A Pilgrim is not a tourist

I'm reading Conrad Rudolph's Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela. While the book has a somewhat secular tone, I do think he makes some good observations (where good is generally defined as 'things that I somewhat agree with but haven't reconciled completely'.) Here's a snippet that I find interesting:

A pilgrim is a not a tourist. You have a deeper experience precisely because you are not an observer in the traditional sense of the word. Something changes. You are not exactly the same person you were before. The locals look to you as a special experience, authentic. Despite the distance, you are a participator, an authenticator, even more than the locals themselves. You are part of the cultural landscape, part of the original reason for being and the history of many of the towns through which you pass. This is the pilgrimage route, and it is a deeply ingrained part of the identity of the towns and people along it. Yours is the experience of a fully reconciled alienation: the pilgrim at once the complete insider, the total outsider. This is why the pilgrimage is not a tour, not a vacation, not at all a trip from point A to point B, but a journey that its both an an experience and a metaphor rather than an event. This is why the pilgrimage must be done on foot, never on a bicycle; why you must stay in refugios, not in hotels, and why the journey should be long and hard. And this is why you then experience a place and culture in a way vastly different than as a traditional visitor or even as a local.

When reading 'pilgrim' literature, I often find it useful to re-read passages substituting 'Christian' for 'pilgrim', if only to see whether my opinion of the passage changes.