The quest for paradise often ends abruptly when tourists end up with cowdung on their clothes, writes David Nicholson-Lord, author of The. Greening of the Cities (Routledge), in The Nation.
What makes people want to travel? The short answer centers on the concept of escape. According to Jost Krippendorf, the Swiss academic who is one of the leading authorities on modern tourism, people travel because "they no longer feel happy where they are -where they work, where they live. They feel the monotony of the daily routine, the cold rationality of factories, offices, apartment blocks and transport, shrinking human contact…the loss of nature and naturalness." MacCannell argues that mass tourism is a product of the "most depersonalised" epoch in history.
Well, maybe. It´s true that people with gardens, or those who live in small towns, take fewer holidays than apartment-block residents or city dwellers. It´s probably also true that what we casually refer to as the "pressures of daily life" – work, family, commuting – are more intense, in some respects, than ever before.
Yet people have always felt a desire for something more than their life routinely offers them -something, well, different. It´s partly because humans are naturally inquisitive and exploratory but also, and more significant, because we need the unknown, what historians of religion call "otherness," to lend our lives significance. So we conceive of ideal worlds – Paradise, the Golden Age, Heaven, Atlantis, Shangri-La – and dream, sometimes, of attaining them.