3 ideas
In 1956 a young Polish reporter who had never left the Eastern bloc was sent to India. His editor gave him a copy of Herodotus's Histories as a parting gift. He arrived unable to speak English and found he could see India but not enter it, so he taught himself by memorizing words from an English novel while the Histories became his companion.
For someone raised inside a closed state, the desire to travel is at first not aimed at any destination. It is a longing for the act of crossing itself: stepping past a frontier to find out what is on the other side. The appetite comes before the object, and the particular country matters less than the fact of being elsewhere.
A culture cannot see its own shape from inside; it becomes visible only when held against other ways of living. A reporter in Herodotus's manner therefore travels, listens to people's oral accounts, and records competing versions rather than forcing a single verdict. The purpose is to understand the Other and, through that mirror, one's own world.