TOURISM

THE FLIPSIDE OF TOURISM

By: Nasser Yousaf

In 2016, I had made a vow never to visit the mountaintop of Malam Jabba again. My resolve stemmed from what I had found after a tiresome journey to the top in the blazing sun of peak summer season.

The mountaintop and its surrounding scenery stood denuded of most of the conifer forest. The entire area was still reeling from the state of militancy which had hit the Malakand region in the first decade of the present century.

Some of the people that we asked about the trees recounted how and who had cut and transported the trees to the down country. It wasn't something cheerful to listen to for long especially since one still had very fond memories of a blissful walk undertaken in 2005 under the canopy of towering conifers from the Shangla top to the mountaintop of Malam Jabba.

More often than not, the vows that we make come back to haunt us. So it was that one had to renege on that solemn vow under the sheer force of circumstances.

A family sojourn, in our time of great private distress, took us to the Malam Jabba mountaintop in the month of July, 2024.

There was a thin cloud cover when we left Saidu Shareef in the morning for a day-long visit to the mountaintop. We thought the clouds will shield us from the sun that blazes down in the mountains with an incredible ferocity. But it wasn't to be and the cloud cover soon fizzled out.

As we got nearer to our destination, an array of hotels started coming out in our view. Those grotesque, multistorey structures were literally around every turn, jutting out of the mountains like juggernauts.

Instead of the scent of the wood, we encountered mountains of concrete painted in gaudy colours and beckoning tourists from all over, especially from the plains of Punjab. The unimaginative construction appeared to have disfigured the mountain scape beyond repair. 

On the top of the mountain stood another massive structure with an ungainly brown façade. It was the five-star hotel about which the mainstream media in Pakistan was so all agog. The hotel sat behind a massive wall of impenetrable barbed wire as it covered the entire length of the mountaintop.

One had to pay a handsome amount to go through the gates of the hotel and into its vast precincts. Not quite long ago, one could roam freely in this area where just about half a dozen kiosks sold light refreshments to the sundry tourists.

But the aura of solitude appeared to have run away from the mountain as if it had been chased by predators. 

Dozens of kiosks now stood outside the gates of the big hotel like sentinels in colourful uniforms. They sold eatables to customers who couldn't afford to get into the limits of the five-star hotel. They had travelled all the way to the top in their own or rented transport which had lined up on the road in hundreds.

The five-star hotel didn't appear to be a work of great architecture. It had a claustrophobic foyer and a lounge that offered no panoramic view of the mountains and some few faraway clusters of conifers. The standard room rent was something close to Rs. 50000/ per night.

The hotel and its infrastructure that comprise a chairlift, a zip-line, skiing turf and a golf course have been built to cater to its rich and 'nouveau riche' clientele from Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi.

In the lush green lawns of the hotel, a young sapling of a cedar with a name plate of the officer who had planted it was quite conspicuous. It was perhaps one of the one-billion trees that the Forest Department claimed to have planted in the province. But little more of the 'tsunami' (as the billion-trees project is famously referred to by those who launched it) was in evidence.

A few hours on the mountaintop left one wondering what more was in store for us. Our mountains are becoming more and more like our cities, our forests are thinning and our rivers have lost their pristine charm.

Every few years, a flood in the river Swat strikes the area with a vengeance but no sooner than the flood recedes, everything returns to where they stood before. Orchards of apples and peaches are making way for commercial markets.

The truth of Swat as our Switzerland is dawning on us in its most shocking manifestation. Without the least amount of exaggeration, the entire Swat region is one endless bazaar of shops and hotels.

There are hundreds and thousands of registered and unregistered motor vehicles in the vast Malakand Division, soley due to petty politics as the area has been bestowed a tax-free status by the succesive governments.

A few days after one returned from the visit, a minister in the KP government crowed at length about a 💯 per cent increase in the number of tourists. 'Nine million domestic and two and a half thousand foreign tourists visited KP this summer,' the figures-brandishing minister announced.

Shying away from telling the whole truth, the minister didn't tell us about the fallouts of such unrestrained movement of both the humans and their transport on nature. Perhaps, the minister is not aware that reverse tourism has set in motion in some parts of the world.

Many countries in Europe including Spain, Italy and Greece have banned the entry of tourists in some areas. Such countries believe that the flow of tourists was endangering their culture and heritage.

It is one thing to write a eulogy for our tourism from the comfort of our desks, and an altogether different story to experience it and write it after witnessing frenzied crowds in our mountains and valleys. Sedentary writing has caused us great harm, notably, when such writings lead us, or mislead, into believing that tourism could be the mainstay of our economy.

Tourism is fast gnawing away at our wilderness, and more viciously than our poverty of imagination would allow us to harness it.