Your third point makes me sad. I remember growing up when there were still places that were considered uncharted for the most part and global trade wasn't quite what it has become today. There was a mystery to other cultures that I always wanted to explore and experience that I feel I can never get back.
Even traveling to Japan, while quite alien in many ways, still gave me somewhat of a theme park feeling because of westernization (one of my favorite countries though).
Is there any way to experience what it is like to be a rare explorer to somewhere largely untouched culturally? Honestly I feel like the closest thing is MMOs sadly enough.
Everyone has TV these days. Even the Uros islanders, living in huts on rafts on Lake Titicaca (a tribe who've become a tourist attraction), had when I visited a little TV powered by a solar panel and car battery. Although it was only black and white.
I think it would necessarily have to be somewhere deliberately cut off, and therefore probably dangerous and hard to reach. The deep inland of the Caucasus has plenty of under-touristed places like Nagorno-Karabakh: http://danhamilton.co.uk/blog/?p=180 Then there's the dictatorships like Turkmenistan, and not-quite-war-zones like the FATA of Pakistan.
(A friend of mine was lucky enough to go to the Lebanon between civil was to see the Roman ruins there. There's a lot of underappreciated under-touristed parts of the Middle East that we'll have to hope survive until the shooting stops.)
Even traveling to Japan, while quite alien in many ways, still gave me somewhat of a theme park feeling because of westernization (one of my favorite countries though).
Is there any way to experience what it is like to be a rare explorer to somewhere largely untouched culturally? Honestly I feel like the closest thing is MMOs sadly enough.