anti-tourist n. – as defined in The Lost Cosmonaut, (Scribners, 2006):

– The anti-tourist does not visit places that are in any way desirable.

– The anti-tourist eschews comfort.

– The anti-tourist embraces hunger and hallucinations and shit hotels.

– The anti-tourist scorns the bluster and bravado of the daredevil, who attempts to
penetrate danger zones such as Afghanistan. The only thing that lies behind this is
vanity and a desire to brag.

– The anti-tourist travels at the wrong time of year.

– The anti-tourist is humble and seeks invisibility.

– The anti-tourist is interested only in hidden histories, in delightful obscurities, in bad art.

– The anti-tourist believes beauty is in the street.

– The anti-tourist holds that whatever travel does, it rarely broadens the mind.

The Travelistic Blog’s holiday reading is Daniel Kalder’s newly published anti-tourist travelogue, The Lost Cosmonaut. Kalder is a man on a mission to overturn the truisms of conventional travel writing –that there is a “right” time of year to go anywhere, that there are “1,000 Places to See Before You Die.” To prove his point, he journeyed to the hinterlands of the Russian Federation, quasi-autonomous regions so obscure that I had to look them up to be sure the book wasn’t fiction. Casting himself as a sort of “anti-Borat”–to quote the New York Times– Kalder travels by tenets laid out at a purported International Congress of Anti-Tourists that took place in (where else?) Kazakhstan. Borat-land isn’t far enough off the map for the true iconoclast, however, so Kalder packs off to Tartarstan, Udmurtia, Mari El and Kalmykia. Right. Along the way he encounters fragments of Peter the Great’s cabinet of curiosities, mail-order brides, and tribal pagans, and visits an isolated outpost dedicated entirely to chess. Mostly, though, Kalder plays tourguide to a nearly empty landscape of bleak post-soviet burgs, and bleaker steppe-country that even most Russians will never visit. But for the anti-tourist, of course, that is exactly the point.

Previously:
– Borat
– “The Endless Steppe”
– Word of the Day

Elsewhere:
– Daniel Kalder
– “Going nowhere” (Guardian)
– “Armchair Traveler: ‘Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist’” (NY Times)