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" we had so much hope. new lodges were being built. children were learning english "
year.
“ Last year I sold five boxes of apricots a week,” she said, standing beside jars of the bright orange fruit.“ This year, it took me a month. The customers who did come were mostly locals. We love them, but their spending is different. We rely on travellers, they don’ t bargain so hard, and they buy more because everything is new to them.”
Perhaps nowhere was the emotional toll more visible than along the Line of Control, where tourism had only recently begun to make cautious inroads. Local porters in Gurez Valley, who had been training to lead foreign trekkers along river trails, found themselves back at home for an entire season. One of them, Bilal, spoke while repairing his worn trekking shoes.
“ We had so much hope, this year,” he said.“ New lodges were being built. Children were learning English to talk to guests. When the attacks happened, the mountains became empty again.”
Brazilian photographer Marina Teixeira, who had been documenting textile cooperatives in Kashmir, described the sudden shift in atmosphere.
“ People were still kind, still warm,” she said,“ but something changed in the air. The chai seller I visited every morning told me,‘ Madam, now you go, it is not good to stay.’ He wouldn ' t even let me pay for my tea that day. He said it felt wrong to take money from someone he thought might be in danger.”
Several vignettes emerged from these months that capture how travel became entangled with the region’ s instability. In Lahore, a group of Malaysian tourists who had arrived for a food tour found their itinerary suddenly rewritten when their insurance company refused to cover visits to certain neighbourhoods. In Amritsar, hotel staff said they had seen more guests spending evenings indoors, opting for room service instead of venturing out into the markets around the Golden Temple. In Skardu, a British couple who had planned to climb to Deosai Plains spent days indoors waiting for clearance that never came, eventually cancelling the trek altogether.
TRAVERSE 146