In my last Post ( # 188)  I raised the point that, within landscape tourism, one should reckon with varying levels of engagement with the landscape. The tourist, on confronting a landscape, may react by merely and briefly 'noting it' (or taking notice of it), capture it in his camera as a memento and then shift his attention to the next 'sight' . This is of course an extreme behavior; the opposing extreme is the case of a tourist going through a 'landscape encounter'. An encounter in the sense given by D. Seamon (2003) : "a situation of attentive contact between the person and the world at hand". In the full sense of encounter this entails absorbing a landscape and immersing itself in it, contemplating it for a long time, appraising it from different angles and, if the tourist is so inclined, 'appreciating the landscape'. It goes without saying that in between those two extreme attitudes we'll find a gamut of many, intermediate ones.

       John A, Jakle, in discussing this subject in his book, introduces the notion of 'spontaneous sightseeing'; a situation in which 'the traveler relates spontaneously to landscape as an unwinding visual display of place stimulation "… as tourists rather than natives, people scan the landscape with fresh eyes and a reduced sense of behavioral expectation"… " As they seek interest and pleasure in their visual surroundings they are sensitive to those aspects of landscape, to those places, that portend interest and pleasure" …."Spontaneous sightseers do not memorize landscape but move in search of scenery to bask in the flow of pleasure-giving images"  (op.cit pp 10-11)(my italics).

   Jakle quotes architect Niels Prak who fittingly likens 'spontaneous sightseeing' to the enjoyment of popular music. I'd take the simile farther to say the sort of landscape encounter mentioned above involves a shift, from the shallow enjoyment of shallow music, to a deeper encounter with more complex musical forms like say, a sonata or a symphony. Such an encounter entails also a state of 'heightened attention' which Jakle uses to describe situations where "tourists seek to linger and savor a sight". 

    An attitude of 'heightened attention' has often been invoked as concurrent or even pre-conditioning the act of appreciation, whether it is appreciation of music, poems or landscapes. This ties up with one of the topics I proposed for discussion  in post # 187,  namely: b) "Appreciating landscapes as part of tourism or 'visiting". One might say that appreciating 'natural' landscapes is usually performed as a part of (landscape) tourism but only in the case of persons for whom a state of heightened attention is brought about intentionally (as opposed to spontaneous).

    In other words, the landscape appreciator sets up (in the sense of bring about) to travel to a particular place already anticipating a certain kind of landscape encounter. Not just a pleasure trip but with a more significant intent (significant as opposed to trivial).

      The analogy with appreciating music is also useful here: we may set up ourselves to listen, say, a certain Mozart's symphony. Not that we are listening it for the first time, nor that we just happen to hear it on the radio, nor that we seek it appropriate as background music for the moment. That particular symphony is 'brought about' intentionally, either by traveling to a hall where the piece is to be performed or by setting us up cozily in our armchair to listen to the recording. Anticipation, intentionality, liking, 'a trained ear' are ingredients of the encounter with the music that may lead to its appreciation.