Tina Townsend Greaves, from the U.K., takes a photo during a visit to the crossed swords monument Saturday in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Greaves was one of eight visitors — including Britons and Americans — on the first officially sanctioned tour of Iraq outside the semiautonomous northern Kurdish region since the March 2003 U.S. invasion.

Baghdad ? The Western tourists had their own reasons for joining the sightseeing tour: One wanted a glimpse of ancient ruins, another liked to visit countries in the news.

But traveling Iraq for two weeks in the first organized tour since 2003 wasn’t quite all they had hoped, what with the hours wasted at checkpoints, and visits cut short or scrapped altogether because of security concerns.

The eight adventurers included four men and four women from Britain, the United States and Canada. They said they made it from the northern city of Irbil to the southeastern tip of Basra — about 560 miles with side trips in between — without directly encountering the violence that has been a hallmark of Iraq’s daily life for so many years.

“It’s really affirmation in many ways that security has improved — the fact that we were able to travel to so many places,” said David Chung, a 36-year-old employee of an investment management firm in New York.

The journey, scheduled to end Sunday after a tour of the ancient ruins of Babylon, gave the travelers a taste of the hardships facing Iraqis as they emerge from war, ranging from electricity shortages to traffic jams to the overwhelming presence of U.S. and Iraqi security forces.

The travelers got quizzical glances but said they never felt in danger, although explosions sounded near their hotel in Baghdad late Friday on the sixth anniversary of the U.S. invasion.

“We just would not have been allowed to come here if it was too dangerous,” Bridgett Jones, a 77-year-old historical researcher from London, said as she drank a glass of red wine in the hotel lobby. “I never felt any hostility.”

She said she bought the wine at a local liquor store.

Navigating the checkpoints proved the greatest hassle. Roberta Wong, a 58-year-old former librarian from Vancouver, said she counted 40 blockades from the southern city of Basra to Baghdad, a 340-mile trip, and 24 on the 217 miles from the northern Kurdish city of Irbil to the capital.

She had plenty of time to keep track during the hours they were held up by guards unsure what to make of the bus full of Westerners.

“You appreciated that they had to have the security. If they didn’t have the security we couldn’t have been here,” said Jo Gilbert, 79, of Menlo Park, Calif. “But there’s no way between the checkpoints and the speed bumps that you’re going to get anywhere fast.”

Gilbert said she wouldn’t recommend the trip to average tourists used to comfort.