Kashmir

The cause of three wars between India and Pakistan, home to perennial violence and political unrest, the Kashmir valley lay waiting at the other end of the tunnel that my bus was speeding through.

Once the security checks were finished and we finally emerged on the other side though, it wasn’t the barren landscape pockmarked by war that one might expect. My first thought, actually, was ‘It’s the shire!’ One of the most gorgeous places I’d seen in my entire trip to India. Guess it would have to be somewhere worth fighting over.

Even though the landscape wouldn’t look too out of place in somewhere like New Zealand or British Columbia, there’s something really immediate about the place – like anything could happen at any moment. There’s a sort of intensity behind it all. The gardens you wander through don’t feel like the product of some aging women’s horticultural association with too much time on their hands. They’re places of such simple beauty that men have been fighting for claim over them for centuries

The barbed wire, machine guns, soldiers, only make things seem more fragile, immediate. The much photographed Dal Lake looks all the more serene when you’re seeing it within the context of the conflict that’s raging around it.

When I arrived in Srinigar, the capital of the state, most of the city had been shut down. There’d been a city wide strike lasting more than a week already after the rape and murder of two Kashmiri girls – supposedly by the Indian army. The only thing I could see of most it was from the inside of the richshaw. The driver didn’t think it was safe for me to go outside.

If that wasn’t enough prices all seemed to be set for proper Western tourists with actual money – not poor backpackers like myself – so after splurging and renting my very own houseboat where I spent a day recuperating from the long bus trip, I caught the first bus I could out of the valley and up onto the Tibetan Plateau.

The living room in my boat

It’s not the sort of place that makes you want to stop in your tracks and settle in for a while by a long shot, but it’s definitely one of those places that would really be a terrible thing to miss.