Trendsurfing: Experimental travel (The Times)
By David Rowan
Planning a holiday? Don't be too easy on yourself. The latest tourism boom requires travellers to undergo any number of alarming or surreal self-imposed challenges. It might be less restful than a week on a beach - but at least you'll come home with some inerasable memories.
It's known as "experimental travel", and Joel Henry is a past master. Henry, a 49-year-old grandfather from Strasbourg, recently took his wife on a Rome city-break, but they ignored the Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain. Instead, they asked a local friend to mark 20 places on a map that held some undeclared personal meaning. "We didn't want to know why, but simply built our itinerary around these dots on the map that meant something only to him," says Henry, a TV jingle-writer. "We spent two days discovering Nanni Moretti's cinema, private houses we knew nothing about, even a local tramline. It made for the most perfect holiday."
Henry calls this an "Ariadne's thread" trip, after the mythical ball of yarn that led Theseus through the labyrinth. But it is just one of his many favourite quirky travel challenges. Some weekends, the Henrys explore European cities using only a century-old Baedeker. Other times, they sample "retourism" - taking the train or plane to a far-flung resort, only to return using the slowest possible means of transport. "My favourite, though, is 'erotourism'," Henry says. This involves him and his wife
travelling separately to an agreed destination, and then trying intuitively to meet up once there. Whether in Venice or Hamburg, they have always hooked up - turning a mere journey into an "erotic pursuit".
As founder of the Laboratory of Experimental Tourism, Henry has spent the past 15 years encouraging others to place equally arbitrary constraints on their journeys. His latourex.org website chronicles their often surreal endeavours, from "monopolytourism" (playing a local version of Monopoly and visiting the dice-determined streets or city jail) to "K2 expeditions" (heading for grid reference K2 on the local map, even if it covers the sewage works). "It's all about having fun trying new things without knowing what will happen," he explains. "So when we tested 'blind tourism', being guided through Luxembourg wearing dark glasses and carrying a white stick, we discovered the city through its smells and noise. What we hadn't reckoned on was customs stopping us to check our papers while we were still in character."
Around 500 experimental travellers subscribe to Latourex's newsletter. But that will grow this spring, when Lonely Planet publishes the first guidebook devoted to the genre. "People seem quite charmed by the idea of turning travel into something playful," says its Melbourne-based author, Rachael Antony. "I wouldn't be surprised to see more taking it up even just for a day. Experimental travel's a great way to meet people."
Antony's research led her to a British snowboarder who travelled through Japan wearing a plastic horse's head "just to see how people would react", and a newlywed Slovak couple who hitchhiked in wedding outfits and found strangers offering their homes as honeymoon suites. "My favourite was a guy who stood in a southern Indian market carrying a sign explaining that
he was a tourist available for rent," she recalls. "He had the most amazing day working in a restaurant, teaching English and handing out pamphlets for a politician. It's just another way of opening your mind."
Still, the natives do not always appreciate experimental travel's postmodern irony. Take the extreme hitchhiking challenge known as "slight hitch travel". "We know an Australian guy who stood by the roadside in LA with a sign saying 'Sydney'," Antony says with a chuckle. "The cops pulled him over and helpfully told him he ought first to head for the airport."
(The Times, London, January 8 2005)
Planning a holiday? Don't be too easy on yourself. The latest tourism boom requires travellers to undergo any number of alarming or surreal self-imposed challenges. It might be less restful than a week on a beach - but at least you'll come home with some inerasable memories.
It's known as "experimental travel", and Joel Henry is a past master. Henry, a 49-year-old grandfather from Strasbourg, recently took his wife on a Rome city-break, but they ignored the Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain. Instead, they asked a local friend to mark 20 places on a map that held some undeclared personal meaning. "We didn't want to know why, but simply built our itinerary around these dots on the map that meant something only to him," says Henry, a TV jingle-writer. "We spent two days discovering Nanni Moretti's cinema, private houses we knew nothing about, even a local tramline. It made for the most perfect holiday."
Henry calls this an "Ariadne's thread" trip, after the mythical ball of yarn that led Theseus through the labyrinth. But it is just one of his many favourite quirky travel challenges. Some weekends, the Henrys explore European cities using only a century-old Baedeker. Other times, they sample "retourism" - taking the train or plane to a far-flung resort, only to return using the slowest possible means of transport. "My favourite, though, is 'erotourism'," Henry says. This involves him and his wife
travelling separately to an agreed destination, and then trying intuitively to meet up once there. Whether in Venice or Hamburg, they have always hooked up - turning a mere journey into an "erotic pursuit".
As founder of the Laboratory of Experimental Tourism, Henry has spent the past 15 years encouraging others to place equally arbitrary constraints on their journeys. His latourex.org website chronicles their often surreal endeavours, from "monopolytourism" (playing a local version of Monopoly and visiting the dice-determined streets or city jail) to "K2 expeditions" (heading for grid reference K2 on the local map, even if it covers the sewage works). "It's all about having fun trying new things without knowing what will happen," he explains. "So when we tested 'blind tourism', being guided through Luxembourg wearing dark glasses and carrying a white stick, we discovered the city through its smells and noise. What we hadn't reckoned on was customs stopping us to check our papers while we were still in character."
Around 500 experimental travellers subscribe to Latourex's newsletter. But that will grow this spring, when Lonely Planet publishes the first guidebook devoted to the genre. "People seem quite charmed by the idea of turning travel into something playful," says its Melbourne-based author, Rachael Antony. "I wouldn't be surprised to see more taking it up even just for a day. Experimental travel's a great way to meet people."
Antony's research led her to a British snowboarder who travelled through Japan wearing a plastic horse's head "just to see how people would react", and a newlywed Slovak couple who hitchhiked in wedding outfits and found strangers offering their homes as honeymoon suites. "My favourite was a guy who stood in a southern Indian market carrying a sign explaining that
he was a tourist available for rent," she recalls. "He had the most amazing day working in a restaurant, teaching English and handing out pamphlets for a politician. It's just another way of opening your mind."
Still, the natives do not always appreciate experimental travel's postmodern irony. Take the extreme hitchhiking challenge known as "slight hitch travel". "We know an Australian guy who stood by the roadside in LA with a sign saying 'Sydney'," Antony says with a chuckle. "The cops pulled him over and helpfully told him he ought first to head for the airport."
(The Times, London, January 8 2005)
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