By IANS,
Shimla : Mellow sunshine and not snow will greet visitors on Christmas day at most of tourist destinations in Himachal Pradesh this year.
The Met Office here Saturday forecast crystal clear skies across the state in the next three days.
“The western disturbances are not active in the region. Most of the towns in the state will witness long, sunny days,” Manmohan Singh, director of Shimla’s Met office, told IANS.
But temperatures have been unusually low in most of the popular tourist spots like Shimla, Narkanda, Kasauli, Manali, Dalhousie and Chamba.
Keylong, the headquarters of Lahaul and Spiti district, was the coldest place, with minimum temperature dipping to 6.1 degrees Celsius below the freezing point.
The night temperature in capital Shimla was 4.2 degrees Celsius, whereas Kalpa, some 250 from here, saw a low of minus 2.6 degrees Celsius.
It was minus 0.4 degree Celsius in Manali and minus 1.7 degrees in Solan, a Met department release said.
But excited holidaymakers, mainly from northern states, have already started descending on tourist resorts in the state to enjoy the Yuletide spirit.
“This weekend almost all our hotels have been packed to capacity,” Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corp (HPTDC) general manager Yogesh Behl said.
The HPTDC has 57 economy and high-end hotels dotting across the state.
He said the arrival of the tourists in Shimla, Narkanda, Manali, Dalhousie, Dharamsala and Palampur is quite good.
The mountain peaks viewed from Shimla’s historic Ridge have been wrapped in a thick white blanket of snow.
Popular resort Manali is getting a good share of tourists as its nearby hills have plenty of snow.
Christmas snows have been eluding Shimla since 1991 when 49 cm of snow fell on Christmas eve. And except in 2010, there has been no white New Year’s Eve either in Shimla in the past eight years.