While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with travelling or being a tourist, there is a problem with how it’s frequently done, and Chesterton summed it up very well in his chapter on Rudyard Kipling in his book Heretics.

The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing an air of locality. London is a place, to be compared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo.
But Timbuctoo is not a place, since there, at least, live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the
races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men–diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern
Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men–hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky.

If you want to know what it is like to be a Chinese peasant, you will learn far more about it by trying to grow some food in your own back yard, even if you grow plants no Chinese peasant has ever heard of, than by going to China, staying in a hotel, and watching the peasant every day for a month.

So much of what the Chinese peasant does he only does because of the accidents of where he is and would do quite differently if he lived, say, in your back yard. If you want confirmation of this, just look at how differently peasants act when they immigrate somewhere else. They haven’t suddenly become different people but they eat different food because different foods are now cheap and wear different clothes because different clothes are now cheap (and possibly better suited to the weather where they are now). The person who only learns the particular reactions to particular accidents learns only about the accidents of the peasant, not about his soul.

Of course, this may be by design; the Chinese peasant being a human being his soul will be much the same as that of other human beings. Well, not the same as the globe-trotter’s.