Kashmiri Town Has Great Snow, No Lift Lines, but Few Visitors

In the soft winter light of the Kashmir mountains, a truck loaded with bored-looking soldiers rumbles through the streets of the old colonial vacation town.

It passes the near-empty Hotel Kingsley and the military VIP lodge, ringed by guardhouses and machine-gun nests. It speeds by the Snowview Hotel, a wood-framed wreck just a strong breeze short of collapse.

Beyond the century-old stone chapel, an abandoned reminder of British rule with splintering stained-glass windows, two dozen beginners make awkward turns on a gently sloping ski hill. No one on the truck looks up.

“A Heaven On Earth,” proclaims a billboard, sandwiched between two heavily fortified military checkpoints, just outside the region’s main airport.

In Kashmir, that may seem hard to believe. Thirteen years of separatist violence has shattered this once-idyllic mountainous state and killed more than 61,000 people.

But in the picturesque, often-empty town of Gulmarg, skiers, businessmen and promoters have created a Kashmiri vision of a winter sports paradise.

This “Alps of the War Zone” is the sort of place where virgin expanses of deep, white powder clash with heavily armed soldiers, where lift lines are nonexistent but the snowboarding teacher is an explosives expert, where hotels are comfortable and cheap, but tourists sometimes are counted on one hand.

And, as Mohammed Ashraf will tell you, it’s safe -- at least by the standards of a combat zone.

“It’s not like there’s a war going on here all the time,” said Ashraf, director general of tourism for the Indian state of Jammu-Kashmir.

But a part-time war is enough to keep most visitors away from Kashmir, where tourism, once thriving, has been devastated by years of Muslim militancy.

All this amid the astonishing beauty of the Kashmiri mountains, with villages full of friendly people and wood-framed houses that look more medieval Europe than stereotypical India. Forests of 100-foot fir trees creep into the mountains around 9,000-foot-high Gulmarg, where a good winter means snow more than 10 feet deep and skiing until April.

“I’ve been to Colorado, New Zealand, France, Italy, Austria. This is the best place I’ve ever been,” said Ido Neiger, 27, the snowboarding instructor who is a veteran of the Israeli armed forces and a de-mining expert.

In better days, Kashmir was a tourist paradise, famous in summer for trekking, fishing and Dal Lake, where guests stayed in luxurious houseboats. Gulmarg, founded during British rule as a refuge from India’s savage summers, was a haven for golfers.

In winter, skiers flocked here. Thousands of Kashmiris worked in more than a dozen hotels.

Gulmarg remains a popular weekend destination for Kashmiris in the summer, but the town all but dies when the cold comes. These days, there may not be 100 winter employees.

“We’ve been waiting for tourists for 13 years,” said Abdul Hamid Dar, a partner in the brightly painted Kashmir Alpine Ski Shop, a shack jammed with skis, boots and snowboards.

Gulmarg may often look like a ghost town, with its closed restaurants and hotels in mid-collapse, but those who have stayed believe in it desperately and have remained here out of love.

“I’m not thirsty for money,” said Yasin Khan, Hamid’s partner. “Here, I’m in heaven.”

The town’s troubles began in 1989 when accusations of rigged elections in Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority state in this largely Hindu country, set off a downward spiral of militancy and crackdown. Much of the state resembles an armed camp, with soldiers on guard along nearly every major road, and government buildings ringed by rows of barbed wire and sandbagged gun placements.

Although attacks on tourists are rare, they can be bloody. In 1995, Islamic militants abducted six Western tourists: One escaped, four remain missing and one corpse was found, headless.

But violence has seldom reached Gulmarg. With two military bases in town, there is always plenty of security, and the militants are not believed to have much support among villagers, who have suffered badly from the decimation of tourism.

So by Kashmir’s standards, Gulmarg is a peaceful place.

Soldiers regularly pass through, but there are few armed patrols. On a recent visit, the weaponry on display seemingly everywhere else in Kashmir was largely limited to the bodyguards surrounding the state tourism minister, who had dropped in for a visit. The serene, forested hills above town make it hard to believe that attacks are regular occurrences a few dozen kilometers away.

But it’s not peaceful enough to bring many tourists back. Although promoters say tourism has gone up slightly, business remains desperately slow.

Many of the 30 or so tourists in Gulmarg recently were Indians skiing and snowboarding for free, or as part of government-subsidized packages. Foreigners are rare.

“We’ve got to get people to come back here,” said Ashraf, who has been pushing tourism in Kashmir for 30 years, long before the insurgency erupted. He acknowledges the state’s troubles, but insists tourists are safe -- or safe enough in today’s world.

“If you wait for some fine day when all the guns disappear, it’s not going to happen,” he said.