Skip to main content

Pakistan full of hidden natural wonders, says PM

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that Pakistan is a land of unimaginable beauty, hidden natural wonders and untapped tourism potential.

He said this on Sunday in a Twitter message which came after a travel magazine, Wander­lust, listed nine destinations of Pakistan for adventurers in 2020, from the magical Himalayan valleys to lunar landscapes of bubbling mud volcanoes.

The magazine described the 2020 hot list destinations in Pakistan that offer diversity of extraordinary natural beauty without crowds.

Wanderlust lists from world’s longest Baltoro Glacier, stretching 63km, to 800-metre tall Trango Towers, world’s highest Deosai plateau, Hunza Valley and Attabad Lake, Neelum Valley, Lake Saiful Maluk in the northern parts of Pakistan to Thar Desert and Hingol National Park, in the west and south of the country as hot list for travellers.

Last Thursday, the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation (PTDC) organised a consultative workshop in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme to take the process further and finalise a ‘national tourism strategy’.

During the workshop, members of the National Tourism Coordination Board (NTCB), private sector tourism experts and members of thematic working groups shared their recommendations and suggestions.

NTCB chairman and Special Assistant to the PM Syed Zulfiqar Abbas Bukhari inaugurated the workshop and appreciated the contribution of participants in the tourism sector. He said that the government welcomed constructive and productive feedback of experts and private sector representatives, which would be incorporated in the tourism strategy. The proposed strategy would provide a roadmap for achieving important milestones in a more organised and systematic manner, he added.

PTDC Managing Director Syed Intikhab Alam said the draft ‘national tourism strategy’ had been developed in consultation with all major stakeholders. The PTDC has planned to promptly incorporate comments and recommendations of private sector experts and NTCB members, he said.

Meanwhile, British Back­packer Society (BBS) has stated that Pakistan, with improved law and order, and inclusive steps taken by its government, may see a huge influx of foreign tourists in coming years as the world’s rapidly growing tourist and travel destinations of the next decade.

Pakistan, after clinching top position in the recently issued ranking of the United States-based travel magazine (Cond Nast) for the 2020s best tourist attractions, has now been declared as third highly potential adventure travel destinations of the world by the BBS, according to APP.

The BBS, in its previous list of the world’s best tourist destinations issued in 2018 had also regarded Pakistan as number one tourist attraction, besides describing it as one of the friendliest countries on earth, with mountain scenery that is beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.

The BBS is an organisation dedicated to promoting and enabling sustainable adventure travel in emerging tourism markets.

Unlike the previous practice, the BBS is looking for a decade-wise perspective this year and will be issuing the ranking of those countries, which it believes as top 10 fastest growing adventure tourism destinations of the world during the next 10 years, BBS President Samuel Joynson told APP in a telephone conversation.

He said the BBS members had voted Pakistan as one of the highly potential tourism markets of the future as it started from a higher base. Pakistan offers much more to travellers and tourists, he added.

Mr Joynson appreciated the government’s steps for the promotion of tourism, particularly for hassle-free access of the foreign tourists to the country.

He said the new e-visa system and abolishment of No-Objection-Certificate for foreign tourists depicted that the incumbent government had put tourism at the front and centre of its policy agenda.

The e-visa initiative is a huge step forward and very positive as so many BBS members now can easily travel to Pakistan without any hindrance, he remarked.

He underlined the need for projecting Pakistan’s tourism potential overseas through an advertisement campaign and projection on the social media.

To a query, he said the government should focus on building mid-range hotels in its northern region as the tourists were facing a major challenge of accommodation.

He also called for upgrading the existing transportation and road infrastructure.

Published in Dawn, December 30th, 2019



from The Dawn News - Home https://ift.tt/35b5WvE
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trump says he urged team to ‘slow’ COVID-19 testing

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he was encouraging health officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered. The president has claimed falsely on several occasions that surges of COVID-19 in several states can be explained by greater numbers of diagnostic tests. At his first rally since the outbreak forced nationwide shutdowns in March, Trump told the crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma that testing was a “double-edged sword.” The United States — which has more deaths and cases than any other country — has carried out more than 25 million coronavirus tests, placing it outside the top 20 countries in the world, per capita. “Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” Trump argued. “So I said to my people ‘slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.” It was not clear from Trump’s tone if he was playing to the crowd, who ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sir Anwer Pervez, richest Pakistani British businessman, loses £432m in pandemic

Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, the founder and chairman of Bestway Cash & Carry has lost £432 million during the coronavirus pandemic to bring him down to No 50 on the richest British people list. The list has 1,000 people and is published by the Sunday Times newspaper . Pervez was at No 42 previously.  The 2020 list of the UK’s richest shows its first fall in wealth in a decade as Britain’s wealthiest people lost tens of billions of pounds in the coronavirus pandemic, the Sunday Times reported in its Rich List 2020. The newspaper, which has produced the respected annual ranking of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people since 1989, found the past two months had resulted in the super-rich losing £54 billion ($65 billion). More than half of the billionaires in Britain had seen drops in their worth by as much as £6b, a decrease in their collective wealth unprecedented since 2009 and the financial crisis. The Hinduja brothers, who topped last year’s list with a £22b fortune, saw among ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Despite reservations about jury, Pakistan to implement FATF reforms: envoy

WASHINGTON: Despite its reservations about the fairness of the jury which is to determine Pakistan’s performance against terror financing, the government is committed to implementing its action plan for dealing with this issue, says Islamabad’s Washington envoy Asad Majeed Khan. In a conversation with a prominent US scholar George Perkovich, recorded at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Monday afternoon, Ambassador Khan said the actions that Pakistan had taken so far to eliminate terror financing were “reflective of the political will”. “We feel that we have done a lot. We are also clear and determined to do more,” said the envoy while responding to a question about a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held in Orlando last week, which asked Pakistan to implement its own action plan for eliminating terror financing by October. Failing to do so could put Pakistan on a blacklist of violators and bring strict economic sanctions too. “But we w...
Post a Comment
Read more