I spent the final five weeks of my trip in China and Vietnam—four in the former, and one in the latter. You might think, then, that I would have felt a stronger connection to China. After all, I speak Mandarin proficiently and have a background of living and traveling in the country. My knowledge of Vietnam, on the other hand, is based on monthly trips to the local pho restaurant and watching Platoon in eighth grade. So why do I feel more of a connection to Vietnam, despite such a weak background and short stay?

I chalk it up to the highly structured experience of being a clueless tourist. I spent my week in Vietnam on guided tours by day and in four-star hotels by night. On the day trips I sat in a hired van as it traversed the country’s underdeveloped highway system. For long stretches, the highway only has two lanes, which were occasionally clogged by gaggles of schoolchildren on bicycles, so we had many hours to fill.

Luckily we also had an English-speaking guide (the fabulously named Ruby), who would fill the time with lessons on Vietnamese history and would illustrate tales of the modern-day struggles by pointing to examples outside the car window. I saw pigs and chickens crammed into cages slung over motorbikes, peasant women selling baguettes to passersby, and many smokestacks, the backbone of the country’s growing manufacturing industry. True, at times this style approached cultural voyeurism: Stopping the van to photograph a nearby farmer riding a water buffalo was a bit too blunt for my tastes. But without extensively planned outings to the country’s “must-see” sites, I wouldn’t have seen or learned so much along the way.

Compare this with my travel experience in China. For one thing, I didn’t actually travel. I spent a month living in the coastal city of Fuzhou, and except for a weekend excursion to a smaller nearby town, this city of six million next to the Min river was my home. Granted, my local friend and host took me on weekend trips to the outskirts of town, and these proved to be my best experiences for understanding the city. But most of the time I was on my own, and at these moments I found Fuzhou inscrutable. Even though I became comfortable with the bus system, and took taxis after the buses stopped running, and walked out of my way to see new neighborhoods, I was lost without an imperative list of must-see sites or an informed narrative of what was going on around me. My language ability and academic knowledge of China did little good, given the impossibility of assimilation into Chinese culture. As I wandered Fuzhou trying to grasp it by myself, it always slipped through my fingers. I would have been better off with a naïve sense of gee-whiz wonder and an oddly named English speaking guide.

The other reason being a true tourist in Vietnam served me well has to do with contrast. I stayed at upscale, Western-style hotels, which allowed me to retreat from the chaotic streets of Hanoi and prepare for the next day’s assault on the senses. By fleeing back each night into what Vietnam is not, I could venture out the next day with an appreciation for what it is. Compare this to my digs in Fuzhou which, while comfortable, modern, and welcoming, offered no escape from the sounds of the construction site the next block over. For an entire month, there was not an hour in the day when a crane’s groan or conveyor belt’s thrum did not echo off the canyons of the excavated lot. Fuzhou pummeled my senses even when I was at rest, and my acceptance of the city’s grinding, clanking plod towards development wore thin.

So even if it means being a softie, I think any travel strategy which consciously prevents overkill (some call it “China rage”) is good for both the individual and the country. Travel implies a positive, deeper connection that lasts beyond the stamping of the passport and survives the crossing of datelines on the plane ride home. Better to keep this feeling alive by traveling within one’s limits and return admitting ignorance, than to reach too far into the fire and end up burning the bridge on the way back.

But Japan was not so simple.

Through the window of a train, I saw Mount Fuji framed between two smokestacks. Japan was supposed to be a gaudy Technicolor light show, and here was the national symbol obscured by smoggy, industrial-era energy. These were not the clean emissions I expected from the country home to the namesake of the Kyoto Protocols. On the other hand, I spotted this scene from a world-class Shinkansen bullet train moving at 186 miles per hour, so the country must be on the right track (get it?).

Nor was the technology anywhere as advanced as I imagined. While I’m sure there are sophisticated servant robots somewhere in Japan, on an average day, “hi-tech” meant few wi-fi hotspots; but lots of heated toilet seats, electronic price tags and water heater displays which announce in cheery Japanese that you can now shower at a comfortable 40-degrees Celsius.

My assumption of densely-packed humanity crowding every livable square meter was also soon deflated. Maybe I would have found Japan dense if I hadn’t just arrived from Taiwan. To use airplanes as a metaphor, if America is first class, then Japan is Economy and Taiwan is the cargo hold underneath the plane.  I spent my first week in Kitakyushu, Tacoma’s Japanese Sister City, which is home to a million people—the same amount as Taichung, Tacoma’s Sister City in Taiwan.  Yet Kitakyusu has far more spacious streets, is more walkable, and has better public transport and public spaces.

Once I made it out to the countryside, I found the openness even more striking. At the side of Tazawa Lake, the deepest in Japan and a thus a draw for domestic tourism, the word desolate came to mind. Granted, frigid November is not peak season for visitors, but feeling so isolated inside Japan still defied my expectations.

Up to this point, Kitakyushu and the countryside had dashed my expectations yet added nuance to my understanding of Japan. But soon as I headed to fewer “off the map” places, I began to see that Japan was still everything I anticipated.

I awoke my first morning in Tokyo, Mount Fuji was back—and much closer to my original mental image. At dawn, Fuji caught the first rays of the sun, and quietly but majestically stood guard over the sprawling city below. Witnessing the noble strength of the nation’s greatest peak gave me both a sense of personal satisfaction, and a mixture of envy and respect for the Japanese for living in such a beautiful place.

A night in the same city added to my awe by exceeding my expectations. I visited the famed Shibuya crosswalk on a Saturday night, jumped into the throng of thousands and surged across roads painted with the vivid light of billboards and the squawk and blare of a million ads and jingles. And then I crossed it again and again, just for the thrill of it. Japan was dense, and it was great!

I had spent my first nights in little known Kitakyushu and my last nights on the famed streets of Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. I did Japan in reverse. And once I had reached the end of my time there, I realized that the true nature of traveling in Japan—and a lesson to be learned about travel in general—could actually be found in Kitakyushu all along. It’s all summed up in this photo:

The ultramodern skyline of the Riverwalk mall is a backdrop for the black tiles atop a sitting room used by Kokura Castle’s past lords. Like all the expected and the unexpected things I had found along the way, these two opposites stand side by side, even overlap, and it’s the job of the traveler to pick which one to focus on. The best understanding comes from including both.

Travelers have to do the work of weighing expectations and realities, sifting through the imagined and the actual to arrive at a balance. Travel should always be an act of confirming the known and discovering the unknown. It’s not easy, but it’s rewarding. To summarize this reality, I suggest a catchphrase: travel—it’s no vacation.

So, hasn’t the group mentality model become passé?

I sure thought it had. Then I attended the first game of Taiwan’s Major League World Series.

I’ve never been fanatical about baseball, but I’ve certainly been to enough sporting events to understand the typical dynamics of a live professional game. The fan support for the home team trumps everything else. There will be cheering for the home team and booing at the guests and their small cohort of fans. There will be deafening euphoria after a game-changing shot. There will be a few half-assed attempts at “the wave.” And there will be corn dogs.

At least Taiwan nailed the corn dogs.

On every other count, the Taiwanese style of attending a live game was completely, well, foreign to me.

First, instead of the physical stadium acting as shrine and sanctuary to the home team, in Taiwan it was quite egalitarian. The stands were divided neatly in half, with orange-clad Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions (the team from Tainan) supporters on the first base side of the field, while those dressed in yellow to support Brother Elephants (Taipei) filed into the half facing third base. Gone was the menace felt by the intrepid visiting fan as he sits amongst local season ticket holders. Instead, equal numbers of fans cheered back and forth in perfectly nullifying harmony.

I mean harmony literally. Instead of the scattered, atonal dirge of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” which in America we are lucky to only suffer once per game, the stands in Taiwan were filled with an unending series of chants, orchestrated by an official cheering squad.

The squad itself reminded me of a high school pep rally team—a kind of embarrassed, self-conscious enthusiasm rang through the men’s singing, and the women’s dance moves were not eager as much as they were overly cautious for fear of screwing up. But the crowd didn’t seem to mind, as inning after inning was filled with a menu of perfectly executed songs, chants, clanks of plastic noisemakers, and distracting disco-esque hand gestures. How 10,000 people all learned to simultaneously dance, clap, and sing is beyond me, but suffice it to say, they are light years beyond the stomp-stomp-CLAP from “We Will Rock You.”

The only players who were granted any special recognition by the crowd were the Lions’ two non-Taiwanese players. An African-American pitcher and a Puerto Rican outfielder were treated with their own special theme songs whenever they stepped to the plate, and in the stands, a supporter swung giant flags of the two players’ countries. While I have no doubt these men were adored as great players, that they did not fit in with the rest of the team reinforced the boundaries within the team itself.

A stadium-wide balance of fans. Amongst fans, impeccable coordination. Within teams, public reminders of whom is truly in and out. After witnessing all of these, I reckoned it was time to reconsider the validity of the Asian group mentality.

To be fair, major changes are underway in Asia, which may well undermine the group mentality. Consider region-wide economic liberalization and financial integration over the past three decades, demographic trends (the so-called “graying of Japan”), and social controls (China’s one-child policy), which all may contribute in some way to more individualistic societies. Of course, in contrast to these broad trends, a corruption-riddled, skill-deprived collection of teams like the Taiwan Major League is just peanuts. But as I walked away from the stadium with ears still ringing, standing out like a sore thumb in the homogenous throng, I couldn’t shake the feeling: in Asia, at least for now, the group still rules.

Then the lights go on, and the movie screen flickers off. I, along with 70 other tourists, neatly file out of the theater. We’re on a guided tour of the DMZ, and this is already our third stop of the day, so we’re good at moving in an orderly fashion. Next, we line up in an airy hallway and are fitted with yellow hard hats. We’ll need the heavy plastic to protect our heads from the moist, jagged ceilings in the cramped confines of Infiltration Tunnel #3.

Entering, we pass signs explaining the tunneling techniques used by the North Koreans when they tried to invade the South. Once they made it 150 meters below ground, the North Koreans excavated another 1,600 meters southward. At an average rate of three meters a day, you can tell they really wanted to stage an underground ambush. Infiltration Tunnel #3 was built until 1978, when the South discovered the ruse and began digging its own “interception tunnel.” In their hurried departure, the North Koreans smeared coal dust on the granite walls, contending that they were just digging for fuel. (Surely, they said, only by coincidence does our tunnel make a beeline for Seoul.) According to the signs in English, Korean, and Chinese, this story illustrates the “two-facedness of the North Koreans.”

On the way out, a bubbly, jaunty sound like children’s music bounces down the tunnel. As I get closer, it resolves into something familiar yet bizarre: a chorus of “hello!” from a hundred young Koreans. The fourth graders from Seoul Elementary are excited that their class trip just turned into a chance to practice English. Like two sportsmanlike teams after a match, we move single-file in opposite directions, exchanging “hello” and “how are you?” instead of “good game” and high fives. Back upstairs, my fellow Americans reward themselves with ice cream.

A promo film shot through rose-colored lenses. Tourists shuffling between landmarks. Foreigners and schoolchildren. Multilingual signage. And don’t forget the gift shop. Except for the sign about coal dust, Infiltration Tunnel #3 could be any tourist destination in the world.

With its not-so-subtle dig at those rascally, scheming, “two-faced” North Koreans, the sign in Infiltration Tunnel #3 represents what’s so unique and, ultimately, so confounding about touring the DMZ: It is literally a line in the sand (well, gravel). It’s a palace erected to celebrate “The Other.” It’s a seven-hour exercise to reinforce the difference between us and them. And I doubt it’s any different when you take the tour from the North.

Outside, behind the strip of iconic UN-blue negotiating buildings, we can see into the North. The buildings sit atop the Military Demarcation Line. This is the literal, physical line that separates two nations. Defectors have sprinted across this line. People starve because the food they need can’t move across this line. A soldier peers at me through binoculars from across this line.

What’s the point of this line? The North has reneged on prior commitments, and is now reestablishing its nuclear capabilities. Around the world, financial contagion is threatening to knock down ailing markets like a neat line of dominoes. Pollution and dust from Beijing cross the ocean and settle against the mountains of my hometown, Santa Barbara. The DMZ is a reminder that environment, economics, and politics are never balanced in perfect unison. As I stand and contemplate the pointlessness of this line, in the face of so many threats and challenges which know no borders, an off-duty U.S. soldier next to me remarks: “I can’t believe I’m finally this close to the enemy”.

We are us. They are them. The Other lives on.

Now inside the negotiating building, we are so close. A table cleaves the room in half, and if you cross it to the far side, you’re in North Korea. U.S. Army Sgt. Murrilo’s lecture on the history of peace talks and the dos and don’ts of interacting with ROK soldiers is drowned out by the cascade of bleeps and chimes from twenty different cameras and recorders. Everyone needs a photo. Look honey, I was that close to crossing the line. The group perks up from their screens when told in a minute they will be allowed to pass the table. The group shifts northward. Everyone will cross the line. Don’t let me trick you into thinking I am any different. When Sgt. Murrilo gave the okay, I’m the first one into enemy territory.