ABSTRACT
Sometimes it seems like nearly any subject of difference or sensory distinction becomes the object of tourism . In Americus, Georgia, Habitat for Humanity International opened the Global Village and Discovery Center, featuring ‘authentic’ slum housing from around the world (except tents and shopping carts of the US homeless). In Newfoundland, Canada, local boat operators lobby to maintain iceberg tourism in the face of commercial ’berg harvesters who make vodka from the frozen waters, claiming its purity m oderates hangovers. China’s Guangdong Province, historically famed for culinary indulgences, issued a ban on the leisure practice of eating exotic animals after the SARS epidemic. In the US Midwest, Europeans sign on for tw ister tours, pack into minivans and race hundreds of miles around the Plains states in hopes of catching sight of a class 5 tornado. Wired reports on
the hacker tourist [who] ventures forth across the w ide. . . meatspace of three continents [encountering] the exotic manhole villagers of Thailand, the Utu rn tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the cable nomads of Lan Tao Island, the slack control wizards of Chelmsford, and subterranean ex-telegraphers of Cornwall and other previously unknown and unchronicled folks, [all engaged in] laying the longest w ire on earth.
