The Dadaist Tourist

As a traveller, most of the instructions and advice I read on travel web sites bores me. People are always pointing you towards the typical tourist traps, instead of unveiling  new and undiscovered treasures which promise fun and rewarding experiences. I’m not the only one with this pet peeve. The character I want to introduce to you in the following lines not only goes by the name of Joël Henry, but goes the extra yard.

Joël Henry is not just any tourist. He is an experimental tourist. In the mid-90s, while dining with some friends, this journalist who writes for the Art channel decided to apply his love for games to his love for holidays. So it was that he founded The Laboratory for Experimental Toruism (www.latourex.org), an entelechy compiling travel ideas devoid of conventional touristic restrictions.

Among his proposals are such gems as getting to know cities by only visiting the last stop on a subway line, catching a train precisely at 12:12 and getting off at the twelfth stop or discovering by yourself and in-depth the K2 area of a city’s map. Whether you think his ideas are stupid or just plain zany, no doubt you’ll agree that chance and random selection often improve the quality of one’s travels. I confirmed this for myself during our ExperienceLess venture, months ago when we launched Trourist.

Going over the top for a moment … who would be willing to choose their next destination from a list of places where a crime took place a year ago? Pushing the envelope a bit further, would you prefer instead to set loose a cricket on a map for a minute or so and then embark on a trip following its aimless wanderings? Now it’s your turn: do you have any wild, out-there experimental tourism recommendations that you’d like to share with us?