Unravelling Travelling

Uncovering Tourist Emotions through Autoethnography

Sue Beeton

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781801171816
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The Tourist Experience is complex, intrinsically personal, and highly emotional. Consequently, it is not easy to understand what it is that drives us to continue to travel, and to return to places visited. It is important for all sides of the travel, tourism, and hospitality industries to understand what tourists are searching for as well as what they experience, with emotions playing a central role.

The research outlined in Unravelling Travelling: Uncovering Tourist Emotions through Autoethnography delves into the deep, personal, and very subjective emotions experienced while travelling to foreign places. Taking an autoethnographic approach, this evocative, reflexive, critical and analytical study uncovers a range of personal emotional drivers that resonate across disciplinary boundaries.

Examining the development of autoethnography in the social sciences, where the researchers often expose deeply personal experiences that cannot be directly interpreted from an outsider's perspective, Unravelling Travelling offers an in-depth commentary on the role of autoethnography in the tourism field. This personal account from author Sue Beeton goes beyond simple memoir, exposing the practices of researcher, as well as the methodology employed. Personal travel narratives and poems not only uncover emotions that may not be evident through other research approaches, but also by being highly critical of her own work, Beeton argues the case for and against autoethnography itself.

Section Two

The Stories

Chapter Five

An Unlikely Pair?

Look at me! How cool am I? I even have a Blog!

Well, I did for a while, trying to write for a non-academic, imaginary audience – I just didn’t quite get the social media thing right, and very few people ever read my wise words. I’m not sure how many will read these words even now, but I will persevere. The issue with many of our social media posts and blogs is that they are personally curated, often highly self-indulgent and present generally invented (or at the very least, enhanced) lives. I for one do not wish to read about the minutiae of someone’s daily life, particularly when I do not know them well outside the social media realm. I realise that I am not part of the generations who have grown up with social media, so I also accept that it may be my idiosyncrasy that I am expressing here rather than something more generic. I guess that is the purpose of what I am attempting in this publication – exposing my Self, but with a slightly larger goal – that of contributing to our overall understanding and knowledge of travel and tourism.

If we wish to study ourselves seriously, as I am aiming to do, we need to be authentic and true to ourselves and others, which is never easy. As I have said previously, one of the real challenges of autoethnography is the risk of seeming to be overly self-indulgent, particularly in relation to travel, which is often looked upon more as ‘holiday’ or at the very least something we do with our discretionary time and money. We often see international travel adventures expressed in very self-indulgent, privileged ways, particularly via our social media lives which tend to appear bigger than they really are. Using myself as a case in point, and as inferred above, I don’t put my day-to-day activities up on social media, rather what I think are the more ‘interesting’ parts of my life, which does include a lot of travel and time spent in fancy airline lounges – consequently, people tend to think all I do is travel overseas and, when there, spend all of my time having great adventures and hedonistic fun. While I spend up to a combined total of four to five months each year outside Australia, I still have another seven or more months at home. I also view my travel as simply part of my life, not something separate as ‘holiday’, special or even ‘exotic’ and am always engaged in some aspect of professional work, from research to speaking and teaching. I used to joke that ‘all my work is a holiday, while all my holidays are work’ which is in fact completely true. I do recognise that this in itself is a very privileged situation, but it is part of my profession and I do not treat it in a cavalier fashion – growing up, my family did not travel internationally, taking my first overseas trip to neighbouring New Zealand in my 20s. In fact, up until I was in my mid-30s, I had travelled overseas only three times, once each to New Zealand, Bali and China.

Making up for ‘lost time’, I have now visited countless countries many times, so when I was thinking about exploring my emotional experiences, I initially thought of selecting a story from each place, but as I ran through my list, it read as being overwhelmingly self-indulgent and pretentious. I am a travel and tourism researcher and educator, so of course I have had the opportunity (and requirement) to travel, so my ‘list’ of places was going to be extensive and at times exotic. This ran the risk of distracting you, the reader, from the core of what I am attempting to achieve here, which is a broader and more in-depth understanding as to why so many of us ‘need’ to travel, and the significance of our emotional responses to such travel.

So, I decided to settle on two countries that I have visited often and had a range of emotional experiences in and focus on my experiences within them, contrasting and comparing where it is relevant, namely India and Japan. This also enables me to talk about why I return to places time and again, which is something I make a point of doing wherever possible. While I like to go ‘deep’ rather than ‘broad’ in my travel experiences, this may also relate to my search to belong in a world where I am an outsider.

Examining my experiences in these two countries also works well as a way to compare and contrast them, which I often did during my visits. My emotions in India feel big and public, while in Japan they seem small and private. I do not say this to indicate the depths of these emotions, many of the smallest can be the deepest, simply that one makes me gaze outward, the other inward, creating a world of swirling emotions. But first, I need to speak more about myself and welcome you into my personal world.

Inside-Out: My Place, My Culture

One of the key elements of autoethnography is the personal and cultural background of the researcher and what that brings to the study. As I discuss in Chapter Two, scholars such as Ellis (2009), Adams et al. (2015), Denzin (2018) and Sparkes (2020) state that this culture needs to be evident within the autoethnography. Culture is more than the external world in which we are brought up and live, our internal personal culture is crucial to how we view and interpret the world around us.

Growing up in middle-class Australia, I have led a life of privilege – one where I was led to believe that I could do anything to which I put my mind. After experiencing open gender discrimination in my first full-time job, I learnt that was not entirely correct, yet I was still part of the dominant privileged group in a postcolonial culture.

In some of my stories, I have left my cultural background as assumed, rather than overtly discussed. However, if the 18 stories are read together, I believe that my place in this becomes clearer. Initially, I did not want to go into too much personal depth outside my tourist experiences as I was concerned about exposing my inner story, yet I have since realised that this is exactly what I need to do. So, I present some additional background here which I believe contributes to our understanding of the emotions of travel and allows you, the reader, to gain even further knowledge.

When I was 10 days old, I was adopted.

This single act has impacted my life and is part of my personal culture, which defines me, my actions and my relationships.

My adoptive family welcomed me as their own and I was brought up with great love and care. My opportunities and education were those of a middle-class white girl in the Australia of the 1960s. In fact, from the outside, my life was boringly normal. I do not look any different to this family (light colour hair, skin and blue eyes), so it was always believed that I would integrate seamlessly into their world – this was the era of seeing a newborn child as a blank slate, with only nurture playing a role. Nature had no place here. But this was not to be the case for me.

I always knew I was adopted, so there was no great shock to my world on such a discovery, but I still felt a little removed from my family and the world I grew up in. I was always just that little bit ‘outside’, looking in. I kept myself at the edge of friendship groups, wondering how it would feel to fit in, but not being able to. Sitting safely in my room reflecting on this became one of my favourite pastimes. My passion for observing and eternal search for connection while seeking to understand others was born.

I sit here in this moment, a product not only of my adoption but also of my education and upbringing, where I was shown a tolerance and understanding which I take into the world. I had the great fortune to learn to ride horses from a young age, and they became my special friends and confidants and in fact honed my empathetic skills. This has, in part, fed into my strong desire to understand how and where I ‘fit in’ – I desperately needed to understand where other people were coming from and why.

I have in recent years met my half-siblings and learnt about my late birth mother, but I do not know who my father was. She took that knowledge to the grave. Even though my siblings have another father, to look into eyes and see my own looking back at me was one of the most powerful moments of my life. The profound drama of this moment comes rushing back to me as I sit here at my computer – my hands tremble and my heart swells while still aching with deep aloneness.

When I started to work on this book, I was only thinking of the emotions we feel around travelling, but I soon began to see that I needed to bring more of ‘me’ into each of my stories in this study. So, in addition to striving to understand the emotions of the tourist experience, I hope that through those stories I also bring further understating about those of us who I call the ‘hidden generation’ – those adoptees who have ‘integrated’ into their world. No one really knows about us as we have been able to physically blend in. But not on the inside.

So, how much has this played into my travel stories?

Would I be experiencing and looking for the same emotional experiences if I wasn’t adopted?

Doesn’t everyone feel like me?

I think the answer is a qualified ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to all of those questions, but I am not the only person who is confused and conflicted about who they are and where they come from, so I trust that some of my emotions will be shared by others.

Why Go There?

My reasons for visiting India and Japan range from humanitarian/philanthropic and recreational to professional, all underpinned by my inquisitive nature and quest for meaning. Both countries have presented me with a number of deeply personal, and at times challenging, situations and responses, which I do believe are not specific only to me but are often difficult to uncover.

Below, I outline my travels to India followed by Japan. But before providing more detail on my relationship with those countries, I need to talk about horses, a poem and a movie … (stay with me here!) …

As with many young girls, I loved horses and dreamed of riding them over the mountains, along the beach at sunset and across the fields with my hair billowing out behind me. The epic Australian classic poem, The Man from Snowy River was the stuff of my dreams (in spite of the hero of the tale being male in a male-dominated society …). Here was a person who was an outsider showing up the establishment and upsetting the accepted order of the world at the time. He made a mockery of those who considered themselves to be powerful and important and above all others. The words of the man’s [sic] epic ride in the poem still stir me deeply and touch something within me:

He sent the flint-stones flying, but the pony kept his feet,

He cleared the fallen timber in his stride,

And the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat –

It was grand to see that mountain horseman ride ….

… Till they halted, cowed and beaten; then he turned their heads for home,

And alone and unassisted brought them back.

(Paterson, 1890, p. 13)

When I was around 10 years old, I began my own horseback journey, learning to ride and care for horses. I eventually rode across those mountains depicted in the poem and shown to us in the subsequent hit movie of the same name. I had tears in my eyes the first time I saw the Victorian High Country and have loved it, the horses and the people ever since. I would often wonder at the bravery and fortitude of our colonial pioneers with only their horse and possibly a dog to help guide them through this land (along with the usually unremarked support of the indigenous people – at least in the days prior to the horrific massacres and attempted genocide of our First Nations). This led me to guiding horseback tours in our mountains and working with the cattle families depicted in the poem and movie. I have written about these experiences in other publications, so will not go into further detail here (see Beeton, 1994, 2008a, 2016a, 2020). But this was not the only foundation for my horse dreaming …

Back in the misty past of my childhood (before I had even learned to ride), I watched a documentary on television about the Royal Horses of India, the ancient and revered Marwari horse. These loyal and brave horses were used by the Indian cavalry based in north-west India (the Rajputs) in battle with their northern neighbours and are well suited to sandy desert environments. Today, they are used in religious rituals, processions and wedding ceremonies and are revered by the people of Rajasthan, where there are shrines dedicated to them. They are remarkably calm and resilient, with narrow features well suited to the deserts of Rajasthan and northern India.

Their ears turn in at the tips, sometimes almost touching each other, to form a heart, while at other times they look like the Ohm symbol or lyre, as in Fig. 1. These remarkable ears can turn independently to hear 360 degrees of sound and are the most obvious mark of this breed. The ears are the pride of the Marwaris, and they have strong ankles and angled shoulders that helps them to handle the desert terrain. During English occupation of India, these features were systematically bred out of the horses, with the ears mocked as a sign of inferiority, seriously endangering the breed and by inference the power of the ruling class/caste of India. Fortunately, in the 1950s, a concerted effort to save the breed began but did not really take off until the 1990s, and even today, the breed remains endangered with only a few thousand registered (Kelly & Durfie, 2000). The horses are rarely permitted to be exported, so apart from a few in England who were taken out prior to the export ban, India is the only place to meet them.

Fig. 1. The Distinctive Ears of the Marwari Horse. Source: Author’s Original Work.

As a child, I fell in love with these exotic, regal horses, blending them into my Snowy River dreams – if I couldn’t be ...