It is tragic, but true that the current situation has left many of the beautiful landscapes of Pakistan devoid of any tourists.
Terror keeps Pakistan’s beauty hidden](Yahoo is part of the Yahoo family of brands.)
CHITRAL, Pakistan (Reuters) - It’s 6.15 in the morning at Peshawar airport and a clerk is using a large screwdriver to prise the padlock off the door of the booking office of Pakistan International Airlines.
When he is finally behind his counter, there are less than 40 minutes to go before the departure of the PIA flight to the picturesque mountain town of Chitral.
He can sell tickets for the journey, but can’t guarantee seats, or whether the flight will even take off, and money can’t be refunded until the next day.
The alternative to 45 minutes in the air is a tortuous 16-hour jeep climb over spectacular but dangerous mountain roads.
Such snags are not the only reason that Chitral, a region so beautiful it should be one of the world’s premier tourist destinations, received only 88 foreign tourists in the first six months of this year.
Pakistan is a country tourists have been advised to steer well clear of after a series of bloody attacks on Western targets last year following the launch of the U.S.-led war on terror in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Chitral is also in Northwest Frontier Province, where the local government is accused of trying to emulate the fundamentalist policies of Afghanistan’s former Taliban regime.
If that wasn’t enough, on Pakistan’s eastern border is India, a nuclear-armed rival with which it went to the brink of a fourth war last year.
Pakistan’s tourism industry was suffering from neglect and external shocks even before the September 11 attacks on the United States put it in the frontline of the war on terror.
TOURISTS ORDERED OUT
In 1998, tourists were ordered out of Chitral for their own safety after Washington launched missile strikes on southeast Afghanistan in response to al Qaeda attacks on its embassies in East Africa.
Haider Ali Shah runs the Mountain Inn in Chitral, which opened in 1968 when most of the visitors were hashish-happy hippies on the overland trail from Europe to Asia.
He said tourists had started to trickle back before September 11. “But since then we have had virtually none at all and those we do get are foreigners working in Islamabad.”
Sitting on a wicker chair in the hotel’s exquisitely tended garden, he explains that each night only three or four of the 26 surrounding rooms are occupied.
“We don’t make money, but we have this property and we have to look after it,” he said. “We have to stay in this business in the hope that it will get better again.”
In the background, a hotel employee nods politely to a monologue from a solitary foreign tourist about how important travel is to bringing cultures together and how this should be understood by the likes of Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush.
Shah says he has had to let some staff go, but other businesses have been worse affected.
Many villagers relied on trekking groups for their income, working as guides, porters, drivers, or in restaurants frequented by foreigners.
Now the only alternative to scratching a living through subsistence farming is to leave the crystal clear air of the mountains and search for work in the smog of cities like Karachi.
Captain Siraj Ulmulk, a former chief pilot at PIA who owns and runs the Hindu Kush Heights, a hotel with a spectacular view of the Chitral valley, said many in the town had been angered by blanket warnings not to travel to Pakistan.
“WRONG ADVICE”
“It’s the wrong advice, because Chitral is absolutely peaceful. There’s nothing wrong here – the police have nothing to do,” he said.
While he understands governments have to play safe, he has witnessed embarrassing moments when diplomats whose embassies had put out travel warnings ran into compatriots at his hotel.
Another troubled by the travel advisories is comic turned adventure traveller Michael Palin, who was filming the first programme in a new series in Chitral in July.
“I think it is as safe here in Pakistan as you are in London in many ways,” he said. “Obviously you have to take precautions if you go to certain areas, but as far as we are concerned, we have had nothing but help and cooperation.”
Palin said he was struck by the great hospitality, an important tradition in Muslim countries, and those who stayed away were missing out.
“The mountains are absolutely extraordinary. This is the most striking and tremendous mountain scenery I think I have ever seen in my life.”
Siraj said Palin could help put the region back on the map.
Indeed, British travel agents refer to a “Palin effect”, which takes the form of a surge in bookings for holidays in remote regions he has visited in his hugely popular travelogues.
Shah said he thought it would be at least three years before any sort of recovery in the local industry, and in the meantime, the Chitralis have been in discussions with Central Asian tour operators with a view to linking up programmes.
Siraj said there were reasons to be hopeful, with the government at last investing in road upgrades and promising yet again to restart work on a tunnel that would lop hours off the journey to Islamabad.
“Once global conditions improve, things will definitely start to happen here in tourism,” he said.