizona University, USA

A Literature Review of:

Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations by Susan Sessions Rugh (University of Kansas Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-7006-1588-9)
- and -
Theme Park by Scott A. Lukas (Reaktion Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-86189-394-9)

One of the stories that I tell people about how and why I became a scholar of geography and tourism has to do with my childhood upbringing. Summer family vacations were an important part of my early experiences, and may have contributed to my adult interest in tourism and travel as both a vocation and an avocation. ...

Access the full article for free at InformaWorld 

Published in: Tourism Geographies, Volume 12, Issue 4 November 2010 , pages 568 - 571

A Review of “Tourism in the USA: A Spatial and Social Synthesis”

Tourism in the USA: A Spatial and Social Synthesis

by Dimitri Ioannides & Dallen J. Timothypublished by Routledge, London and New York, 2010, ISBN 0-415-95685-4 

Reviewed by Patrick Brouder, Department of Social & Economic Geography, Ume University, Sweden 

This 222-page book sets out to give a comprehensive overview of tourism in the USA. The title hints that the book is not only about tourism studies but includes many elements of geography, in particular, and social sciences, in general. Ioannides and Timothy state that their 'aim is to provide an overview and detailed account of the workings of tourism as a modern-day phenomenon in the United States of America' (p. 3). Their rationale is, at least in part, an attempt to address the fact that 'despite all the fuss about tourism in the USA, it is more than clear that it is a misunderstood phenomenon' (p. 3). In short, Tourism in the USA: A spatial and social synthesis offers an excellent overview of its subject and makes the phenomenon of one of the largest tourism economies in the world better understood. 


Access the full article for free at InformaWorld  


Published in Tourism Geographies, Volume 12, Issue 4 November 2010 , pages 575 - 577

Time as a Major Barrier to Sustainable Development

Author: Alan A. Lew, Department of Geography, Planning and Recreation, Northern Arizona University, Arizona, USA

Published in: Tourism Geographies, Volume 12, Issue 3, August 2010, pages 481 - 483

There are many barriers to sustainable development, including

    * just defining what sustainable development is;
    * trying to making connections between sustainability issues that exist at different scales (from personal to community to global);
    * trying to make connections between sustainability issues that exist in different industries and activities (total life-cycle costing issues); and
    * deciding how to properly balance environmental, social and ecological issues.

Most of these issues are mentioned in the literature on sustainable development (including my study area of sustainable tourism) in some way or another. One major challenge, however, that seems to never come up is the limitation of the human perception of time. 'Be here now' is, unfortunately, how most of us behave too much of the time. ...

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To cite this Article: Lew, Alan A. (2010) 'Time as a Major Barrier to Sustainable Development', Tourism Geographies, 12:3, 481 - 483

Landscape, Tourism and Meaning

Book Review of: Landscape, Tourism and Meaning by Daniel C. Knudsen, Michelle M. Metro-Roland, Anne K. Soper & Charles E. Greer (Eds), Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, ISBN 978-0-7546-4943-4

Reviewed by : Brian Graham, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster, UK

Published in: Tourism Geographies, Volume 12, Issue 3, August 2010, pages 484 - 486 

This book, which is a contribution to Ashgate's 'New directions in Tourism Analysis' series emerges from the sometimes unfortunate engagement of tourism studies with cultural geography and its convoluted and pretentious lexicon. The provenance of the volume lies in two sessions at the 2004 meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Philadelphia, the purpose of the book being explicitly ambitious in that its role 'is to re-theorize tourism' through an examination of the intersection between landscape, identity and tourism. ...

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To cite this review article: Graham, Brian (2010) 'A Review of “Landscape, Tourism and Meaning”', Tourism Geographies, 12:3, 484 - 486

Publishing Tourism Geography Research

Author: Deborah Che

Published in: Tourism Geographies, Volume 12, Issue 2, May 2010, pages 324 - 328

At the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers held in Las Vegas, Nevada (22-27 March), geographers shared their experiences as participants in a stimulating and thought-provoking panel on 'Publishing Tourism Geography Research'. I organized this session in order to elicit recommendations from geographers with extensive publication records and with experience editing, reviewing, developing book projects, founding journals and experience with department and university administration where institutional research standards for tenure and promotion decisions are developed and put into effect. ...

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To cite this Article: Che, Deborah (2010) 'Publishing Tourism Geography Research', Tourism Geographies, 12:2, 324 - 328  

The 4 Best Tourism Journals!

Shaul Krakover sent the photo above, saying:

“I attach here a photo taken at our Tourism Destination Development and Branding Conference, held October 14-15, 2009, at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Eilat Campus, Israel.

The photo presents the 4 best tourism journals!  It was taken in a session on "Publishing in the Academic Hospitality and Tourism Literature: Trends and Challenges" with the participation of the following (from Right to Left):

- John Tribe, Editor in Chief of the Annals of Tourism Research
- Rick Perdue, Editor of Journal of Travel Research
- Abraham Pizam, Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Hospitality
Management, and
- Shaul Krakover, Associate editor of Tourism Geographies.”

Learning To See Through Travel

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Can We 'Learn To See?': Study Shows Perception Of Invisible Stimuli Improves With Training

ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2009) — Although we assume we can see everything in our field of vision, the brain actually picks and chooses the stimuli that come into our consciousness. A new study in the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology's Journal of Vision reveals that our brains can be trained to consciously see stimuli that would normally be invisible. [Click Here to read full story]
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Many years ago (many, many, in fact), I attended a meditation retreat in the hills near Clear Lake north of the SFO Bay Area.  There was a young guy on this retreat, in his early 20s, who was able to see aura around people’s bodies.  He did not need to do anything, this ability was just natural. 

Now in those days, when I was younger, I had a pretty good ability to see things at night – much better than almost anyone else I had met. So I kind of envied his aura seeing ability.  But he thought nothing of it – he told me that it really doesn’t mean much, he is just able to see them.

So, a few decades later, I still can’t see auras, and might night vision has declined as my need to wear glasses has increased (since I started using computers).  But now comes this story on ScienceDaily about how German researchers have shown that the eye can detect objects even though the brain does not recognize the object as being seen. This has a couple of fascinating possibilities:

(1) Our eyes may be detecting objects and fields of view just beyond the visible spectrum, in the infra-red and ultraviolet range, or in a dark field with no visible light, that we are totally unaware of, but which may still impress our brain, behavior and experience.

(2) We may be able to learn to see these objects of fields of information if we are trained or practiced in doing so. (This is the direction that the German researchers are moving – to help people with blind spots.)

As cool as that sounds, I no longer have my old meditation patience that I think it would probably take to master such skills.

However, I do see implications of this phenomenon – of learning to see what we otherwise would not – in my interests in the tourism and travel experience. These implications are:

(1)  People travel to see parts of the world, parts of the human existence, parts of the planetary geography that we otherwise would not be able to see.  We drive to travel because our monkey curiosity wants to fill in the blind spots of terra incognita.

(2) We use guidebooks, online video guides, and local human guides to help us to see what we would not see if we were to visit a place without any interpretation.  This is what semiotics refers to a the “sign” or “signifier” – it is the name and meaning that we humans assign to sites and sights that, in turn, gives us deep, existential experiences of those sites and sights.

(3) We also reject the guides and the guidebooks in an effort to gain a pure and direct experience of places – especially of the spontaneous and unplanned surprises that new places have the potential to offer us.  And related to this, are new identities and roles that arise in ourselves, that we may never knew were their, but which the liminal experience of traveling away from home, can sometimes show us.

(4) Some of us learn about broader issues of travel and tourism, especially sustainability issues, to make us more aware of our impacts and to better understand how tourism shapes places and people (both the hosts and the guests).

All of these are exercises in geographic visioning – of stretching our normal vision (and understanding) of the world, its places, its environments and ourselves – and to see and understand them in ways that we may never have considered were possible.  (Although, tourism advertisers also know this and flash images of possibilities that are often tempting, if fundamentally shallow.)

So, here we are.  At one level we are curious monkeys wanting to see what is hidden behind the peek-a-boo of distant places. At another level we are stretching our cognitive skill, stretching our brains, perhaps to lead us to a more aware planet that is hopefully able to manage, if not solve, the global issues that we all share today.

Are you a Tourism Extremist?

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Extremists More Willing To Share Their Opinions, Study Finds - ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2009) — People with relatively extreme opinions may be more willing to publicly share their views than those with more moderate views, according to a new study. [Click Here for the full story.]
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The story linked above is about a study at Stanford University in which students with extreme views on an issue were more vocal in expressing their opinions when they thought that the majority of their peers leaned in their direction.  There were generally silent if they thought that their peers held moderate or opposite views to theirs.

While we all have met people who are willing to express their "extreme" views even if they are clearly in the minority, they are the exception. The problem is that human nature assumes that the most vocal are expressing the dominant opinion of a group, whereas in reality, they actually represent an extreme position.  Thus, we (those of us on the left) assume that the talking heads on Fox News represent the typical Republican Party views in the US, when they really are a marginal extreme.

So what does this have to do with tourism?  Off the top of my head, I see the following implications:

We (tourism professionals) often assume that everyone want to travel and everyone is supportive of tourism because that is what seems to be the majority. In reality, there people's opinions on travel and tourism run a continuum from no interest in travel to travel as a lifestyle, and from no support for tourism to tourism as a foundation of the new service economy (cf. Urry's discussion of the "service class").  Making the pro-tourism and pro-travel perspective dominant has enormous impacts on macro economic priorities (such as transit and destination branding), community development decisions (where and what to spend tax dollars on), and human behavior (defining the range of possible leisure time activities). 

And this has resulted in major sustainability challenges, from the massive greenhouse gas emissions of long haul air and cruise ship travel, to change in traditional cultures from tourists visiting remote destinations.

Do we ever seriously even consider a no-tourism option as a lifestyle, as a form of community development, as what might be best for a destination? What kind of world would that be like ... possibly a more sustainable one?

 
 

Blogging Two Years Later

In June 2007 I wrote a blog post titled "Why Don't We Blog? University Faculty Blogging about Travel & Tourism". So two years later I took a look back at that blog post, and to my surprise there were 36 comments! That was strange, because I do not remember receiving any notices to moderate that many comments on any of my blog posts. A quick scan showed that there were three legitimate comments, posted soon after I wrote the blog entry, and 33 spam comments. Yikes! – I had not turned on the comments moderation, nor even the word verification, so any robo-computer could post a comment to not only this blog post, but to any other post on my Tourism Place blog.

So now I need to go through all my posts to find and delete the junk comments. Bummer!

I started blogging in 2005 and got quickly hooked on this form of self-publishing and self-expression. I have always fashioned myself as having strong non-hierarchical and egalitarian values, and even though I too play the academic publishing game, I really resent the haves (book writers) and have-nots (book users) that are created in that process. I also do not like the high cost of poorly written textbooks and the sometimes political nature of the academic review process. And I loved the opportunities for self-expression that blogging enabled.

So blogging, which allowed me to write and publish online whatever I wanted, was an incredibly liberating experience. I loved it and started several blogs, and a couple of related podcasts. But I did not see many other academics blogging, especially in the tourism and geography fields that I found of interest. So I sent a query to several tourism email lists and compiled the result in my "Why Don't We Blog?" post.

By 2009, however, my own blogging has fallen off considerably – though I still do blog. I have heard that blogging growth, in general, has flattened out, though micro-blogging on Twitter (@alew) and Facebook has taken off and continues to grow. This has happened to me, as well. I mostly moved from my long blog posts to micro-blogging on Twitter (which is then automatically forwarded to Facebook). 140 character messages are a lot less time-consuming to write than 140 to 1400 word blog posts. I guess have gotten lazy.

I stopped podcasting at the end of last semester, though I hope to start up again soon (once I get over some technical difficulties). I still blog – occasionally – when I feel an urge to write more than 140 characters. Most of these either go on my "Tourism Place" blog (anything related to tourism) or my "Outside Looking In" blog (most anything else that I want to talk/rant about).

And, of course, I still have my academic articles and books, which I also enjoy writing – when I have time, which is not very often. So, perhaps what micro-blogging and blogging do for me is to allow the writing fluids to have an outlet during the school year when I am mostly consumed by teaching, which is what I should be doing now … instead of deleting spam comments on two-year old blog posts!

Time as a Major Barrier to Sustainable Development

An UPDATED version of this blog post is available HERE.

I Hate Being Liminal - on the transition to home from a trip abroad

[Photo: View of the Li River from my conference hotel in Yangshuo, China]

I think I just experienced one of the longest travel-related liminal experiences ever (at least for me).

Liminal experiences are those that are characterized by transitions from one state of being to another. Tourists experience liminality when they transition from a home-based state of being to a travel-based state. Liminality also occurs during rights of passage, such as graduating from school, becoming married, becoming a parent, or becoming a new employee of a company. The liminal experience is one of becoming something different, and is potentially transformative, with a shedding of the old and a creation of something new, but also a period of vulnerability and weakness in the face of an uncertain future.

The transformative potential of travel is one of the major reasons that many people want to travel. Even when a trip is fully planned and fully chartered and catered, there is still the possibility, if not probability, of meeting new people, seeing the unexpected, and doing something that is totally unconnected to one's home. The period of liminality, the transition between being a resident-in-place and being a tourist-on-the-road, normally occurs when the tourist is in transit between their home and their destination. For most people it is a period of expectation, anticipation and hope – the emotions are generally positive, though there could be some strain related to the exertion of travel.

However, there is a second liminal experience that is a bit different. This experience occurs at the end of the trip, when the tourist is returning home and transitioning from being a traveling-guest to a resident-host. In this case, the emotions may be either positive or negative. Negative emotions may be related to reverse culture shock, which arises when a tourist "goes native" in an exotic destination and must readjust to "going native" in their home place. Going native during a trip actually refers to developing a sense of attachment to a place. This attachment may be to the physical place, a culture in that place, or an individual(s) that was met during the trip. In each of these instances, the return home is accompanied by a sense of separation and loss. That loss may be addressed by an attempt to develop or maintain a longer-term relationship with the travel destination through repeated visits or other commitments and activities.

For example, I experienced a deeply moving trip to the Shan State of Myanmar in 2005. I blogged about that trip – basically keeping an online trip diary (http://golden-triangle.blogspot.com). After the trip, I continued for a year to post and discuss news items about Myanmar. Eventually, however, my attachment to the people and culture of Myanmar waned and I stopped blogging about the country, though I still hold it in a special place in my memory. Tourists also develop an attachment to each other, mostly when traveling as a group of some kind. The sociologist Ning Wang has referred to this social bonding as "touristic communitas," and it too can result in a sense of loss when the trip comes to an end. Close friendships can form that continue via long distance, and which may remain strong, though they are more likely to fade with time.

In both of the post-trip instances cited above, intentional efforts can be made to continue attachments to place and attachments to people beyond the trip. This effort is part of the remaking of self that is one of the goals of travel and tourism. (I believe this is the major reason why people travel.) The effort varies considerably from one person to the next. For some, the attachment is a mild one where the destination simply occupies a check mark on the list of places that have been visited – a kind of trophy or bragging right. For others it is more meaningful, either in terms of personal relationships or professional relationships. The permanence of these relationships will also vary considerably, though maintaining strong ties over a distance can challenge any relationship. We might think of the liminality of the return trip as never really ending so long as an intentional effort to maintain a place, culture or person relationship continues.

That being said, there is another way that the liminal experience of a return trip can seemingly last forever. That is when the tourist is ready to return home before the trip has ended. And that is what I just experienced. I just got back from a trip to China to attend a tourism conference in Yangshuo (near Guilin). Prior to the conference, I traveled with a colleague in the Business School at Northern Arizona University who had a conference to attend in Chengdu (Sichuan Province). So I spent about five days touring the Chengdu area prior to the tourism conference, which lasted for an additional four nights. I also spent layover nights in Shanghai on my way to Chengdu and again on my way home from Guilin. Altogether, I was gone for 15 days. However, after touring Chengdu and then attending my tourism conference, with a very full day of outdoor activities in Yangshuo (which was very, very hot and humid), I was pretty burned out and was ready to go home.

However, I did want to see the larger city of Guilin (where the airport is located). I had been to Guilin four times (first time in 1988) in the past and wanted to see how it might have changed since my last visit in 2001. Also, my colleague had never been to Guilin and also wanted to see the city. Finally, he also arranged for us to get free accommodations in exchange for guest lectures at Guangxi Normal University. But just like in nearby Yangshuo, Guilin was very, very hot and humid, and the hotel we stayed in was the lowest quality of the entire journey (no internet, cockroaches, and in need of new carpets -- though it was free!). On top of this, I was coming off of an emotional high from the great meeting we had in Yangshuo, and feeling the loss of separation (as described above) that often accompanies the end of these meetings (which I help to organize every two years in China). So, as much as I wanted to see Guilin, I really wanted to just go home. I was done with my trip in Yangshuo and I had entered a liminal state of mind, which made me feel somewhat weak and emotionally vulnerable (not feelings that I get very often).

The Shanghai Airport Hotel (aka the 168 Hotel) was a very pleasant surprise, with weak but workable internet access, at Y398/night (about US$58/night),. This gave me a good rest for my cross-Pacific flight the next day. I dislike LAX (really bad internet options), but was lucky to be able to change a seven hour layover there into a one hour layover, getting me home sooner than expected. So I have almost completed my liminal transition, I almost over my liminal anxieties, I am reconnecting with conference colleagues to build on the new relationships made there, and I am glad I went to Guilin, despite all the challenges. Now, we'll see how long it takes to get over the jet lag, which is always worse for me when upon returning to Arizona from Asia...

[Photo: sign inside my hotel room at the old Chinese hotel I stayed at in Guilin, China.]

Urban Planning and Design Tools for Tourism

As a member of the American Planning Association, I get their monthly magazine, Planning. I came across a couple of lists in recent issues of Planning that I think has application to those of plan tourism at the community and place level.

What Makes a Great Neighborhood?

1. Has a variety of functional attributes that contribute to a resident's day-to-day living (residential, commercial, or mixed uses).
2. Accommodated multimodal transportation (pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers).
3. Has design and architectural features that are visually interesting.
4. Encourages human contact and social activities.
5. Promots community involvement and maintains a secure environment.
6. Promotes sustainability and responds to climatic demands.
7. Has a memorable character.
   
   (Hinshaw, Mark. "Great Neighborhoods", Planning, Jan 2008: 6-11; list on p. 8)
   

Characteristics of a Great Street

1. Provides orientation to its users and connects well to the larger pattern of ways.
2. Balances the competing needs of the street -- driving, transit, walking, cycling, servicing, parking, drop-offs, etc.
3. Fits the topography and capitalizes on natural features.
4. Is lined with a variety of interesting activities and uses that create a varies streetscape.
5. Has urban design or architectural features that are exemplary.
6. Relates well it its bordering uses -- allows for continuous activity, doesn't displace pedestrians to provide access to bordering uses.
7. Encourages human contact and social activities.
8. Employs hardscape and/or landscape to great effect.
9. Promotes safety of pedestrians and vehicles and promotes use over the 24-hour day.
10. Promotes sustainability through minimizing runoff, reusing warer, ensuring groundwater quality, minimizing heat islands, and responding to climatic demands.
11. Is well maintained and capable of being maintained without excessive costs.
12. Has memorable character.
    
    (Knack, Ruth Eckdish. "Dan Burden's Sidewalk-Level Fiew of the World", Planning, Jan 2008: 14-17; list on p.16)
    Also: Tempe, Arizona's Mill Street was awarded one the 10 Great Street designations by the American Planning Association in 2008 - click here for the story.
    

Security Index for Public Spaces

• Features Encouraging Use

1. Signs announcing "public space"
2. Public ownership of management
3. Restroom availablity
4. Diversity of seating types
5. Various microclimates
6. Lighting to encourage nighttime use
7. Small-scale food vendors
8. Art, cultural, or visual enhancement
9. Entrance accessibility
10. Orientation accessibility

• Features Controlling Use

1. Visible sets of rules posted
2. Subjective or judgment rules posted
3. In a business Improvement District (BID)
4. Security cameras
5. Secondary security personnel
6. Design to imply appropriate use
7. Presence of sponsor or advertisement
8. Areas of restrictd or conditional use
9. Constrained hours of operation
   
   (Ewing, Reid. "Security of public Spaces: New Measures Are Reliable, But Are They Valid?", Planning, July 2007: 55)