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" like everyone was holding their breath waiting for a bus they knew wouldn ' t come "
Karakoram Highway of Pakistan to cross the even more famed Attari-Wagah Border before heading north into Indian Kashmere.
“ We had riders on a tour when the attack took place,” Buddhi explains.“ The border was closed and the retaliation started. We quickly had to come up with a solution to ensure the safety of everyone and so that the ride could continue.”
Only a week after the attack, India launched Operation Sindoor, targeted strikes across the Line of Control. and the Pakistani response came swiftly. For four days the skies echoed with jets from both sides. The air-raid sirens in border districts, rarely heard by travellers but well known to residents, screamed through the evenings. For much of the world, this was a geopolitical flare-up. For those on the ground, it was something far more intimate: the collapsing of a season, the crushing of a livelihood, the reminder that tourism is always the first to bleed when politics erupts.
At Srinagar Airport, backpackers and pilgrims waited on the cold tile floors as the departures board filled with red cancellations. Among them was Jasmin, a solo traveller from Australia, who had arrived two days earlier intending to trek to Tarsar Lake.
“ The airport felt like the ground floor of an earthquake,” she recalled.“ People were calm, but in that exhausted way, like everyone was holding their breath waiting for a bus they knew wouldn’ t come.”
She slept upright against her backpack, woke to an announcement that flights might resume, then watched them shut down again as Pakistani airspace closed in response. After thirty hours she abandoned the region entirely, flying south to Delhi on a military-coordinated shuttle.
Delhi was no refuge. Tourism in the Indian capital depends on stability; it is the beating heart of the country’ s inbound travel, the city that greets visitors before they scatter to forts, beaches, or mountain retreats. But 2025 chipped away at that confidence too. After the mid-
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