Travel allows individuals to escape from their ordinary disturbances, and the outdoor environment is considered to contribute mental health implications of psychological well-being, particularly, traveling association of natural settings. However, why psychological immersion in nature leads to such outcomes remains unclear. This study provides insight into how tourists’ mental processes can be transformed by meditative travel experiences. The study used in-depth interviews to explore how tourists experience a meditative state involving non-conceptual interaction with the natural environment. Interviews with 31 Taiwanese backpackers allowed identification of 51 episodes of mindful meditative experiences in Australian national parks. The results reveal backpackers’ engaged in ‘non-elaborative awareness’ while totally immersed in their surroundings. Respondents reported, being aware only of their awareness. This mental state facilitated deeper non-conceptual insight, reflective thinking and metacognition. This post-disciplinary analysis combines concepts from psychology and tourism with notions of space and place. The findings highlights that nature-based experiences can induce mindful experiences associated with meditative mindfulness, an interaction between self-awareness and metacognition, resulting in feeling at ease and in harmony with the environment.

This research looks at how tourism develops in geographically isolated areas where large infrastructure projects are introduced. It will use the development of an international airport in the Regency of Tana Toraja in Indonesia as the field location. Tourism development has tended to be seen through a historical lens, where we look back at past events and make conclusions from recorded outcomes. This research seeks to take a more dynamic look at factors influencing the trajectories of tourism development. To do this, it requires more than a historical look back at outcomes. It also requires analysis of the events that shape the path to tourism development as they occur. Evolutionary economic geography (EEG) is a useful foundation to apply to this research. However, while it contributes a basic conceptual framework, it lacks the ability to incorporate ‘in situ’ occurrences influencing the trajectory of tourism development. EEG also focuses on micro-level activity, which precludes the inclusion of broader interactions and relations. This research will therefore also apply elements of relational economic geography (REG) and institutional economic geography (IEG) approaches.

At the intersection between geography and tourism lies tourism geography, multivalent in its connotations and intra/trans/cross disciplinary drawing from physical, human, cultural and economic geographies. This paper revisits, reframes and reaffirms the place of tourism geographies within its parent discipline (Lew, 1999) and within a post-disciplinarity framework (Coles, Hall & Duval, 2016). In doing so, Pearce’s (2000) line of enquiry is invoked:

1. How might a national geography of tourism best be characterized?
2. What factors shape a national geography of tourism?
3. What are the implications of the existence of national geographies of tourism for the overall development of the geography of tourism?

This paper draws on both critical empirical and conceptual underpinnings of people, place and space from long-term research in Asia-Pacific through a tourism geography lens, and exemplifies post-disciplinarity as a hallmark of contemporary tourism geographies.