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Whatever the specifics and forms of these processes of mobility,
they reinforce the argument that boiled down to its essentials tourism is a
geographic phenomenon. And so is the tourist. As an embodied
geographical being every tourist is faced with the challenge of overcoming
the friction of distance between different locations and places on the Earth.
In that perspective, the tourism production system is nothing but the
supplier and constructor of means to overcome that friction and channel
flows of tourists in and through particular geographical ways.
To take a place or to give up a place, that is the whole question (Serres
1995, p. 74).
To take, or give up, a place usually involves and requires nonhumans
with their (im)mobilities and geographies. In tourism mobility this
means that tourists simply do not travel to Iceland alone, or by the social
force that comes from their human agencies only. Aeroplanes, ships,
material accessibility networks, and systems of transportation make them
movable too. And when tourists have returned home from travelling the
non-humans are there once again, ready to stand in and help memory grasp
passed experiences of what forever remains away. Yet, every tourist
knows too that the pictures shown and the stories told cannot fully represent
the experience of the places visited, nor re-wind the trip as a
whole. The difference between being there and representing it here can
never be completely erased: “That was such a nice and lovely place. If you
don’t believe me, you better go there and see for yourself”.
Such, then, is the geographical condition of the tourist, but what
about the tourism researcher? As it turns out, any researcher in any field of
science is very much facing the same geographical problem as the tourist,
that is, how to make a journey between here and there. More precisely, for
the researcher this creates a research methodological problem of how to
bridge the geographical gap between here and there.
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