I was actually in northern Pakistan with a group of British tourists when 9/11 happened. So cut off were we, in the valleys of Hindu Kush, that we didn’t hear about the catastrophic events in New York until three days later, surely making us among the last people on the planet to know. I remember walking into a hotel in Chitral Town and seeing the local newspaper with a picture of the Twin Towers on fire and the headline, ‘Doomsday for the USA’; I slumped in a chair and thought doomsday for Wild Frontiers more like.
As it happened, I couldn’t have been more wrong. With Pakistan now off limits I was forced to look elsewhere, to other countries I knew from my travels, and by 2003 we were running trips in Central Asia, India and Africa. We now run small group tours and tailor-made holidays to 80 destinations, on six continents.
But in the aftermath of 9/11, tourism in Pakistan died completely. Even a brief renaissance in 2004, helped hugely by Michael Palin’ ground-breaking Himalaya series, didn’t last long and throughout the Noughties and the first half of this decade tourist numbers remained low. And to be fair Pakistan did have problems. In 2007, the Swat Valley, a tourist favourite in the early Nineties, was taken over the Pakistan Taliban, a time best known perhaps for the almost fatal shooting of the inspirational Malala Yousafzai. In 2008 in the heart of the nation’s capital the Marriott Hotel was bombed killing 54 people. Peshawar experienced terrorist incidence of one form or another on a weekly basis. The Khyber Pass was closed to foreigners and despite huge military intervention, the government continued to have problems in the troubled Tribal Areas.