ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how tourist bodies merge with nonhuman materials and the surrounding environment during multi-day wilderness walks. Drawing on interviews and photographs of tourists in Tasmania, Australia, the chapter examines the unexpected and at times haphazard embodied interactions that arise between tourists’ bodies while packing equipment and walking with hiking bags. These moments of flexibility and reconfiguration open alternative perspectives to the anthropocentric ideals of wilderness walks and the experience of being connected to nature, or seemingly isolated from the human realm. Building on notions of materiality and affect in tourism and mobilities, I suggest that these material-bodily assemblages play a significant role in how tourists can feel entangled with the more-than-human world.
