As I said in my last long mail Srinigar is special and I feel obliged to write more about it, even if its just to give a blow by blow description of our activities, and despite the tranquility of the houseboat we have managed to get up off our big fat arses (well mine is big and fat, it just seems [appropriate] to try and drag Amit and Maya down to my level).
The houseboat comes with two meals a day, breakfast is unfailingly eggs (scrambled or omletted), huge amounts of toast and a slalad. (What's a salad?). Dinner is usually fried lamb or liver or chicken and tonight we had an excellent lamb stew (at least I believe it was lamb but mutton can be either lamb or goat - you don't really want to ask) with vegetables, usually carrots, beans and potato. Our host Ayub is not, however, a very good cook and sometimes one has to really struggle to bite and chew the lamb stew was cooked by his father from whom he took over the business. Apparently the old man (probably 50) likes to keep his hand in. We have a fridge, the first time for any of us and that means we can keep milk, cheese, coke, water, fruit, ice cream - god, the posssibilities are endless. We are eating well and living off the fat of this land.
Each day we wake up around 8:30 (me) or 9:30 (my house-mates) and then breakfast is served half an hour later. During the interim, we drink coffee and have an early morning smoke. (ha). What to do with the day? Whew, that's a toughie. Everything, well almost everything is brought to our deck-step (my word I believe), all the shops you can imagine float up to our HB and
yell till we come out to tell them we don't want to buy anything, but they are nothing if not persistant and now and again we break down and allow them on board and then we are lost, we buy and buy and buy and buy.
There are jewellers, and woodcarvings and pashminas and papermache, mind you, they haven't brought carpets to the HB, for that we had to go to the shop and again I showed total lack of will power. I have bought too much and I want tovomit and I drool over my newest additions to the museum of kitch!
And then there are the fruit and vegetable guys, and the floating supermarket which has everything but at a 20% markup and the shishkebab wallah and the shikara taxis all needing to make a buck (and most of them subsist on that buck - most not all, some of them actually make a whole herd of bucks).
Some days we take a ride to a tourist site; Shalimar Bagh and Nishat Bagh the magnificent Moghul gardens, gulmarg, Indias most popular ski resort and claimant to the worlds highest golf course, a temple here a mosque there and of course a visit to a village about 35kms from here where the locals make imitation cricket bats (I've begun to take an interest in cricket since arriving here - it is almost impossible to ignore India's national sport and national passion).
And then there are drives around the city which are beautiful and going to Nehru park to watch the Indian tourists at play. They are mostly Punjabi (Punjab is just south and very, very hot at this time of year (Amritsar!). They come here in droves, the middle class with their 2.4 children and parents from both sides and two or three brothers or sisters and their kids and all 32 pile into a jeep and never complain but very rarely smile and because the language of Kashmir is Urdu the tourists mostly interact with the locals in English. And we take pictures of them and they of us, all very amicable.
But the best is when we take a day off and just lounge around the HB. The mornings are magnificent with the sun rising and shining on the Fort opposite us and sometimes we can see the mountains behind, snowtopped of course and the reflections in the sometimes mirrors-mooth lake. And the silence in the morning is wonderful and you hear the frogs croaking and the birds singing and in the lake are little ducks which dive and swim under the
water close to the surface so that we can follow their movements and then they pop up with a tiny fish in their tiny beaks. And all around are hawks and pigeons and two kinds of crows, the completely black and those with grey around the neck. And swallows and kingfishers and cuckoos and many others which I can't identify. They soar and swoop and dive and they're always
double, in the sky and in the water. And besides the various salesmen there are Shikara taxis and goods Shikaras going about their business completely oblivious of us.
We went for a lovely Shakira tour of the lakes, Dal and Nageen (we're on Nageen) to see the floating market - one hundred boatman all selling the same three types of vegetable all grown on the floating gardens which really do float and rise and fall with the level of the lake. You can get out and stand on them and they sink with your weight. Wherever you go on the lakes you see houseboats and all those who serve them, kiosks, bakeries, souvenier shops, carpet emporiams, restaurants - all on houseboats moored to the shore.
And when it gets too hot to sit around we jump off the deck into the lake which is unpoluted and just the right temerature for me. Then we get out and eat our icecream and watermelon or pineapple and wonder why we spent all that time in Kasol when we could have been here.
The people are friendly and even when we admit to being Israeli, not always of course, but when it seems okay, this does not change. All you have to say is that Kashmir is the best and they smile hugely. We feel pretty safe. Kashmir is indeed a sort of paradise on earth. If I have, in the past praised other parts of India, they all pale in comparison to the beauty and tranquility here.
I cannot resist sending many more photos, sorry (I don't really mean that).
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