PESHAWAR: Last week, Qadeer Gilani took his 72-year-old mother on the adventure of a lifetime: a motorcycle ride across the rugged, impregnable mountains of Pakistan’s northwestern tribal districts.
In 2017, Qubra Bibi and her son were at their home in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore watching a documentary on the magnificent Lake Saif ul Malook, when enthralled by the remote, snowbound Kaghan Valley, Bibi told her son she wished she could travel there.
Gilani, a 36-year-old manager at an event planning company, didn’t own a car. He asked Bibi if she would be comfortable going on a motorbike. When she said yes, he borrowed a bike from a friend and therein started a journey that has led the duo all over Pakistan’s northern areas in the past two years: over the valleys of Swat, Kalam and Kumrat to the mountains of Chitral, Shandoor, Gilgit and Hunza, across the Deosai plains, and all the way to Khunjerab Pass on the southwest border of China.
This year, the twosome decided to try something even more adventurous: visit Pakistan’s tribal areas, for long the ground zero for US drone strikes and Pakistani military operations to flush out entrenched militant groups. They picked South and North Waziristan for a trip last week because Gilani said he had many friends there. The visit has left both mother and son blown away by the scenic beauty of the area as well as the love and hospitality of its people.
The duo left on May 1 for Tank, an impoverished district on the edge with South Waziristan tribal district, where they arrived early in the morning two days later and had a light breakfast.
From Tank, they drove onwards to Gomal Zam Dam in Waziristan where they stayed for the day, returning to Tank to spend the night there. The next day they visited the Makeen, Kaniguram, Laddha and Baddar valleys of South Waziristan.
Though Gilani said there were few proper hotels to stay at in any of the spots they visited, everyone they met treated them as “if we were their personal guests.”
From Makeen, they drove to Razmak, a scenic valley in North Waziristan district, where the prestigious Razmak Cadet College is located.
A tight schedule did not afford mother and son a proper stopover in North Waziristan but they said they visited Miran Shah, the headquarters of North Waziristan, Mir Ali, another main town, and then arrived at Bannu, the gateway to North Waziristan.
The mother and son are now in the country’s pristine northern areas and plan to head back home to Lahore by the end of Ramadan.
“I have great affection and love for Waziristan and its people,” Gilani told Arab News via telephone from South Waziristan on Tuesday. “I have toured almost all of Pakistan but South Waziristan is extremely rich culturally and its hospitality is matchless. Wherever we visited, Waziristanis used to call my mother ‘mother’ and invited her into their homes.”
“My mother was stunned by the beauty of the Baddar, Laddha and Makin valleys in South Waziristan,” he said. “The most memorable thing I will take back from here is the beauty of their culture, land and their hospitality. I love South Waziristan to the extent that I would prefer to spend the last years of my life here,” he added.
Gilani said the area had massive tourism potential, if tapped.
As security has improved across Pakistan in recent years, cricketer-turned-prime-minister Imran Khan is keen to promote the nation’s tourism potential, with the government saying it is working to ease visa restrictions for many foreign visitors.
Pakistan was last a prominent tourist destination in the 1970s when the “hippie trail” brought Western travelers through the apricot and walnut orchards of the Swat Valley and Kashmir on their way to India and Nepal.
Since then, deteriorating security and the imposition of a harsh interpretation of Islamic laws has chipped away at the number of visitors.
But security has since improved dramatically in recent years, with militant attacks down sharply in the mainly Muslim country of 208 million people.
The state Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation said last year tourist arrivals rose to 1.75 million in 2017, media reported.
“I took this excursion for that very reason: to wash out the impression that Waziristan is an insecure place,” Gilani said. “Secondly we have to set a precedent for other tourists to come and enjoy the unexplored beauty of this region.”