So you can imagine the fear when I lined up to do the tango in Buenos Aires. This was not just any old humiliation I was facing. This would be shame on a grand scale, me butchering another country's cultural icon in its home territory, flailing around a dance floor attempting to reproduce a passionate, emotional ritual that Argentines hold dear.

My humiliation was unfortunately set to take place in public, in no less a venue than a proper Porteno​ milonga, or tango club. I was there for an introductory lesson to the dance, but still, you can't help but be nervous. It's bad enough to suck at dancing, but what about when you publicly suck at attempting someone else's cultural institution?

Walking out on to that darkened dance floor, glancing nervously around me at all of the other punters that I was convinced would be tango gods and goddesses, I was struck with a thought: I didn't have to do this. I could have done what everyone else in BA does and just gone along to a tango performance starring professional dancers and watched. Easy.

But no. I'd opted to do it myself.

And so I stayed there on the dance floor as the music started and the teacher began barking out orders in Spanish. I forced my feet through the steps as everyone around me, fortunately, stumbled and bumped into each other like the rank amateurs that they were. And I had fun. So much fun.

That night in Buenos Aires made me realise something great: it didn't matter how bad I was at the tango, or at any other cultural tradition. What mattered was that I was trying it for myself.

This, to me, is what travel should be about. Not seeing, but doing. Participating.

It's so easy to fall into the trap of taking travel as a spectator sport, of being content to be an outsider and looking in. So many of the touristy highlights you read about in a guidebook are passive experiences. You're told to visit a museum, or look at a building, or stare at some art. And that's all fine. But modern tourism, great tourism, should be less about seeing, and more about doing.

Think back to the major highlights of your travelling life, the things you want to tell your friends about. It's unlikely any of them will involve watching shows, or visiting buildings, or being led around by a guide. They will be the things you actually did, the people you met, the experiences you sampled for yourself.

Going to a professional tango show in Buenos Aires is fine. In fact it's probably more than fine – you get to see the dance the way it was meant to be. But that experience still has nothing on the feeling of taking your own unco-ordinated steps into the culture of the tango, of sampling its emotion and its tradition as you attempt to reproduce it on a dusty wooden dance floor at a club somewhere out in the suburbs.

And this notion of doing rather than seeing is something that can be recreated anywhere in the world. Instead of eating at a restaurant in France, take a cooking class and shop at a market. Instead of riding in a taxi in Ho Chi Minh City, hire a scooter and join the madness. Instead of staring at traditional villages from the highway in Fiji, do a homestay and share someone's life. Instead of watching the beach footballers in Rio de Janeiro, put your hand up for a game.

There's so much more to be gained from travel when you decide to do things rather than just to watch them. When you take chances and step outside of what's traditionally thought of as the tourism experience, you open up another world.

Suddenly you're meeting more people. When you elect to do things rather than just stare at them, you're being taken into people's lives, people who will usually welcome the chance to share part of their culture. When you forgo the selfie-stick photo ops in favour of making something, or learning something, or trying something, your travel experience is changed forever.

There's still room for passive tourism. You can lie on beaches and drink cocktails if you feel like relaxing. But those won't be the highlights of your travelling life.

The highlights will be the things you actually do. Even if that involves dancing the tango when you're really, really bad at it.

b.groundwater@fairfaxmedia.com.au