3-day snow festival at Galyat concludes

F.P. Report

ABBOTTABAD: Three-day snow festival at Galyat has come to an end on Sunday with renewed vows from the town managers to promote the area as one of the top adventure travel destinations of the world.

The multi-locational event at the hilly area having a number of ‘Gallies’ (allyes) has drawn a sizeable number of local and foreign tourists which the Galyat Development Authority (GDA) has termed as a huge success.

The GDA, playing leading role in arranging the first-ever snow festival in Galyat, said some 40,000 tourists had thronged  the festival to promote tourism as the national cause, besides witnessing snow in its different alleys located in the north east of Islamabad.

The event featured a number of games and competitions for the tourists, including skiing, sculpture making, graffiti, tug of war, ice football, archery, snow tubing, and V-log and photography competitions, besides jeep ralleys, bike race and quadbike competition. “The festival has served its purpose as we have managed to attract over 40,000 tourists form within the country and abroad” the GDA spokesman Ahsan Hameed told.

“Such activities are vital to improve the ranking of Galyat  in the eyes of nature lovers who have hunger to discover a location that can fill their lives with nature.” Ahsan Hameed said tourism promotion at Galyat was imperative to boost revenue generation, which would eventually help the tourism departments in building strong road infrastructure system, buy machineries for removing snow from roads, and exploring new sites for the tourists.

 He said all the administrative units including police, traffic police, rescue 1122 and others remained high alert to facilitate the visitors and mitigate any untoward situation during the event. He said the private sector was also engaged to generate businesses in the town.

Tourists euologized the efforts of provincial government for uplifting the sector and urged them to enhance the numbers of such events in future. “GDA deserves appreciation for arranging such a wonderful tourist-friendly event in such a cold weather,’’ said Jawad Ali, a tourist who came from Rawalpindi along with his family.

“If the government wants to boost tourism in the country, it must widen roads, ensure timely removal of snow from roads and provides food and accommodations at nominal rates,” he remarked. One of the major problem, a number of tourists highlighted was minimal number of public toilets. ‘Nobody can avoid the nature’s call, at least the departments concerned must considered this, when it comes to their endeavors for tourism promotion.”