Six months after

LOS ANGELES – "Sierra Sam," a Texan tour guide in Las Vegas, remembers the entire week after 9-11, when not a single plane flew in or out of the McCarran International Airport. There were reports that the Hoover Dam and some casinos would be blown up, Sam said, prompting authorities to shut down the airport.

The reports were scary because Mohammed Atta, believed to be the leader of the group that launched the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11 last year, had stayed in a hotel near the Las Vegas Strip.

"Las Vegas never took a hit during the Great Depression," Sam told me. But the "Diamond of the Desert" was hit hard by the aftershocks of 9-11. The number of visitors from Japan, Las Vegas’ biggest market overseas, dropped about 90 percent. Japan Airlines suspended flights to Las Vegas. Several casinos closed. Over 200 trade shows and meetings were canceled.

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We all know that Las Vegas was not the only place hit hard by the fallout from 9-11. The reverberations were felt all the way to the Philippines. The international travel industry was devastated. Philippine travel agents told me business had already been bad since December 2000 because of the tech meltdown and the start of a global economic slump. Then the Abu Sayyaf struck in Palawan. 9-11 completed the disaster. Members of the travel industry in the Philippines see no major improvement unless the Abu Sayyaf problem is resolved.

Some travel agencies went out of business. Others laid off employees or made them work only every other day. JAL did not downsize, but employees who retired were no longer replaced.

The sad stories aren’t over; British Airways went offline recently.

The situation in Las Vegas remained bad during the New Year holidays – traditionally the city’s biggest revenue-generating period. Despite lower room rates, the number of visitors went down.

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Six months after 9-11, there are signs of recovery. The United States has declared its mild recession over. The trade show business is rebounding across the United States. In Las Vegas, there are 125,000 visitors attending an agricultural congress.

This month JAL resumed its flights to Las Vegas. Casinos are pushing through with expansion plans. In California, unemployment in february registered its biggest drop in a single month since March 1994, including in Silicon Valley, according to the Los Angeles Times.

But there will always be reminders of how the world has changed. Flying out of Manila I had to take off my shoes for inspection at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. There were no soldiers with long arms to greet passengers arriving at McCarran International, but they were at the Los Angeles airport with the canine sniffers when I flew in.

I also crossed the Mexican border to Tijuana Saturday. Going back the queue of vehicles at the border was about two kilometers long. Since security checks were tightened at the border after 9-11, returning to the United States can take up to three hours. With so much hassle, business has plummeted in Tijuana.

Fortunately the driver of the bus I was in took a different route, which gave passengers a 30-minute tour of Tijuana. At the border I got off the bus, then waited in line for half an hour for the security check and inspection of my travel documents that took less than a minute.

Still a hassle, but better than getting stuck for three hours in traffic. US officials have warned the world that terrorism is here to stay. Travel guides and bus drivers, like all the rest of us, are learning to live with the threat.