In the days after Bangkok's New Year's Eve blasts, which killed three people and came on the heels of a military coup, many travelers seemed confused about how to respond. Some travelers appeared unfazed; one Briton hurt in the bombings, Paul Hewitt, quickly told reporters, "I can't see why this would deter me from coming back." Expatriate friends of mine wrote that Bangkok seemed normal, and they planned to spend New Year's Day engaged in one of Thailand's favorite activities, mobile phone shopping.
Some travelers trying to decide whether Thailand was truly safe looked to the old standby, the US State Department's travel information, which is broken down into Public Announcements, Consular Information Sheets and Travel Warnings, all available at www.travel.state.gov. The Public Announcements "disseminate information quickly" about short-term threats to security abroad; the Consular Sheets provide detailed, broad background on safety and other issues in foreign countries; and the Travel Warnings advise Americans to avoid a country or to take significant precautions while visiting.
Yet the State Department's reports, while useful and thorough, can also prove confusing. The most serious category, Warnings, includes nations like Indonesia where there are real terrorist threats but generally low levels of violent crime against foreigners. Warnings do not include countries popular with tourists like South Africa that have high rates of assault and murder, which are more likely to affect travelers than terrorism. The Public Announcements sometimes seem too broad to follow: One recent announcement warns of terrorist threats on nearly every continent. Consular Information Sheets offer serious cautions about so many relatively peaceful countries, from Greece to Vietnam, that they can lose their impact.
But savvy travelers know not to rely solely on the State Department reports. Many look to the Web sites of the US Embassy at their destination, which tend to be more detailed. Travelers also turn to the advisories of the UK and Australian governments. Australia offers nuanced advisories that use factors ranging from terrorism to crime, to grade nations' safety on a continuum from one to five, with five being the most dangerous. Australia's advisories are available at www.smartraveller.gov.au, and tourists can sign up for a handy e-mail service that automatically sends Australian updates about a particular place. (The UK's advisories are available at www.fco.gov.uk — travel advice is available on the left-hand side of the page.)
Local English-language newspapers can prove even more vital, and the Web sites www.thebigproject.co.uk/news/ and world-newspapers.com offer links to Web sites of English-language publications from the Times of London to the Times of Central Asia. Often, the local papers offer early warnings of events that later threaten tourists. In Thailand, the Bangkok Post and the Nation, English-language dailies, reported credible talk of a coup well before the Thai military actually seized power in September.
"This had been predicted in the press for weeks," a Bangkok Post editor, Songpol Kaoputumptip, told me just after the coup.
Many of the local papers' Web sites also contain discussion forums, which travelers can use to assess the state of local concern about anything from avian flu to air safety. Local news media also cover mass emigrations, the best sign that people in that country are genuinely afraid. After the 2002 Bali bombing, Indonesian papers reported few exoduses of middle-class Indonesians to Singapore, suggesting that locals thought the nation remained stable. By comparison, during rioting in Jakarta in the late 1990s, many Indonesians fled the country.
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