The Potala Palace soars above Lhasa, thirteen stories of imposing red–and–white fortress topped with elaborately detailed Tibetan roofs. Inside the Dalai Lama's traditional winter home are tombs of his predecessors, two seventh–century chapels, dozens of jewel–encrusted statues and stupas, and hundreds of murals recording the lives of the former Himalayan kingdom's spiritual leaders–oh, and rooms full of rubble, actors playing Buddhist monks, and a gift shop selling tourist trinkets (Lhasa beer, yak jerky) emblazoned with images of the site, which until 1959 was the seat of Tibet's government. It costs you five dollars–and your conscience–to get in the front door .

Across the world there are castles and churches, minarets and museums, burning ghats and ethnic ghettos, promenades and restaurants and riverbanks, taxi drivers, school teachers, tour guides, fruit vendors, street urchins, artists, government functionaries, underpaid doctors, and even college freshmen (and sophomores and juniors and seniors)–many of them located in countries with repressive governments, internal strife, one–party politics, stomach–turning human–rights records, and a million other reasons to spend the summer in Florida. Maybe Palm Beach is out, too: Does anyone remember butterfly ballots and pregnant chads?

Still, you can't just stay home. You may want Israel out of Jerusalem, or a Kurdistan carved from Turkey, or a Cuba free of Fidel, but you may also want to lounge on a Tel Aviv beach, eat authentic doner kebab, and smoke Cohibas until you vomit. You may dream of stringing up the Taliban by their beards, but wouldn't it be fun to hike the Hindu Kush?

Deciding not just where to go but whether and how to go can be a heart–wrenching process. As Amnesty International spokesman Alistair Hodgett puts it, "If you're driving on a road in Burma that's constructed through slave labor, are you personally uncomfortable with that? Or do you travel down it nonetheless, and try and use your experiences to come back informed about the country?"

The U.S. government has an easy solution: If you're thinking of vacationing in Cuba, Libya, Iraq, North Korea, or several other nations with whom Washington is not on speaking terms, think again. You may be able to get an official license to go, often as part of an academic trip, but the ban on travel generally isn't so much diplomatic as economic. "It doesn't matter if you're buying a taco on the beach or using some sort of state–sponsored travel agency for your ticket," says a spokeswoman for the U.S. Treasury Department. "A dollar spent in Cuba without a license is a violation of U.S. law." Criminal penalties range to–yikes! –10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines. That is, if you're caught red–handed with a stamped passport and a plate of rice and beans.

One Is the Loneliest Number
Perhaps the best way to visit the repressive nation of your dreams is to go with a tour group. Several organizations–Global Exchange, Witness for Peace, and EPICA, among many others–have been arranging trips to places like Cuba, Iran and Vietnam for years. And while you may not relish the idea of spending winter break in a structured program, groups can get you possibly the most important thing: access.

"I was one of those individualistic hotheads who thought, Oh, groups are for sissies," says Kevin Danaher, co–founder of Global Exchange, which runs so–called "reality tours" to more than a dozen countries, " Over the decades I learned that you get a lot more out of your money and out of the experience when you go with a group."

"People have busy lives," he adds. "They're not going to drop everything to give you an hour interview about how their hospital works or something like that, but when we come in, you get access. If we take people to South Africa under apartheid, you want to have people meet a white government official who's going to give the arguments defending apartheid. If you take them to Cuba, you want them to meet people who trash Fidel and people who love Fidel–and people who don't give a damn one way or the other."

But one Global Exchange participant, Geoff Bederson, says his Cuban reality tour in 2000 failed in just that regard. The group stayed exclusively in luxury hotels, ate in fancy restaurants, and met with no one who wasn't "extremely positive" about the communist island, he says. Bederson, a 40–year–old teacher at an alternative school in Anchorage, Alaska, says he had to get away from the group to find out the real level of oppression in the nation. Cuba boosters, he says, "always claim they have free medical care, and they do–but I met a university professor who earns about $25 a month but cannot afford medicine for her child."

There's the biggest pitfall with any group that's going to take you off the beaten tourist track: politics. Many of the organizations that put reality tours together aim for balance, but their focus on poor and Third World nations seems to tilt them clearly to the left (not that there's anything wrong with that). There isn't really a right–wing version of Global Exchange, unless you count Club Med, most travel agents, or something like Abercrombie & Kent, the high–end tour broker that will take you through the wilds of east Africa, stopping at every Hilton on the way. In a fundamental way, the group you choose will shape your impressions of a country and its people.

"To get to the truth about what their level of freedom is, or their level of prosperity, is not easy," Bederson says. "Even if you're there, you may be blinded by your preconceptions."

Know Before You Go
You can minimize those preconceptions by learning as much as possible about the country before you get your passport stamped. In Tibet, for example, uninformed visitors would miss a lot, says John Hocevado, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet. Besides trusting the fake monks at Potala Palace, he says, naïve travelers "wouldn't know that the person who China is claiming as the Panchen Lama is not who the Tibetans would say is the Panchen Lama, and that the real Panchen Lama is an 11–year–old kid that has been missing for the past six, seven years now." The two Tibets–the official, Chinese Tibet and the repressed Tibet–were starkly visible to a Georgetown University sophomore who went there last year with tour organizer Sojourn Nepal. She asked not to be named for fear of being denied a visa for future travel. An SFT member since high school, she spent two weeks in Nepal, first in Kathmandu, then in a mountain village studying Tibetan culture, religion, and language before flying to Lhasa.

Her studies paid off. "For me, the Potala Palace–going in, you just see how dead it is, and just how before the Chinese occupation there was so much life to these monasteries, and thousands and thousands of monks," she says, adding that she noticed more than just the deterioration of holy sites. "In the central marketplace, they had officers stationed at the corner. They had video cameras at the major monasteries. You kind of always knew that you were being watched and heard." Rajan's education didn't just cover recent history–she learned from the tour leaders how not to make things worse. "We had to be very careful with our words," she says. "If we were in a Tibetan restaurant and mentioned the Dalai Lama . . . we had the power to get other people in trouble."

Mind Your Manners
That kind of sensitivity is paramount in countries with poor human–rights records. You may want to discuss the Communist Party with your Hanoi waiter, but will he lose his job for responding? You may want to distribute pro–democracy leaflets in Beijing, but will the poor soul who picks one off the street do jail time for her curiosity? You may feel the need to denounce Castro, but giving voice to your feelings can sometimes be . . . inappropriate. "We've had guys get up in the middle of a meeting and insist on singing 'God Bless America' because they figure this is something to shove up the nose of our Cuban hosts," laughs Danaher of Global Exchange.

Still, you needn't bear mute witness to a country's woes. "Frankly, in countries in which it's appropriate, we would encourage people to raise those human rights issues that strike them in private conversation," says Amnesty's Hodgett. "I've heard anecdotally from people who've visited Turkey, where there's a lot of Western tourism but also a human–rights concern, that people have talked it through. And I think both sides benefit from those discussions. It's worth remembering that in a lot of societies in which there isn't free media, it's news for people to hear from tourists or travelers some of how their country's human–rights record is perceived externally." According to Hodgett, tourists also play a major role in bringing to light human–rights abuses around the world. "They happen to be visiting a remote site and observe a police crackdown or something else," he says. "People who've been tourists in Saudi Arabia have come back and actually have pretty valuable insights into what they've seen. They got stopped by the police, or an African–American colleague was mistreated because that's routine in Saudi Arabia."

Follow the Money
You've chosen a country, mastered its tragic recent history, and will not talk politics until the secret police have gone home. Now comes the big question: Aren't your tourist dollars supporting a regime that's ruining the lives of the wonderful people you're about to meet? Should you go at all? There's no getting around it: A visa costs $25. A portion of your $1000 plane fare goes to the Ministry of Transportation. Every museum, temple, and geological wonder has an entrance fee. It appears the luxury hotels are owned by the army, while the generals' cousins, in–laws, and college roommates run all the backpacker joints.

"You can't go to a country without leaving some money there," says Danaher, "but to equate that with 'If you spend money in some little café or in a hotel, does that go to the head of state?' I don't know. A piece of it does, but most countries have systems of taxation. Just like here, if you come to San Francisco, some of your money's going to go to our governor, who's a dick. But that's part of the structure." So while you can't keep every last peso, dinar and ringgit out of Big Brother's pockets, you can minimize his take by avoiding big hotels, fancy stores and restaurants, and large tour–guide outfits, all of which often have direct or indirect ties to the government.

In China, for example, the People's Liberation Army owns so many "regular businesses" that it's known as PLA Inc. Until 1998, when China tried to root out corruption by forcing the PLA to sell off its commercial enterprises, the military owned everything from pig farms to toy factories to nightclubs to high–tech firms. As many as 1,500 hotels were under their control. Even now, the army has yet to divest itself of some major companies, including three–star hotels and cell–phone systems. And don't imagine that, say, Beijing's Jinlang Hotel is now run by average folks–much of the PLA's former holdings were transferred to the state. And you can bet that the Chinese government will be reaping a hefty profit from the 2008 Olympics–just think of all those packed hotels, ticket commissions, and taxable cans of Coca–Cola . . .

Still, you can't go around so frightened of funding a "bad government" that you end up sleeping on the street, or staying home altogether. "If you don't spend the twenty bucks staying overnight somewhere," says Hodgett, "in all likelihood, by the time you look at the government's share, and the share from that that goes to the military, which supports the human–rights violations, you're probably stiffing whoever the local merchant is who would've benefited from the economic activity." And in the end, the pittance the state collects will be far outweighed by what you gain–exposure to new people, customs, and experiences–and by what you bring to those unfortunate citizens: a sense that the world has not forgotten them.

Unless . . .
Unless we're talking about Myanmar. The nation formerly known as Burma outdoes most of its despotic–government competition. The military dictatorship, which has ruled the nation since 1962, finally allowed open parliamentary elections in 1990. But when it lost in a landslide, it annulled the results and cracked down hard on the winners and their supporters, killing some and locking up others, including the charismatic Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 but remains under house arrest. Tourists simply should not go, says the U.S.–based Free Burma Coalition, which with the backing of Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy (the political party that won an overwhelming majority of seats in the failed election) has organized a travel boycott. All the arguments that apply to other countries–Cuba, Turkey, Cambodia–fail in Myanmar, according to Jeremy Woodrum, director of FBC's Washington, D.C., office. First of all, he says, virtually the entire tourist infrastructure is built through forced labor. The road you take to the Mandalay Palace? Paved by teenagers. The hotel you stay in? Prison inmates laid the foundations. "The more tourists that get over there, and the more people that travel around, the greater the demand it will create for even more infrastructure," he says. "And the military regime has proved time and time again that they're not gonna do this stuff in what anyone would consider an acceptable manner."

Think you can sidestep the regime and pump some cash into the local economy? Well, just to set foot in Yangon (formerly Rangoon), you've got to exchange $200 for special foreign–exchange currency, a cut of which goes to you–know–who. Private companies that are unaffiliated with the military and that try to do business on the grassroots level often find themselves regretting success. Take the Mandalay Brewery. After Win Win Nu turned the failing venture around, transforming its beer into a hot commodityand making the company Myanmar's largest taxpayer, she was fired and eventually forced to withdraw her multimillion–dollar investment. She has been fighting in the Myanmar and Asean legal systems since 1998; the International Court of Justice in the Hague agreed this summer to hear the case.

And don't pretend that your presence as an emissary of the democratic West is going to teach the downtrodden Burmese about freedom. Woodrum says: "It's a silly assertion. The people of Burma have spoken strongly and clearly that they want democracy in the country. They gave Suu Kyi and the NLD 82 percent of the seats in the would–be parliament. It doesn't seem to me like they need to be educated."

It's far from easy to gauge whether the travel boycott is helping the cause of a democratic Myanmar. With millions in foreign investment from the likes of Unocal, Pepsi, and Crate & Barrel, not to mention the cash that corrupt generals pocket from the heroin trade, Myanmar could probably care less whether it gets its cut from your two Ben Franklins. At the same time, the NLD has managed to reopen its offices, several large corporations (Kenneth Cole, Pottery Barn) have refused to do business in the country, and Suu Kyi has been in negotiations with the junta, though their outcome remains to be seen. Is this because principled tourists refused to fund repression? Or is it because conscientious travelers bore witness to human–rights abuses? There are no simple answers to these questions–and no one to answer them but you.

Illustrations by J.F. Podevin