I asked him where he was going. He shook his head; his hair danced. "Just"—he raised his eyes and said with drama—"travelling."—Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar, 1975.
This is an article that discusses what I call the "traveller culture" in India and Nepal. It is basically a reflection upon some paradoxes in this transnational culture of Westerners travelling with the Lonely Planet guidebook in their backpacks. A guidebook which has a crucial role as a trendsetter in this traveller culture. In order to avoid talking about a traveller culture in abstract essentialised terms, one has to embed the concept in social activities, and that I have tried to do.
There is a gap between travellers´ actions and the norms and representations they themselves think they communicate and represent. These individuals do not look upon themselves as ´tourists´, but as ´travellers´. A general view of tourists among travellers, is that tourists travel only for short time and in organised groups. They thus only have access to "front stage". Travellers, on the other hand, have access to "backstage", as Ulf Hannerz points out in Global Culture—Nationalism, Globalisation and Modernity.
A well-established subjective identification as travellers differentiates them from "ordinary tourists". Since they want to travel "backstage", travellers seek authentic otherness. This drive for authenticity instead of the reproduced (understood as produced for tourists) make travellers seek destinations off the beaten track, where there are no tourists. Lonely Planet gives a lot of information about "untouched areas" (as the opposite of "tourist ghettoes"), where one rarely will see large groups of travellers together and "where the local people remain friendly".