Breaking and entering, or a feeling of heterotopia in tourism situations

This paper is based on the following field research conducted in 2010: (i) a tourist accommodation experience in Chora, capital of the Greek island of Skyros, in a house that in all likelihood was never originally intended for tourists; and (ii) a visit of the Estonian city of Paldiski, an important military port under Soviet rule. These two cases, a priori very different, generated intense feelings of uneasiness similar to both guilt and voyeurism in the two groups of tourists involved, which included the author of this paper. For both of these experiences, the tourists we were had the impression of “breaking and entering”, of unlawfully accessing areas that were not intended for us and which should have remained well off the standard tourist trails. And yet, in both cases we experienced something of this fantasy of tourism authenticity: entering totally uncharted territory, without mediator or staging, with a view to understanding what life there was really like and discovering this “behind-the-scenes” that is supposed to systematically guarantee “enchantment” with tourists. In this paper, we shall attempt to understand why the enchantment gave way to dysphoria in both of these cases, which we consider to have been “borderline”