Worst traffic jams make tourists suffer in Swat

KALAM: Thousands of tourists thronging the picturesque Kalam valley in Swat had to face the worst road blockades and traffic jams on Matta-Bahrain and Bahrain-Kalam roads on Friday and Saturday.

It took 12 to 14 hours for the tourists, belonging to different parts of the country, to cover the 35 kilometers distance between Bahrain and Kalam. Most of them spent the night in vehicles on the road as, according to them, there was bumper-to-bumper traffic jam right from Matta town to Bahrain and then from Bahrain to Kalam.

Matta is the hometown of Chief Minister Mahmood Khan, where traffic always remains jammed due to rush of local vehicles and it becomes difficult for the narrow road to bear the burden of thousands of tourists.

Unfortunately, like the rest of the country, the roads go up to Bahrain and onward to Kalam passing through the busy bazaars.

As expected, the majority of the tourists had left their hometowns for Swat on Friday, the third day of Eidul Azha, and all of them reached the Matta-Bahrain road at the same time. No doubt mismanagement was a major issue and the rush was so heavy that the roads couldn’t sustain the burden.

“We had left Multan at 5 pm on Thursday and by 1 pm we were in Bahrain where we offered Friday prayers. Then we left Bahrain for Kalam at 2 pm and arrived in Kalam at 3:15 am and it took us 13 hours to reach Kalam,” Abdul Haseeb told The News.

He works in a transport company mostly taking tourists to multiple places in the country.

“I have been in Kalam a number of times but haven’t seen such a rush of tourists before. People were coming in buses, trucks, cars, pick-up trucks and motorcycles and whatever they found to take them to Kalam, and then everybody was in a hurry to get into Kalam before others,” he said. Like other tourists, Haseeb complained of the lack of traffic police to manage the traffic.

He said the government had built the Bahrain-Kalam road in 2019 that reduced the four-hour journey between the two beautiful valleys to an hour but it showed criminal negligence and didn’t construct four bridges.

Most of the people traveling between Bahrain and Kalam and other villages beyond Kalam suffer at four locations as the road is quite dilapidated.

Another family from Sheikhupura in Punjab had a similar story to narrate, saying they had to spend a whole night in a car.

“It took us 23 hours from Sheikhpura to Kalam, though we arrived quite early to Matta town in Swat, thanks to the Swat motorway, but then we spent a whole night traveling from Bahrain to Kalam.

We reached Kalam early Saturday morning. We were exhausted and hungry but there was no food available in Kalam,” said Wajid Ali, who for the first time took his family to the picturesque valley.

He said he forgot all the pain he had suffered on the way after he reached Kalam and enjoyed its natural beauty and breeze.

According to him, it hurt them and other tourists as the local administration was invisible to facilitate tourists coming from remote areas in Punjab and Sindh.

“The local administration should have prepared better traffic management for this occasion as it was understood that people from all over the country would throng to Swat and particularly Bahrain and Kalam. Tourists themselves had to manage traffic in many places, otherwise, we would have still been there on the road,” he said.

Almost all tourists had a similar painful story who held the government and the Swat district administration responsible for their woes.

The tourists from Multan and Sheikhupura said they used to go to Murree every year but the rude and insulting behaviour of hotel staff frustrated them and they preferred to visit Kalam this year.

This correspondent made multiple attempts to seek comments of Swat Deputy Commissioner Junaid Khan but he did not bother to comment. Text messages were sent on his cell-phone which were not responded to.