Travellers have many different aims related to their profession. I usually categorised tourist of Gilgit-Baltistan in following categories:
- Professional travellers
- Seasonal Travellers
- Researchers
- Aimless travellers
Professional travellers
Professional travellers are those who are taking this as a profession in term of sponsorship, blogging and vlogs. Most of the travellers nowadays are taking it as a profession and making so much money. To reach at this point you have to invest more than 3-5 years in profile building. Which is toughest job just as a graduation degree, but you end up making much more money and adventure plus learning in addition than a graduate professional that what I think.
Almost less than 10% to total number travelling to GB are professionals and more than 50% of foreigners are professional tourists.
Despite of the fact that we can earn enough money by capturing these heavenly landscapes, I never seen any famous vlogger on YouTube or anywhere on internet who is so famous. Locals are not aware of the gold mines in their hand.
Seasonal Travellers
Seasonal travellers are mostly families from different cities to explore new areas. After achieving milestones of Swat and Kashmir, they finally travels GB. I interviewed lot of local (Pakistani) tourist about the experience of Gilgit and Skardu region, and the most frequent answer from the majority is; we were misguided by the tourist agencies a long time ago, whole GB is such an amazing place to travel and no other place in Pakistan ever comparable to GB. These are mostly used bus services to travel.
Tourist traffic on GB side is increasing in past few years. According to local entry exit report of Baltistan region police department, in 2016 1.4 million people entered into Baltistan region in between May to September and total number of 0.3 million cars enters into Baltistan region.
It means we have very high empty space for hotels, rest houses and other services places as well. Locals are quit active in this side and benefiting from these opportunities.
Researchers
Word researcher is very annoying to most of us, but more than 30% of foreign tourist are visiting GB for research purposes. Major research areas of these professors, research scholars are geology, herbs, animals and insects.
Gilgit Baltistan have rich to undiscovered assets in these four areas. Even Pakistan researchers are busy in copying and searching way to escape from plagiarism, foreign researchers are getting their job done by using our resources for free.
Local researchers should focus on these areas as well and government has to identify the visiting purpose of travellers and should formulize some sort of terms and condition, results in benefiting Pakistanis as well.
Aimless Travellers
Here comes the ULTRA LEGENDS (Mostly called title on memes pages). They have nothing to do with travelling, exploring new things, adventure. Their prime goal is to make fun of anyone, enjoy every moment doesn’t depends either they are at the top hill of Deosai or in Red Hot Multan city with no light.
