Our Clock Moves at a Different Pace: The Timescapes of Identity in Estonian Rural Tourism

One of the effects and results of tourism is that it marks our senseof time, differentiating the extraordinary and ‘heightened’ time and the time of the mundane. An important role in this is played by the hosts – in the case of rural tourism by the farm owners and tour guides. The tourism farmers and tour guides act as mediators of the temporal experience, therefore creating and providing various timescapes for their guests. An altered perception of time, adistinctive temporal experience of place is offered to guests as a specific and special characteristic and a counterbalance to the rush of everyday life in the local identity of two rural border regions. Some meaningful and meaning-forming, interconnected and sometimes opposite notions of temporality are analysed as narrated by tourism farmers and tour guides in two very popular tourism regions in Estonia: Hiiumaa Island and V ru County. The ways in which these hosts(re)construct and perceive temporality are identified and presented and some distinctive elements of those rural timescapes are considered.