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In January 1963, after years caring for her invalid mother, Dervla Murphy set off alone from Dunkirk on a man's bicycle named Roz, fulfilling a plan she had made at age ten. She rode through one of Europe's harshest winters, reportedly used a .25 pistol against wolves in the Balkans, and continued across Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to reach India about six months later. Along the way she relied almost entirely on strangers for food, shelter and repairs.
A traveler who arrives slowly, alone and visibly dependent, without motor, money display or group, triggers the host's obligation to shelter rather than the vendor's instinct to transact. The bicycle's exposure is what opens villages and nomad camps that a car or tour would pass through as a customer. Hospitality grows as the visitor's apparent power shrinks.
Judge a society by the self-possession and hospitality of its people rather than by its roads, cars or Western goods. Seen this way, a materially poor but intact traditional culture, such as the rural Afghanistan Murphy crossed, can look healthier than a rapidly Westernizing one. In the Westernizing places, imported modernity brings envy, rudeness and cultural dislocation before it brings prosperity.
A lone Western woman traveling in a strongly gender-segregated society falls outside the local categories of male and female. This lets her eat with the men and discuss politics with them, and also enter the women's quarters. Her anomalous status gives her a range of access denied to both local women and foreign men, though it also exposes her to suspicion and occasional aggression.