Niger

Niger is an amazingly endowed African country that simply isn’t on the tourist map right now: As the active U.K. and U.S. travel warnings note, terrorism, including kidnapping, is a serious threat here.

For now, then, travelers with a passion for African history, culture, and ecology can only indirectly admire Niger’s innate beauty. The fossils and historical antiquities of the National Museum in Niamey; the striking Grand Mosque of Agadez; the spectacular indigenous cultural festivals, such as Cure Salee and Guérewol—a wealth of attractions befitting the vast scope of this biggest of West African countries. Given its size and strategic geography, Niger provides a cultural cross-section of the threshold of the Sahara and the steamy West African tropics.

Niger’s nature reserves—some of the region’s most significant—could, in a calmer and more secure future, host a thriving ecotourism industry. In the Sahara, the Air and Ténéré Natural Reserves offer critical habitat for highly endangered desert creatures such as the addax, the dorcas gazelle, and the ostrich. The Air Mountains that partly fall within this huge protected complex constitute some genuinely breathtaking scenery: sand-scoured outcrops, fiery-hued gorges, rich palm oases tucked into sere outback. Niger also claims a significant portion of the tri-country reserve of the W Transborder Park, shared with Benin and Burkina Faso; a complex that provides habitat for some of the last significant populations of many large West African mammals, including elephants, lions, and cheetahs.

Keep Niger on your list. Someday—and, for the sake of its people, we can certainly cross our fingers—this reservoir of West African culture and wilderness may be welcoming tourists once again.