Given that tourism is an “earthly business”, a fundamentally geographical endeavour, why is it that the Earth rarely explicitly appears in tourism studies and the way in which tourism has been framed through discussions in Actor-Network Theory (ANT). This paper builds on a recent contribution to a book on ANT and tourism and grapples with the question how the Earth can be made explicit in theorising tourism practices, building on the advances made through ANT. In an attempt to grapple with this apparent paradox, this paper will contribute to a conceptual re-cognition of the Earth by probing some theoretical obstacles and possibilities. Through examples of the development of geotourism in Iceland the paper demonstrates how the Earth has been conceptually erased by a privileging of the mapping of tourism and tourists onto the reference plane of the social in general and ANT in particular. Critiquing this, the paper will provide a geo-philosophically informed theorisation which conceptualises the Earth as a primary plane of reference, and tourism as a particular form of de/re-territorialisation.