ABSTRACT
More often than not, it is preferable to be perceived as a traveller than a tourist, or so researchers and writers of travel narratives would have us believe (Fussell 1980; Galani-Moutafi 2000; McCabe 2005; O’Reilly 2005). Travel is associated with authenticity, adventure, and spontaneity. Tourism, on the other hand, has the less desirable connotations of being planned and superficial. This view is emphatically encapsulated in American historian Daniel J. Boorstin’s observation that: ‘The traveller was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing”….’ (1992, p. 85).
