Traveling to a place vs. reading about it

Katie Couric recently interviewed Sarah Palin (click here for the video) and brought up the fact that many people were questioning why Palin didn’t get a passport until last year.  According to Couric, viewers were wondering if this meant that she had a lack of interest in the world.  Palin’s reply made a reference to the backpacking and vagabonding culture:

“I’m not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents get them a passport, and give them a backpack and say ‘Go off and travel the world’.  No, I’ve worked all my life, in fact I’ve usually had 2 jobs all my life until I had kids.  I was not a part of, I guess, that culture.  The way that I have understood the world is through education, through books, through mediums that have provided me a lot of perspective on the world.”
Source: CBS Videos

Personally, I’m not very comfortable with Palin’s reply.  She seems to imply that backpackers don’t work, as well as ignore the significance of travel.

People who travel, from the tourist spot vacationer to the vagabond who loves roughing it, always come back home with a very different perspective of both their home and their travel destination.  This new perspective might not necessarily be open-minded or it might have a minimal impact on the traveler, but it is something you can’t get from books or the internet.  Reading a book or watching a video about a foreign country might give you intellectual understanding, but visiting the place itself will allow you to know a place and its people with your gut.  The former tends to be distant, the latter hits close to home.  When it comes to learning about other cultures the distant approach has its benefits, but I find that it is often never enough.  It’s like reading about basketball, but never actually playing the game.  To be a master of the game, you need to do both.

Mark Twain once wrote “Travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice and narrow-mindedness. Broad wholesomeness and charitable views cannot be acquired by vegetating in one tiny corner of the globe.”  I believe this to be true, and it is something Sarah Palin should seriously consider if she really wants to win over the world.

Do you think reading about the world is enough to know it?  Or should you actually go out there and see the world for yourself?