As the chapters in this volume show, tourism in Africa is characterised by heterogeneity and complexity. Though wildlife tourism is the continent's main tourist attraction, all kinds of cultural tourism and sea, sand, sun (and sex) tourism can also be found. Small-scale tourism developments directed at niche markets, such as those of the Dogon, Touareg, volunteer, roots, chief and community-based tourism, exist shoulder to shoulder with large-scale industries with a mix of foreign and domestic investment, as the Kenyan and South African cases show. This diversity means contradictory outcomes for local populations. While some local people and communities are able to benefit from tourists, others are excluded from tourism revenues. The paradoxes and contradictions of the African case that are so eloquently described and analysed in the preceding chapters raise the question of what is specifically ‘African’ about African tourism. Or in other words: how can African tourism be compared to developments on other continents? In this Afterword, I want to sketch my own research in the Cusco-Machu Picchu region of Peru and show some of the similarities to and differences from the cases presented in this volume. I will focus on the formation of the tourist bubble, (the leading concept for all the authors here), and its main participants, i.e. the state, mediators or middle men and women, and the local men and women who work in the lowest echelons of the tourism labour market.