Tourism and pilgrimage have been said to be closely related1
. However, the
relationship between tourists and the religions and religious contexts they visit has
been neglected. Why tourists travel to places of religious significance and how they
conceive of their travels are important questions to both the study of tourism and of
religion. This thesis is particularly concerned with those tourists who engage in
religious practice or have some form of spiritual experience in a religious context.
These I am tentatively calling ‘spiritual tourists’. What the study of their experiences
can yield is information on the nature of touristic experiences and the position of
religion within society. These patterns are conspicuously played out in the context of
travel writing, where stories of personal transformation and self discovery can often
seem the standard.