Kashmir

A few months after I arrived in Japan, I was walking through the streets of Kurashiki, a city neighbouring mine, with my new friend Lee. We had just been celebrating another friend's birthday. We were approached by two beautiful blonde western girls who asked us for directions to the club we had just been at. One of them was petite with big green eyes which held mine for longer than a stranger would, and I was instantly smitten. I vowed to return to Kurashiki the next weekend to find her, which I did. Megan and I got together on the Spring Equinox and began to explore the intricacies of a relationship in which both people come from different countries and meet in a third. In June, she asked me if I would join her in India once her contract finished, and after a bit of negotiation with the headmaster at my school, I said yes.

We arrived in New Delhi at 10pm after a ten hour flight on the dirtiest plane I've ever seen that still flies, with a short stopover in Hong Kong. The plane looked like it was going to fall to pieces. Inside it actually was falling to pieces. It was so old that it still had ashtrays and those pneumatic earphone jacks in the armrests. The inflight safety briefing sounded like a death metal vocalist with bronchitis. Sometimes it just degenerated into horrible noise. My neighbor thoughtfully translated this for me after I got back: "Dont even bother trying to listen to this safety announcement. If this baby goes down, we're fucked." The flight attendants were serving double servings of triple whiskeys and then coming around later and offering more. I took advantage of this thoughtful service and the peace of mind it afforded. Needless to say, we were happy when it landed and stopped and we got out.

I had sent a few emails to hotels in the dubious yet popular Pahalganj area asking if they had rooms, yet none of them had replied by the time we left. At the airport, I phoned a few of them and found one that had an available room. We were pestered by taxi drivers offering bargain trips, but I had read that they had alterior motives (they receive commission for taking you to places you don't want to go) and opted for the more expensive government taxi instead. In a little over ten hours, we had come from ordered, efficient Japan and descended into the smoky chaos that is New Delhi. The taxi turned left out of the airport and straight into a midnight traffic jam. All the cars had dents and dings, even the new ones, and we soon found out why. Following distance is not a recognized concept on Delhi roads. Our driver performed manoevers that would make even South African taxi drivers jealous. A police van was on our tail with the driver screaming in Hindi over the PA system. I thought he was screaming at us, as we had perpetrated about ten traffic violations in as many seconds, but it turns out he was screaming at everyone to drive as fast as they could. When we passed the pile-up, the traffic eased a little. We made it into Pahalganj eventually, but the driver said that he couldn't find our hotel, as the address that I had given him was inadequate. He may or may not have been in on the same type of scam as the other taxi drivers, but what happened next is literally a textbook case of what travellers are warned to watch out for and avoid when arriving in New Delhi.

It goes something like this: Your driver will tell you that he cannot find your hotel. He will then take you to a travel agency (which is mysteriously still open at midnight) in order to better locate said hotel. The travel agent will be a smooth talking Kashmiri, and you will feel like he is your best friend within a few minutes. He will call your hotel, pass you the phone, and they will tell you that they have become booked out in the time that it took you to get from the airport to his office. He will helpfully offer to find other hotels for you. Their prices will escalate with each phonecall, but rooms will only become available to you by the time the prices are at the stratospheric level. He is the one dialling the numbers, by the way, and you are the one talking to whoever it is on the other end. You now have three choices. Wonder around in Pahalganj until 6am when the trains start running to the places you had planned to go (not really a choice at all, considering jetlag, luggage, spooky people with long fingernails etc.); Spend your entire budget for a few hours rest with the CEOs, politicians/drug traffickers and movie stars... or drop all your plans and buy a package holiday in Kashmir! In which case a decent hotel for the night will materialize out of thin air.

Megan and I are both easygoing people and a year each in Japan had primed us to expect the unexpected, roll with the punches and take things as they come. We had actually got so good at this kind of thing that we were pretty much the perfect candidates for What Not To Do When You Arrive In New Delhi.

To be fair, I had wanted to go to Kashmir since I had called my friend Roger, who had spent a year travelling India, to ask him for advice. After telling me several times that two weeks is just not enough time to spend there, he suggested we go to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, and stay on a houseboat. Megan was keen on the idea too, until she heard about the American travel advisory to the region. As Operation Catastrophic Doom (a rose by any other name would smell just as bad) marches on, more and more places around the world become unsafe for American citizens, and now since the suspension of Habeas Corpus, America itself is one of those places (as an aside, I would like to point out that the misuse of the "T" word has grossly exaggerated the actual danger of a random attack by a group of dispossessed and/or CIA sponsored killers. Statistically, you are more likely to die from falling off your chair or being stung by a bee. I eagerly await the War on Chairs, but that's for another blog). We had decided to go to Uttaranchal instead, since we both wanted to go to the Himalayas and this was another state that the range intersected. Our first two hours in New Delhi, however, brought us back to Plan A.

The hotel that Yakub the smooth Kashmiri travel agent found for us was small yet clean and comfortable. Our room had a marble floor was taller than it was wide, which made it feel as if gravity was at right angles and we were sleeping on the wall. We were preparing for the worst, having re-read the guidebook to find that we had done exactly what they had warned against. We were both a little worried that we had been sold a dud hoiliday, that we would be asked to pay for the hotel in the morning and that our plane tickets to Srinagar would not materialize.

We were pleasantly surprised to find our fears unfounded. We were given our choice of breakfast, we didn't have to pay for the hotel, and we were driven to the airport in a car with only three or four dents in it (which meant it was very nearly brand new). The domestic flight to Srinagar was on the best airline either of us had been on, and even though it was only a little over an hour's flight, we were served a delicious meal of curry and basmati rice. Srinagar lies in a valley between the Pir-Panjal range and the Himalayas, and we were running around the plane like little kids trying to take in the view of the snowcapped peaks from either side. Landing in a Himalayan valley in an Airbus is really fun. It involves a series of steep dives interspersed with G-pulling level-outs, kinda like being on a five mile high roller-coaster in slow motion.

Srinagar airport is better described as a military base that allows civilians in. We were greeted by a group of soldiers with assault rifles who asked us for our names and then misspelled them so badly that they couldn't find us on the passenger list and started to get excited that finally they might be able to shoot somebody. Luckily a senior officer recognized our names from our passports and ushered us out to meet Ibrahim, the guy who would be driving us around most of the time. On the way out of the airport we passed a sign that said "Welcome to the Paradise on Earth". I have been lucky enough to visit a few kinds of paradise before, but Praia De Tofu, Ko Tao and Grande Comore (though each having suffered through a coup or civil war or both) were never as heavily occupied by military force as Srinagar, Kashmir. Soldiers were everywhere. Literally. Everywhere we looked, there were soldiers. They were stationed every hundred metres or so on the road into the city, and in greater concentration in the city itself.

We were a little on edge as Ibrahim parked the car. We slid off the leopard-print seats and onto the dusty street wondering if we had just become the latest hostage story that no-one would hear about. We had arrived at Dal Lake after having driven through the city down poplar-lined avenues and past impressive new houses for Indian CEOs, politicians, generals and/or drug traffickers. Almost every civilian had amazing green eyes. None of the soldiers did.

Once we stepped onto the shakira, which is Dal Lake's floating equivalent of a taxi, our anxiety subsided with the noise of the heart-shaped paddle dipping into the still clean water. We were paddled through the floating town (the quietest town I've ever been in) and greeted by Kashmiri schoolkids and colourful Indian tourists on passing shakiras. It took about five minutes to reach The Wild Rose, our houseboat and base for the next two weeks. The Rose was the size of a modest house, with two bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, a rudimentary kitchen, a dining room, lounge and a balcony hanging over the stern. We even had a nice view (actually spectacular on clear days). It was built entirely of wood, like every other of the few thousand houseboats on the lake. We had chosen the budget option at Yakub's recommendation. The other options were DeLuxe and Super DeLuxe. The Wild Rose was a little rickety, but comfortable and fully carpeted, and judging from that, I can only imagine what opulence the Super DeLuxe dwellers languished in. We were relieved to see it, and hear that we would be given three home-cooked meals a day. We hadn't been swindled (that badly) after all.

Having left our crazy Japanese working hours behind, we were both relieved to have a whole day of doing nothing. Nothing except parting with large sums of money. Ibrahim managed to talk us into a trekking expedition and a series of day trips. The accommodation itself was a fairly good deal, but we were to discover that trekking in the Himalayas comes at quite a price. Beyond the budget kind of price. An opportunity to do this thing doesn't come around very often though, so we took it. I felt bad for having helped drag Megan into this mess, but it really was a beautiful mess.

The next day we were taken to visit some gardens laid out by the old and very rich Mughal family, who had pretty much run Kashmir for several centuries before the British came and messed everything up. The gardens were spectacular. One had a gigantic snowmelt-filled water feature that ran down the entire length of the garden to the lake. The trees were magnificent; huge lush sentinels that had stood for hundreds　of years protected by a Mughal decree forbidding their felling. Our guide's name was Althalf or something, but we called him by his nickname, Shoga (which means ginger in Japanese) instead, as it was much easier to remember and pronounce. We took a crowded bus around the quieter parts of Srinagar (still heavily militarized) and were stared at by schoolboys who looked like they thought we were the most interesting things they had seen all year. We had lunch on the shakira in the shade of an 800 year-old bridge that was all that was left of the original road to the city across the lake. Our next stop was at a pristine white mosque, one of the most popular places of worship in the area. Every Friday the building and grounds are filled with around eighteen thousand people. Megan was given a green cloth to put over her head and we had to take our shoes off and hand our cameras in at the door. It was the first time either of us had ever been inside a mosque. And who did we see inside the holiest of holies but an Indian soldier with a loaded assault rifle. If that doesn't say "Fuck You"
louder than anything except explosives going off, I don't know what does.
The visit was interseting, if a little unnerving. We saw some pages of the first Koran brought into Kashmir from Arabia. They were very large, very ornate and several hundred years old. We left the mosque and wandered around the area watching craftsmen silver-plating bowls and decanters at their streetside workshops while pigs, sheep, dogs and chickens scrabbled around in little piles of rotting vegetables. Nearly every building was at least a century old, and contained several small enterprises like chai shops, spazas and mechanics' workshops.

After another day of doing very little, Megan and I left the houseboat to travel up the Sonomarg valley and into the Himalayas. We passed huge herds of goats, huge convoys of army trucks and little villages in which little had changed for centuries. The water in the river was a milky aquamarine and the broadleaf trees gradually gave way to alpine conifers as the valley steepened. We eventually turned onto a road that had a gate, a guard and a sign saying 'No Vehicles'. Some money changed hands and our vehicle proceeded along the road.

Our first campsite was in a valley presided over by a glaciated 5000 metre mountain. The grass was very green and very short, as a result of sheep poo and sheep teeth respectively. We walked up the valley for an hour or two, following an ancient pilgrimage route known as the Yatra. At the turning point of our journey we came across a weird formation that looked like the ground on either side of the river was reaching upwards to try to touch itself again a few metres over the river. Shoga explained that it was the remnants of a glacier from the previous winter. The ice had been stained dark brown by the soil and debris, and the river had bored a tunnel through it. We had evidently arrived a few days after the roof of the tunnel had melted away, leaving the sweeping arcs behind.

The next day, after the airforce had temporarily ruined the peace in the valley, we started the real trekking. It was pretty tough going walking continuously uphill, especially after a few days of doing almost nothing, but it was excellent to be out in nature amidst the soaring mountains. It was like walking through a huge mountainous park, though it was hardly 'a walk in the park'. We got to our campsite just before it started raining. The next morning the valley was illuminated with golden light and the clouds clung to the side of the mountain just below us. In the time it took us to eat breakfast though, it had started snowing! We had to delay the start of the day's trek beacuse of this, so we waited a few hours, drinking sweet tea. The sun eventually came out and imbued everything with brilliance (we had been sampling some of Kashmir's best while we waited, which may have aided in the perception of this brilliance). Each little melting snowflake cast tiny rainbow spectra. The squelchy meadow shone bright green and the mountains across the valley glared brilliant white against the blue sky. I cant think of any adjectives for that one. It was just blue. I put on the rediculously large and heavy snowboots that Ibrahim had lent me before we left, and we set off for the ridge, about eight hundred vertical metres above us. Habib, a local of Sonomarg valley, and Shoga accompanied us, along with a pony that Megan accepted a ride on. The first half an hour was very steep and hauling those heavy boots uphill in thin air started to take its toll, so when Megan offered me the pony, I accepted. I could virtually hear the thing thinking: "No! Not the big one! Not with those boots on! Can't he just walk?! Noooo!" Afterwards I looked at a photo Megan took of me riding it and it just looked rediculous. Poor animal. My feet were nearly dragging along the ground! Needless to say, after a few minutes it just stopped and refused to respond to any encouragement, so I duly got off. We reached the ridge at about lunchtime and awesome vistas opened up to us on the other side. We stayed there for about two hours, eating, resting, meditating and just soaking it all up. Words can't really describe what it was like. Suffice to say that we were in the Himalayas, almost completely surrounded by snowcapped peaks separated by emerald valleys while eagles soared above and below us.

By the afternoon of the next day we were back at the bottom of the Sonomarg, both bearing evidence of exposure to the elements on our faces. It was the most expensive four days that either of us had paid for, yet one of the most memorable, and worth every dime (we paid in US Dollars). After a day's rest on the houseboat, we headed into Srinagar to visit the biggest Mosque in Asia with a capacity of 33 333 people. We were told that some days it is filled and thousands more worshippers have to stay outside. The roof is supported by about 347 huge wooden pillars, each once a single tree. The mosque is 700 years old and has burned down three times in its history.

The following day, we were back on horses again, this time in Gulmarg, home of the world's highest golf course. We were taken on a hair raising ride down the side of the mountain in which my feet got knocked out of the stirrups a few times as the horse passed too close to boulders on the side of the path as it tried its best to stop itself from slipping. We were happy to get to the bottom of the valley, as were the horses, which took off for home at a gallop at one point. It was the first time I have ever had to hang on to a galloping horse, but I got the rhythm so it was more fun than scary.

Our next adventure was in Pahalgang, a chilled horse ride though a pine forest and across a large meadow to the head of a beautiful valley. The horses had grown up together so they played along as Megan and I raced and tried to run each other off the path...or maybe Megan and I played along as they raced and tried to run each other off the path...

We listened to the chorus of Imams calling the faithful to prayer again on our last evening together. Their voices mingled over the lake very much like the voices in 2001 Space Oddyssey when the monolith is discovered. Often we'd hear congregations from two different mosques chanting in unison. There is no noise pollution on the lake, for the obvious reason that there are no cars, so these chants and prayers pervaded the dewy evenings and early mornings uninterrupted by any other sound.

The next morning it was time for me to go. Megan left the following day, yet she is staying in India until nearer to the end of the year, learning the secrets of Reiki and Yoga.

Sure, the Americans don't want you to go there. Sure, there are a lot of guns, bombs, jets, soldiers and other such bullshit. Sure, its the only place on Google Earth where you will see a red border instead of a yellow one, but Kashmir is something special. It is a land of people under occupation. They are obviously unhappy about this, yet the natural beauty, their faith in their religion and the grace with which they live their daily lives seem to combine to create something that stands victorious over the fact that it is a flashpoint for a potential nuclear war. India, Pakistan and China all own atomic weapons, and they all think they own Kashmir. But none of them do. The Kashmiris own Kashmir, and they always will.