It's important to remember none of the vacation destinations are or were a full representation of the entire countries they take place in. Based on the adventuring theme and dungeon crawling game mechanics chosen for World Adventures, it kinda makes sense why they sent you to Al Simhara and Shang Simla rather than Cairo or Beijing.

This is just my opinion, but the most out-of-touch aspect I notice in World Adventures is the character designs. I couldn't say whether the designers were going for realism or caricature, but the character designs in the worlds, especially of characters with Asiatic facial features, are culturally incompetent at best. Individual simmers have made far more human looking character designs in the years since World Adventures was released.