Introduction

This chapter seeks to extend the new mobilities paradigm that encompasses corporeal movement to include and explore the physical sensuous responses that tourists must adapt to as they travel. I refer to these spaces as comfort (or discomfort) zones; places in which the senses are satisfied or offended. The concept 'comfort zones' combines both spatial and sensual experiences. My investigation focuses on the flowing in and out of sensory comfort by budget tourists in Mongolia – expressed in blogs, and in my own ethnographic diary.

For many people, their own mobility is now an assumption: as technologies have accelerated, so have their own abilities to travel almost anywhere they wish (Bell & Lyall, 2002). For some, what was once 'a trip of a lifetime' has now become a way of life and for many tourists, that binary distinction between tourism and home life is recapitulated several times each year. As Hannam et al. (2006: 1) have noted, 'mobility has become an evocative keyword' for the 21st century. Through tourism, the Western consumer seeks a kaleidoscope of new experiences to add to the construction of self as an on-going project; to the assemblage of one's own autobiography through the purchase of travel events (Bell & Lyall, 2002). As Urry (2002b: 1) has argued, tourism 'is about consuming goods and services which are in some sense unnecessary. They are consumed because they supposedly generate pleasurable experiences which are different from those typically encountered in everyday life...'. These include diverse sensual experiences. In their introduction to the first issue of Tourist Studies , Franklin and Crang (2001: 13) called for tourism scholars to consider the novel experiences that enchant tourists and intrigue the range of human senses. Notably, they suggested that tourism academics consider the 'sensual, embodied and performative dimensions' of contemporary tourist practices (Franklin & Crang, 2001: 14).