Essay 2: Lost Cosmonaut

            In his book, Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist, Daniel Kalder defines an anti-tourist as “[someone who] embraces hunger and hallucinations. The anti-tourist seeks locked doors and demolished buildings. The anti-tourist travels at the wrong time of year, prefers dead things to living ones. The anti-tourist is humble and seeks invisibility. The anti-tourist values disorientation over enlightenment and lastly the anti-tourist loves truth, but is also partial to lies, especially his own.”

Kalder is from a small town in Scotland. Growing up he found a lot of over touristy places to be boring. He talked about how those places have been seen and written about so many times that it’s hard to see them for yourself. Tourists wind up following an automatic path and the job of the anti-tourist is to reject that common path. Kalder says that anti-tourism is to “step into the wastelands and forgotten zones that are usually neglected in the more standard form of tourism.”

I believe I have embraced some aspects of anti-tourism. Last summer my best friend and I went backpacking through Europe for six weeks. We planned our entire itinerary and paid for the trip ourselves. We chose to stay in cheap hostels and go couchsurfing rather than stay in nice hotels and we ate dinner in with locals instead of going to fancy restaurants. In the end I think we learned way more about the culture than we would have on some pre-planned typical tourist trip.

I can definitely see how anti-tourism relates to our recordings and drifts. We need to be an anti-tourist in a sense and explore forgotten places that are different and unique. At the same time, we need to be an invisible observer and only record what is in the environment naturally.