If you still can't enter the country you might as well be in your own country working in comfortability.
Oil platform 'roughnecks' spend 2-4 weeks working 12-hour days, then get 2-4 weeks off on shore, for work that's much more physically draining and dangerous than tech work.
Working in your own country just doesn't seem to produce the amount of innovation that happens in Silicon Valley. Otherwise, we should be able to see lots of successful geographically-distributed startups made of software developers who use teleconferencing and other online tools. While that does happen with many open-source projects, it doesn't seem to work as well for commercial ventures.
Why might that happen? A hypothesis I find interesting is that face-to-face contact increases trust, which is a crucial aspect for a startup. Oft-cited piece of research that support this are Dahl and Pedersen, 2004 - "Knowledge flows through informal contacts in industrial clusters" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733304...), and "Building Trust: A Matter of Proximity?" (Bruneel, 2007, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1064201).