It is dominated by its lakes and mountain backdrops. We were furtunate to enjoy the experience of staying on one of the 1200 house boats that are home to many people on Lake Dal. Like in Venice the local transport are small boats with a single rower, here the boats are named Shikaras.
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| Oar boats Dal Lake |
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| Lili and Sandrine on Shikara Dal Lake |
Dal Lake is full of boats and people, but no noise, as all the boats are hand powered not a motor boat in sight. The only sounds to be heard are the sounds of the many birds, with flocks of Black Hawks circling above and occasionally swooping down to catch fish from the lake to three different kinds of Kingfisher and herons.
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| Kingfisher on Dal Lake |
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| Heron on Dal Lake |
On our second day in Srinigar we had the great of pleasure of holding Lilis second birthday.. We invited the only people we knew in town and our friends Saqib, Melanie, Jeane and Rihan went and bought a chocolate birthday cake some pic nic stuff and headed to the botanical gardens.. The weather was great, the place beautiful and we had a party in the park with the kids running freely and all adults enjoying it too..
Everybody who I talked to asked me how long I had been in Kashmir and did I like it, my customary response was just a few days and yes it was very nice, they would then tend to say how it was the greatest place on earth and by the way don´t believe what they show you on TV about Kashmir. The feeling I got was that everyone was very patriotic if slightly paranoid. At the time of our visit the news said that 40 militants had crossed the border from Pakistan and were now in India and the Indian army was killing some and still chasing others... We met two journalists working for Times of India who told us they were in town to cover the story, I expressed my belief that it all seemed rather like a show, the journalist looked straight at me and said yes, it was all a show for politics, there was never any invasion of militants... Perhaps the Kashmir people were not so paranoid after all.
Kashmir is Muslim dominated and the morning prayer call was followed by one hour of singing from 5 in the morning till six, which is unusual as prayer is a time of concentration, I asked my friend Saqib about this and he said he believed it was from the time that Kashmir had been mostly Hindu, once the Hindus had reverted back to being Muslim they still continued to want to be noisy as is typical in their religion so that is why there was singing in the morning... whatever the reason it was pretty strange to be woken up to a city singing every morning..
After 9 days in Kashmir it was time to leave, Danial the brother of Saqib had successfully booked us on a train from Jammu to Haldwani, it was to be our first Indian train journey. Before we left, we took another Sikara ride and also visited a national park which is famed for its black bears and leopards, unfortunately the only ones we saw were in an enclosure for rescued animals, we did however have a close encounter with a Himalayian Viper, which is a deadly snake, our park ranger/guide removed the snake with a stick, clearing it of the road where it had been and placing it safely to the side.
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| Room with a view, black hawks were constantly around us and getting photos was easy |
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| View of part of Dal Lake from mountain |
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