Backpaking lifestyle
Resembling Cohen’s (1979) ‘existential mode’ of touristic experience, yet more mobile
and ephemeral than Benson and O’Reilly’s (2009) idyll-seeking lifestyle migrants, several
participants ultimately aspired to find an ideal place to settle. This unspecified idyllic place
was imagined as aesthetically pleasing, providing a strong spirit of community and
representing value/belief systems congruent to their own. Their contemporary Shrangri-La-
esque utopian visions were set in contrast to the perceived ‘toxicity’ of their generating
societies, establishing these lifestyle travellers as representative of the most alienated of all
tourist types (Maoz & Bekerman, 2010). One manifestation in which tourists inhabit such a
revised notion of home is Auroville in southern India, where Sharpley and Sundaram (2005)
describe the communal lives of a number of ‘permanent tourists’ who have settled in an
annaabi.ee 
