Essay 2

Among the many descriptions of an anti-tourist Kalder provides throughout the interview I was particularly taken with the idea of  “disorientation over enlightenment” (Kalder). I think that’s an absolutely beautiful concept. Inspiration as derived from confusion. The anti-tourist is not looking to understand, or more specifically, to mold or force an experience into a familiar package of understanding. To go off another of Kalder’s examples, they are not looking to recreate something from a postcard. The anti-tourist seeks an experience they couldn’t think up themselves, but could only stumble across. This perhaps brings the term ‘explorer’ to mind, however I don’t think the definitions are quite synonymous.  Immediately ‘explorer’ seems to wrongly imply a sense of superiority, an idea of ‘I conquered this place’ that is antithesis to what I understand an anti-tourist to be. I don’t think the anti-tourist wants to go somewhere no one else has been, but perhaps where no one else wants to go; a place literally off the map for most of the world but simultaneously the only part of the map for the very, very small percentage that live there. I suppose the best metaphor I could come up with is that of anti-tourism being a sort of cultural spelunking. An examination of life, or lack of life, at its deepest and rawest level. An interest in not necessarily the untouched but the un-glossed, ruminating in the idea of nothingness and what can be found there.