CHITRAL, Aug 27: 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 Chitral.

He can sell tickets for the journey, but can’t guarantee seats, or whether the flight will 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.

Tourists have been advised to steer clear of the country after attacks on Western targets last year following the launch of the United States-led war in Afghanistan.

The NWFP government is accused of trying to emulate the fundamentalist policies of the Taliban.

On the country’s eastern border is India, a nuclear-armed rival with which it went to the brink of a fourth war last year.

The tourism industry was suffering from neglect and external shocks even before the Sept 11 attacks on the US put it in the frontline of the war on terror.

In 1998, tourists were ordered out of Chitral for their safety after Washington launched missile strikes on Afghanistan.

Haider Ali Shah runs the Mountain Inn in Chitral, which opened in 1968, when most of the visitors were hippies on the overland trail from Europe to Asia.

He said tourists had started to trickle back before Sept 11. “But since then we have had virtually none at all and those we do get are foreigners working in Islamabad.” He says each night only three or four of the 26 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 British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush.

Mr 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.

Capt Sirajul Mulk, a former chief pilot at PIA, who owns the Hindukush Heights hotel said many in the town had been angered by blanket warnings not to travel to Pakistan.

“It’s the wrong advice, because Chitral is absolutely peaceful. There’s nothing wrong here — the police have nothing to do,” he said.—Reuters