Perhaps we need to recognize that to large extent, tourists do not usually want to experience a genuine ethical relation with the Other, in Levinas’s terms. They may experience both desire and wonder at the Other’s existence, but as tourist their interest in sustaining the Other in all of their difference is that best marginal. (Which is not to say that the tourist relation may not blossom into something more: a real desire to preserve rainforest, to assist the poor of the South, and so on.) Even those tourists seeking to give depth to their ‘inauthentic’ modern existence by experiencing the exotic do so vicariously, at a remove from the local reality, through a commodified (instrumental) relation, and for a strictly limited period (a fortnight or month ‘abroad’ ). The exotic they seek is often just a counterpoint to their own desires and expectations – that is, in Levinas’s terms, it is reduced to the Same.