“A travel does not need any motives. It soon proves that it is sufficient in itself. We think we are going on a travel but soon it is the travel that makes or breaks us.”

“But it is the nature of long travel to bring back something completely different from what we were looking for.”

“On the road, the best thing is to get lost. When we get lost, plans give way to surprises and it is then, but only then, that the trip begins.”

“The virtue of a travel is to purge life before filling it.”

Nicolas Bouvier

 

Visiting new places, going on a trip, sightseeing… It is a highly anticipated moment of the vacation, it can be a passion that occupies a whole part of life. But beyond the places visited, the number of countries explored, the new people met, the experiences and memories brought back… it is a relationship with otherness, a relationship with reality that is revealed.

Traveling or tourism: two different states of consciousness revealing two opposing relationships with the world.

Tourism refers to consumption. Mass tourism appeared with the democratization of means of transport and industrial civilization.

Travel has always existed, it includes explorations, trips of discovery.

The tourist travels to consume: to consume landscapes, people, cultures, special moments. But if we consume, we are in turn consumed. The tourist is seen as a walking wallet, able to bring in money and feed entire economies. The only value is pecuniary, the only criterion is quantitative: memories for money.

The traveler travels to live: he does not consume but discovers, discovers himself through new cultures and new encounters. He is not there to consume but to learn or be surprised. The most important value is discovery and encounter, the main criterion is qualitative: surprise, enrichment.

The tourist takes the highways of the travel industry. It stays on the most traveled paths and follows the cultural and commercial traces already created for it. It follows the tourist guides.

The traveler walks the secondary roads, although sometimes it can also follow the tourist paths. But it remains in its philosophy of discovery. He creates its own paths, or lets itself be surprised and improvises its trip over the course of encounters and opportunities, suspends or modifies its journey according to its instinct and intuition. It can then crisscross new roads.

The tourist can visit hundreds of countries and remain exactly the same person. He will have carried with him his bubble of certainties and protection, and will not have been transformed.

The traveler can visit a place, any place near home or on the other side of the world, and find himself transformed, enriched. He will have approached otherness in an open way, in such a way as to provoke a real encounter.

The tourist remains in a controlled movement, delimited by the barriers of mercantilism and consumption. His journey is predetermined and anticipated. His encounters remain limited to commercial relations or to other tourists like him.

The traveler lets himself be surprised. He walks and gets lost, he gets lost to better find a new part of himself. He lets himself be surprised by life, allows himself to question himself through the people and cultures he crosses.

Tourism is an outgrowth of the logic of consumption of the industrial era. Travel has always existed, it is part of the human experience.