As this quotation from the Lonely Planet ‘Theme Guides – Religion’ webpage
demonstrates, there is a history and continued presence of travellers looking for
spiritual answers from their journeys, and it is in the context of ‘being on the road’
that a search of ‘new’ or different answers is both expected and encouraged. With this
in mind, and the theoretical and methodological threads of the previous chapter in
hand, I now wish to walk through a selection of the works and information published
by, and available to, the spiritual tourist. Most important to this thesis are the firstperson,
biographical accounts tourists themselves have written. Additional important
resources are the guide-books that are published, either for spiritual tourists or for the
wider tourist community, that include information on locations and their appeals, and
newspaper stories by travellers about certain locations or travel ideals, and websites.
For the potential spiritual tourist there are hundreds of works to choose from. Indeed,
the travel writing industry is geared to publish stories that involve a move out of the
ordinary, and in the increasingly secularised world, tales of not only religious
epiphany but spiritual exploration may be seen as extra-ordinary. These themes are
often the focus of travel writings, and so before examining the collections of
publications I will briefly examine the history of contemporary travel and travel
writing. This will demonstrate why the historical and cultural place of travel writing is
so indicative of tourist behaviour, and thus such a valuable resource to the scholar
attempting to make sense of it.