ABSTRACT
Tourism relies on difference, on the provision of the extraordinary. We all want something more out of our existence than the mundane familiarity of our daily working lives. As a means of escaping the rigours of regularity, the holiday has become a concentrated life moment when we can actively engage in pursuits beyond whatever constitutes our normal practice, even if this means doing nothing at all. The experience of tourism is that all too brief moment in our regulated patterns of time when we can revel in the atmosphere of something beyond the bounds of the everyday (cf. Urry 1990), when we can enjoy something Other. This sense of Otherness can be anything, either material or immaterial. It can be something as banal as the sun; as elusive as the uncertain desire of a sexual encounter; as trifling as a tourist trinket; as exotic as an alien environment; or indeed as arcane as an encounter with some strange being. Whichever or whatever combination of Otherness we may choose to partake of, the aura of authentic difference can always be found shimmering in the background. Even if we wrap ourselves up in the tourist bubble as a protection against the very fear of difference (cf. Boorstin 1964), we still consume that Otherness, albeit in easily packaged and manageable forms. So long as we can believe in the authenticity of the experiential encounter, so long as we feel that we are getting something above and beyond the normalcy of home life, then it can be said that we have encountered difference.
