In many places, the experience economy of tourist performance present-in-place is seen as an attractive way to pursue. But the theoretical understanding of what it takes to perform tourist sites is still only emerging. This paper is in search of deeper and more critical understandings of first what it takes to make experiences, and second what are the triggering features of fascinating and fantastic experiences. Third, the paper wonders how it is that experience and mobility seems to depend on each other? How is it that travelling and tourism is associated with folding time and space so that memories of other times and space and multiple realities in wider ways intersect? Clearly these are questions not only about sheer physical sensing and movement – of (er)fahren – but about life and how to live up in experiencing – zu erleben.

The paper will thus be a conceptual discussion situated in contemporary discussions around the experience economy, acknowledges the initial contribution from ANT in understanding how experiences are enacted, travels into social and cultural theory to understand experiences themselves better as kinds of enchantment, to finally suggest and discuss the how mobility and multiple realities are involved with the becoming of experiences.

Some main inspirations come from Walter Benjamin, Kevin Hetherington, Georg Simmel, J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as from Actor-Network Theory and mobility studies. Among others, the paper elaborates and develops an earlier paper available at http://rudar.ruc.dk/handle/1800/5604.