Why travel? Just read.

I don't really like to travel, yet I enjoy reading travel literature. This may seem incoherent at first, but it is not.

First of all, traveling to a place is orders of magnitude more costly than reading about it. More dangerous, too. Even if you are going to a perfectly calm vacation resort, the risks of being involved in, say, a car accident, far outweigh the risks inherent in reading a book, like papercuts.

One could object that traveling in person allows you to have unmediated access to a place, to directly experience the sights, the sounds, the people and the cuisine. However, sensory inputs are only the raw material. You need to synthesize them in order to arrive at something meaningful. And here is where most travel writers are better than you. They are more experienced, they have better insights and are more adept at expressing them. Furthermore, they are likely to take more risks and peek into places you wouldn't dare to enter.

When you undergo an x-ray examination, do you interpret the results by yourself, or do you delegate the task to an experienced medical specialist? Why travel should be any different? Yeah, go and delude yourself. You may discern the vertebral column (doric, jonic, or corinthian?) maybe the ribs, and be satisfied with that. But your superficial gleanings should in no way count as a diagnose.

Furthermore, technologies like Google Earth, Panoramio and Photosynth are steadily reducing the difference between direct experience and digital reproduction. There is still a gap, but not a large enough one to warrant spending a month's salary in bridging it.

I suppose the worn cliché that travel opens your mind and widens your perspective on things is true to some extent, but only dumb people who don't read need to do it that way. You can achieve a similar effect by going to your local library and perusing some anthropology textbook. Come to think of it, traveling to the library may itself be too much of a hassle. Why don't you just read about the subject on Wikipedia?

Socrates wasn't interested in any place other than Athens; I'm pretty sure he only left the city because of military duty. In fact, the only worthy reasons for travel are conquest, work, or pilgrimage. All else is vanity.