ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the presence of mass tourism in narratives of echotourism. Many echotourists, including Tim Mackintosh-Smith and Michael Wood, look down on mass tourism as a product of the modernity that endangers the histories they re-enact. Nevertheless, tourists can be a surprisingly productive presence for echotourists. Drawing on scholarship on anti-tourist sentiment, the chapter demonstrates that echotourists make use of other tourists to invest a heightened degree of meaning in their own journeys. In Darwin Slept Here, Discovery, Adventure, and Swimming Iguanas in Charles Darwin’s South America (2009), David Simons is acutely aware of what he perceives to be the “staged authenticity” (MacCannell) through which Darwin’s travels are presented to tourists and asserts that this awareness makes him distinct from other tourists. In Nick Hunt’s Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Footsteps Through the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn (2017), the presence of tourists structures the subjective experience of echotourism. For much of his narrative Hunt feels trapped in a depthless modernity whose nature is most clearly characterized by the mass tourists he sees intermittently. However, in moments that recall Dean MacCannell’s influential distinction between front and back regions of travel experience, Hunt perceives other tourists as markers of shallowness that allow him to apprehend a historical depth to his re-enactment that it might otherwise lack. This chapter ends by suggesting that echotourism itself may be a form of staged authenticity.
