"A tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist"

 (Turner and Turner 1978,p. 20)

It is foremost the New Age seeker's connection to ancient and foreign traditions and associated sites, which may provide the impetus to travel for reasons connected to the New Age.  It was particularly during the 1960s, that thousands of spiritual seekers followed the ‘Hippy Trail’ (The Guardian Weekend, 2000.p.9), motivated by a search for meaning and new values from their Eastern Gurus. Smith (1992) thus argues that this can be seen as a new form of pilgrimage, since people embarked on a journey of sacred wishfulfillment. While spiritually motivated travel, as old as spiritual believes themselves, may be regarded as the oldest form of tourism (Vukonic 1996), it was not until the Renaissance, that a distinction arose between the believing pilgrim and the knowledge-seeking tourist, as travel for the sake of knowledge became politically feasible and socially sanctioned (Smith 1992). This distinction was described as a continuum with secular tourism as one extreme and sacred pilgrimage as the other (Smith 1992). But it was the phenomenon of mass tourism, largely a result of the Industrial Revolution, that made secular tourism the most prominent form of tourism.

As Smith (1992) viewed this development in a temporal context, in conjunction with social beliefs and knowledge held at the time, she suggested that reasons for travel are largely tied to cultural values. Turnbull (1981) supports this notion by arguing that tourism and pilgrimage may be seen as alternative categories of quest, rather than alternative institutions, as they share the common goal of future betterment and the hope of experiencing a change (Smith 1992). Yet this distinction also fades, when considering the argument of anthropologists, who see tourism as a collective ritual and modern equivalent and substitute for religion (MacCannel 1976), celebrating that which is important to a society (Durkheim 1912). Similar to participants of rituals, tourists will experience non-ordinary states of mind and feel increased social solidarity with people of different classes as they are released from a routinised social structure and enter ‘antistructures’ or ‘communitas’, as described by Turner and Turner (1978). Tourism is also characterised by a temporal nature, and its structure corresponds to that of sacrifice in traditional societies (Hubert and Mauss 1898).

The only distinction between tourist and pilgrim may therefore lie in exhibited behaviours, as only the ‘existential tourist’ truly accepts and immerses himself in a culture outside his own (Cohen 1991). The tourist’s snobbish and arrogant behaviour, which often results in the imposition of familiar values on host communities, on the other hand, clearly distinguishes the tourist from the pilgrim (Turner and Ash 1975). A further difference may also lie in the culturally supplied language of symbols (Pfaffenberg 1983): faith and devotion for the pilgrim and hope and nature appreciation for the tourist. But both tourist and pilgrim are essentially questing for the same; fulfilment of their innermost wishes; sustained by religious belief on the one hand and knowledge on the other, each will nevertheless carry a degree of reason as well as faith that these wishes will be fulfilled.