CORRESPONDENT
SHILLONG: Meghalaya is taking significant strides to enhance its adventure tourism sector, with a focus on both hard and soft adventure experiences. Director of Tourism Cyril V. D. Diengdoh highlighted the state's initiative to map and document various hiking trails in a newly published book. The objective is to cater to adventure seekers who prefer trekking without specialized equipment while also ensuring safety measures for activities like caving, which require professional gear and guidance.
"So that a lot of people are looking for not only hard adventure, as it's called in tourism, but also soft adventure. Soft adventure is where you can just trek, you don't need much equipment. For caving, obviously, you need to go with equipment because there is a safety angle. We need to take care of safety and security. So, both aspects are important in tourism. So we are looking at promoting both hard adventure and soft adventure," he said.
Diengdoh also highlighted efforts to revive and promote adventure sports, including paragliding, while strengthening the capacity of local guides and service providers. "A few years ago, some places had paragliding events, so we are trying to encourage that also. So, you know, we're working on it. These are all different things we need to do. We're working on various aspects. The idea would be to build enough capacity of our local guides and local service providers so that they can then give the services to tourists because these are localised services-a hiking track or a caving expedition are very localized, and they need to be provided by that service provider who is operating in that particular village, that particular tourist location."
On infrastructure development, he underscored the government's commitment to improving facilities. "So we are doing a lot of infrastructure. Like I said, unless we have good infrastructure, we will not be able to cater to the demand, right? Adventure tourism is a very important sector under Meghalaya Tourism because we have beautiful caves, we have beautiful trekking routes, we have beautiful waterfalls, and we have a multi-pronged approach. One is definitely we want to build the capacity of our local service providers, build further capacity of the tourism service providers, so that the best trained manpower is available."
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