ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the imaginary proximity of the literary author as traveller could be related to concepts used in tourism studies. It interested in parallels in the disciplines of tourism and literary studies, regarding experiences of time and space, and with a special focus on the traveller in the double role of actor and spectator. The chapter focuses on the spectator and, in particular, on ways of seeing performed by the travel writer and we elaborate on the concept of telescopic eye. It concentrates on the travel writer as a playing actor and discusses in more detail a presupposed link between tourist imagination and modernist poetics; the penultimate section offers some close readings of Nooteboom's travel writing on geographically, as well as culturally, interesting places. The blogging tourists either use explicit quotations, or refer to a topic or theme that Nooteboom has described: such as evening in Isfahan' or last train to Mandalay'.
