You Can See Them Without Visitation Rights

Have you always dreamed of visiting Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Burundi or Sudan?

Maybe you should keep dreaming and stay home, at least for the time being. These countries are among the 18 on the official “Travel Warnings” list issued by the U.S. State Department. A country usually makes the list for one of three reasons: an unstable political situation that could pose dangers for tourists, the policies of the country’s government or political groups that could pose problems specifically for U.S. tourists, or the country simply doesn’t recognize U.S. passports.

But all these countries certainly have something of interest to outsiders, whether it be beautiful landforms, historical/archeological sites or just the chance to learn about a different culture.

Until you are able to travel to these places in person, you can at least get an idea of what you are missing by visiting them virtually at government and private sites on the Internet’s World Wide Web.

We begin our sample tour with that “Travel Warnings” list, which can be found on the State Department’s site at https://travel.state.gov/travel_warnings.html. The site is also useful for foreign travel in general: It lists more than 100 countries and lets you know for each what documents you’ll need to travel there.

Afghanistan, according to its State Department listing, hasn’t had an official U.S. presence within its borders since our embassy was evacuated in 1989 because of the civil war. “Westerners are vulnerable to politically and criminally motivated attacks, including robbery, kidnapping and hostage-taking,” the listing says.

You can find sad depictions of the results of that fighting--burned out buildings in Kabul--at https://hypermall.com/bazyar/afghan.html. But you can also access an absolutely breathtaking photograph of one of the country’s natural wonders, a group of several lakes known as Band-e-Amir high in the Afghan mountains.

Also check out the Afghan Cultural Information Center, https://www.gl.umbc.edu/hqurba1/Afghanistan.html.

The sites concerning Sierra Leone in Western Africa are harder to come by. This country, slightly smaller than South Carolina, was ruled by a military government until last month and any travel by visitors is difficult outside the capital of Freetown. The situation even in that city can be uncertain: On an English site, I found a terse note dated March 1 that warns Freetown now has an 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew.

Although some sites, including the public CIA fact sheet at https://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/95fact/sl.html give basic information on Sierra Leone, I could find no photographs.

Internal warfare in Lebanon is not as bad as it was a few years ago, but a travel warning remains in effect. You can find spectacular pictures from that Middle Eastern country at https://alumni.EECS.Berkeley.EDU:80/dany/lebanon, which includes not only photos, but numerous links to other sites.

One of the oddest listings on “Travel Warnings” is for Guatemala. It mostly stems from an incident a couple of years ago when two American women were beaten by a mob convinced that foreigners were kidnapping children and selling their body organs for transplants (long-rumored stories about these type of kidnappings have never been substantiated).

There have been other incidents in that country, including the murder of two tourists from Alaska earlier this year in a popular resort city.

These warnings should be carefully considered, of course, but they should not keep a traveler from checking further into the relative safety or danger of a destination. After all, if judged just from newsmaking incidents about tourists being attacked, the United States would probably make it onto a lot of countries’ “Travel Warnings” lists.

* Cyburbia’s e-mail address is david.colker@latimes.com.