Kashmir and Ladakh

Lightning storm over Dal Lake, Kashmir. The buildings in the foreground are houseboats, and the blurry line in the water is a shikara streaking past. This was the most dramatic lightning storm of my life. It lasted over an hour with nonstop thunder and brilliant, massive flashes of light in every corner of the sky. Pounding rain, too.

"If there is paradise on earth then it is here, it is here, it is here in Kashmir"
-Mughal Emperor Jehangir

Conversation on Gmail with my mom:
mary: I think people that grow up on the water have a really hard time leaving it..
me: well said

I am increasingly homesick for almost everything that exists in the Pacific Northwest - family, friends, the Olympics, the Cascades, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, my bike, Port Angeles, Trader Joes, good coffee, my computer, cool weather, watching bad TV and movies, eating cereal...and to think I could have all of those things in a week... Oh well, I'm still happy about extending my trip by two months, though I am definitely slipping into countdown habits. This also reminds me that I have two more months to get bitten by a rabid dog and to somehow require an evacuation that costs half a million dollars, so I can justify buying travel insurance and a rabies shot.


Dal Lake at sunset

Not many travelers visit Kashmir these days. Reason for this is obviously the violence that poisoned the area in the late 1990's, and Bill Clinton's '99 proclamation that Kashmir was "the most dangerous place on earth" echoed in my thoughts as I stepped off the Airbus after a two hour flight from Delhi into the most militarized airport imaginable. The security process just to leave the airport was more serious than entering most Central or South American countries, but once I cleared a driver from the houseboat that I booked in Delhi picked me up and whisked me through the chaotic streets of Srinagar to the edge of the relatively peaceful Dal Lake, where a shikara (a Venitian-style gondola with an Indian flair) carried us to the Persian Palace, my houseboat for the next five days.



Solider heading home after work


Riding in a shikara


On Dal Lake

The history of the houseboats on Dal Lake is actually a bit interesting. During the Raj period, when India was a British colony, the Mughal royalty spent their summers in Kashmir to escape from the brutal heat of the lower areas. The British naturally followed suit, but the maharaja of Kashmir didn't permit them to buy any land, so the Brits built little floating houses all over the lake, and thus lived for free.


At sunset...one of these days I'm going to drop my camera in the water taking pictures like this

I spent most of the five days just lazing around on the houseboat itself, and only got dragged off once to check my email and once to visit a Kashmiri textile shop, which the owner kind of tricked me into, since like everywhere east of Morocco the carpet sellers and hotel owners and taxi drivers all have their hands in each others pockets. Tourism used to be huge in Kashmir, but the industry basically ceased to exist after the conflict in the 1990's, and while there may have been Indian tourists around, I didn't see any obvious westerners during my stay there. Eight months after leaving home, I've become very weary of places where tourism is the only industry, and Kashmir is definitely a case of this.


There isn't much to do on Dal Lake except take pictures of shikaras

Four nights on Dal Lake was enough and I was feeling quite homesick and lonely, probably due to my iPod and a few books being my only company. The long bus ride from Srinagar to Leh passed through some exquisate green valleys with snowfields and scree slopes tumbling right down to the road, though sitting in the very back of the worst bus I'd ever been on didn't make enjoying the beauty very easy. About six hours into the ride the bus arrived at the bottom of the Zoji La pass, where we had to wait for the once-a-day military convoy to escort us up switchback after switchback on a road so narrow that an arm out one window could touch the cliffside while an arm out the other could drop something off the cliff. The pass topped out a few thousand feet above the valley, and I think there was quite the collective sigh of relief when once again there was a reasonable amount of horizontal ground on both sides of the road.


Road alongside a river on the drive through Kashmir

One of the interesting things about going over the pass was that almost instantly we left the lush, green scenery of Kashmir behind and entered the dry, desert environment of Zanskar. In the next four hours of the bus ride I repeatedly had to get off the bus and register with various military checkpoints, since the fact that the Line of Control with Pakistan was practically within spitting distance from the left side of the road makes the area particularly volatile. The lack of hostilities in the last few years makes the 60,000+ deaths in the last 15 years really validates Clinton's declaration in '99, since that iis when the majority of the violence occured.


The mighty Indus River - this curves over through Pakistan before emptying into the Arabian Sea




All of these signs alongside the road to Leh had funny little safety warnings, like, "A cat has nine lives but not the one who drives" and "Go easy on my curves"


Some kind of herder at work

After the first day's 10 hour bus ride, I ended up in a small town called Kargil, which was one of those pit-stop kind of holes that you never thought you'd find yourself in. I got in a quick night of sleep in a sketchy hotel, and woke up at 5 the next morning to find a jeep to take me the rest of the way to Leh, which is the capital of Ladakh. Fortunately I found a family from Jammu who was hiring a jeep, and I rode the 8 hours to Leh squashed in the improvised back-back seat. The scenery on the way was just incredible, though, and I talked a bit with the other guys in the jeep. Just as the green valleys of Kashmir had given way to the arid deserts of Zanskar the day before, the crescent-mooned mosques of the Islamic west gave way to the prayer flags and monasteries of the Buddhist east on this drive, and I was surprised to hear that a bit of conflict had been simmering between the two faiths in recent years, since these were two faiths that I associated with peace and tolerance, though I guess land is land and people will always fight over resources.


Roadside sex ed...this must be the worst pieces of wisdom I've ever heard in my life...I'm not really sure how it is advice, come to think of it.


The end of the Karakoram range colliding with Kashmir valley

As beautiful as the scenery was, after two full days of driving I was thanking some kind of deity to find myself in Leh, which is in a region known as "Little Tibet" for both its Buddhist influence and desert environment. Leh is at almost 12,000', and so I took it easy for a few days and didn't do much besides wander around the small town and laze around my guesthouse. The altitude wasn't really affecting me, but it seemed like a good excuse to not do much, and I've been in the market for those lately. I do owe some ancestor of mine a large thank you because I haven't had any problems with altitude in any of the places that travelers usually succumb to bad headaches and nausea, such as Cusco, Lake Titicaca, and Quito.


Prayer flags on the palace in Leh


More prayer flags

I was feeling lazy after a few days of this, though, so I talked to a local guide service and arranged a three day trek through some of the neighboring valleys. It was kind of weird for me to hire a guide to do a trek, but I had no equipment with me and zero interest in wandering around unmarked trails and roads in the Himalaya for three days, so I coughed up $45/day for what turned out to be the most enjoyable and luxurious backpacking trip of my life. The guide cooked amazing dinners, the best food I've had in India, and a horse carried all of our gear, so we just had to carry light daypacks, which turned out to be a saving grace since the trek ended up being between 80 and 90 kilometers long. On the last day we went up and over a 16,400' pass, which was the highest I'd ever been and gave us great views of the valley we had hiked up and the neighboring Indus River valley. I would have liked to do more trekking while I was in Ladakh, and as nice as having a guide and horse was, I realized that a lot of the fun gets taken out of things like this when you don't have your friends or family to do them with.


Beginning of the trek...pretty bleak, huh? The Indus River is to the right


The Indus River


A gompa that the trail weaved through on the second day


In the valley approaching the 16,400' Stok La pass


My guide Stanzen working on the best food I had in India


Looking back at the valley from the top of Stoh La


Switchbacks in the snow

After one more day in Leh after the trek, I flew back to Delhi in a spectacular hour long flight that took us over the tops of the dramatic Himalayan peaks in the Himachal Pradesh region. As much as I admire travelers who can love cities like Delhi, I didn't have the slightest interest in seeing anything more than a shower, a computer screen, and a 747 bound for the Far East, so I planned my flights as such and spent only 12 hours in Delhi before heading back to the airport to head to Bangkok for the last segment of my trip, which will go throughout southeast Asia but begin and end in Bangkok. After eight months of almost nonstop backpacking, one of my primary goals for this segment is to spend as little time on buses as possible, and as much time on the beaches and in the ocean as possible. It's funny, I found it really hard to relax on beaches and just bum around and surf during the first part of my trip, but now it is the only thing I want to do.

Kashmir and Ladakh were the best parts of India for me, but since I have free internet right now I'll write a bit about the other few places I saw. The bus ride from Jaipur to Agra turned from four hours into six hours, and when I arrived in the dark I could see the outline of the Taj Mahal in the distance from my hotel's rooftop patio. I had half of a small beer - the only alcohol I'd had in a month and a half - and woke up the next morning feeling painfully sick, which made visiting the Taj Mahal a little less pleasant and a little shorter than I would have liked. I walked all around and inside of it, sketched a rough picture, and headed to the train station.


There is a picture of the Taj on this India tourism magazine I have, and the caption said, "And to think that these days men get away with giving chocolate and flowers"

In the train station I thought I was clever by buying an "unreserved" ticket, since the train left just a few minutes later. I stepped on one carriage and found 100 people in a 50 person car whose iron-bar windows and piles of trash made it feel like some kind of prison. I sat down next to a guy on a bench, and he looked at my ticket and said, "This is first-class. Your ticket is for unreserved, at the very back of the train." Oh. I got off the train, walked past what were apparently the second-class cars, and found my "unreserved" car, apparently the lowest class possible, at the very end of the train. The platform had ended some time ago, so the door was at shoulder level, and as I confirmed that this was indeed where I was supposed to be the train started to move. I had both of my backpacks on, the larger one weighing about 40 pounds and the smaller one about 15 (you owe me for this wine, dad!), but despite all of the weight I managed to climb up a ladder into the door as the train pulled away. Inside I found that every square inch of possible sitting space was being more than occupied, and the only place for me and my two backpacks was at the end of the car in the short hallway to the two lavoratories. Now, bathrooms in India are pretty heinous. Some of the worst I've seen on this trip. Bathrooms in trains or buses tend to be pretty atrocious. So you can imagine what its like to be sitting next to two toilets in India in the lower-than-second-class section of a train...on an incredibly hot, 110 degree day...when you're already being seiged by nausea and other unpleasantness.

After an hour and a half, a guy who had been sitting in the exit doorway with his legs hanging out disembarked, and I was quite grateful to take his place. I rode for half an hour in this position, slightly worried that someone might trip and push me out the door, but at the next major station a guy came up and presumably said something to the effect of "what the hell are you doing?" in Hindi and ushered me into the next car, where I felt like the luckiest person in the world to ride the remaining four hours to Delhi on a wooden bench seat.

That is pretty much my story for India. Two and a half weeks for one of the largest countries in the world...considering I have ten months for this trip, you would think that I'd want to spend more time here, but India is such an anomalous destination that I think a trip to India has to be a trip in itself. The preceding eight months had exhausted my tolerance for long bus rides, dirty cities, and the other obvious discomforts that India has in spades, and I really just wanted to see the mountains, relax and trek a little, and get out.


My drawing of the Taj in my tent on the trek