Pahalgam after the terror attack: Why tourists are returning to Kashmir’s most beautiful hill station

On a good day, when traffic does not clog Jammu and Kashmir’s streets and highways; or if travelling is not impaired by the movement of security forces, Pahalgam takes exactly two and a half hours from Srinagar, says Aishaq Hassan, a driver. “Stare out the window. I will play you my list of old Hindi songs even if you do not understand it,” he says, already a tad overfamiliar.As we leave the summer capital city’s polluted streets behind, the roads begin resembling poet Agha Shahid Ali’s Postcard from Kashmir. The lines from my Class 6 text book: “This is home. And this the closest I’ll ever be to home. When I return, the colours won’t be so brilliant, the Jhelum’s waters so clean, so ultramarine. My love so overexposed,” echo out of the blue. My lungs adjust to the crisp air from the sturdy grey mountains speckled with snow. There are acres of apple trees, and chinars with trunks thick as walls.“I’m a poet too, you know,” Aishaq says, prattling off lines in Urdu that sound like dense couplets. I nod the ‘super’ sign to him. “Leave it, you won’t understand,” he says, and then stops where the river Lidder appears. “We are getting close,” he adds. At the Lidder Valley Golf Course | If you are lucky, someone like Aishaq will insist that you drink kahwa laden with powdered almonds from Pampore because the saffron is best there — fresh red stigma that turns a rich orange-yellow with water. Your luck is not likely to run dry in Kashmir as a tourist though. Every turn is a journey, every bend, a stream of thought and otherwise.“There is grave misconception about Kashmir,” says Nazir Ahmed, resident manager, Pine and Peak, a property of Welcomhotel By ITC Hotels in Pahalgam. One year ago, Nazir was one of several hundred locals from Pahalgam sheltering stranded tourists with no way out of the town after a terror attack. On April 21, 2025, militants unleashed brutal violence in the region’s picturesque Baisaran valley, full of rolling green meadows, killing 26 tourists. Videos from the incident, particularly of a man on a zip line capturing the carnage, were played over and over by Indian news channels with a barrage of exaggerated animations. A tourist on a zipline | Baisaran is only a six kilometre trek from the property. We instantly knew it was firing. We are familiar with the sound of bullets. My boss called up the police station. That is when we knew that it was something major. Us drivers went rushing to Baisaran but also to Pahalgam’s top A-B-C tourist spots — Aru, Betaab, and Chandanwadi valleys — to gather everyone. It was a horrific day that I hope we never relive,” says Jahangeer Ahmad Shah, a driver.Except when the entire valley was shut down during the height of militancy in the 1990s and early 2000s, Pahalgam has always been considered safe. For years now, the destination has been viewed as an essential part of the Kashmir itinerary. A definite day-trip to the tourist spots where able-bodied people are transported on comical looking coloured sleds, and goats are made to wear sunglasses and pompoms, is guaranteed.My job as a journalist is to use words to describe people, places, and things. But I find myself scrambling for words to describe Pahalgam. I wish I could play you a sound recording of a whistling thrush singing as water flows through rocks and crevices in the Lidder’s path. The hill station, full of trees, takes on a most beautiful serenity. Life here is meant to be lived in a slow, sensible manner. Words can take time. Sometimes even years, to get right. Kahwa with freshly baked bread |