We are surprised and touched by the hospitality, the friendliness of the people, the daily discovered marvels on the water and on the earth. If it wasn't so damn cold in Srinagar, we might actually consider staying a little longer in this valley and renting a houseboat.
A houseboat costs 45 rupees per day, including three meals, prepared Indian or European style, as you wish. In the meantime, we have tasted the Indian food Kashmir style, it is less spicy than anticipated, and tastes exceptionally good.
In short - we participate in the daily life of the people without being a part of it. The eternal destiny of all travelers. Only when you have settled somewhere for a lengthy period of time, perhaps for years, perhaps for the rest of your life, you become, with a lot of luck, part of a foreign community. Maybe not.
Of course, who would expect otherwise, there are touts at work. Always and everywhere they try to sell their services, be it to introduce to a special friend who is known for special prices for the friends from Europe. Or you get a surefire tip for the best restaurant in the city, whose chef is famous for his special skills.
Sometimes you go along with the game, sometimes you don't. But the guys are clever, smarter than you might imagine, and psychologically better trained than a tried-and-tested sales trainer, as the following case proves.
A fur factory and some really stupid hippies
A friend of our touts apparently owns a fur factory. Just the mention of it should have set all the alarm bells ringing. Of course we recognize the intention behind it, we are not stupid, or are we? Anyway, we let ourselves be chauffeured with a Shikara (that's how the local boats are called) through the countless canals and finally end up in the said fur factory. What happens now enters the annals of inconceivable stupidity.
Nowadays, after so many years, we wonder if we were just stupid or if the salesman played his talent of persuasion according to all the rules of seduction?
Anyway, we are led into strange smelling rooms, filled with furs. Of animals of every kind, most of them unidentifiable to us. But they are of distinct beauty and quality, and above all - I bow my head in shame - they are also distinctly cheap. Can it be that this makes us weak, albeit with mixed feelings?
In any case, after a good two hours of intensive thinking about the pros and cons, a wolf fur jacket and a lynx fur jacket change hands.
What can we say about it according to today's criteria? In our days an unforgivable sin, at that time at least we had some doubts, but not more (we were indeed able to bring the furs to Switzerland, but wearing these jackets eventually turned out to be so embarrassing that they stayed in the closet and eventually disappeared somewhere).
The State Emporiums
All over India there are special stores called emporiums, where the crafts and works of art of an entire region are on offer. The Emporium in Srinagar also offers everything that the local craftsmen and artists have created.
Cloths of all colors, carvings, weavings, painted papier-mâché dolls, vases of all sizes, seductively iridescent, seemingly weightless lamps hanging from the ceiling, images of deities and strangely unreal people. We walk through the aisles, feeling the longing to possess the beauty and the need to bring it home. But our further travel plans, the expected heat, the lack of space in the car let the longing fade away.
Our house and yard tout eventually persuades us to visit a wool factory, but this turns out not to be a possible supplier of warm sweaters and jackets, which we would desperately need in the increasing cold, but just offers woolen fabrics. However, this is not we hoped for, so to the great disappointment of our tout we leave the factory without having spent a single rupee.
At least this gives us the opportunity to walk back through the old town, a unique experience. The alleys are narrow and dirty, they are full of equally dirty children and dogs. A picture reminiscent of other times, of the turn of the century in Europe.
It's getting cold, the farewell is approaching
The approaching winter is becoming more and more noticeable. For the first time it has become really cold; in the morning thick layers of ice cover the windows. Time to say goodbye, time to leave!
Strangely enough, we leave Kashmir with mixed feelings. On the one hand, so many wonderful experiences and images - the Dal Lake, the canals, the colored boats, the old town, the warm-hearted people - and yet we leave the last days behind us without any sadness. Given the long and arduous journey back, we ask ourselves whether the 1000-kilometer trip was really worth it.
In the end, don't we always do things simply because everyone does them, because they are part of the way of doing things and part of the program? We may believe that we are following our own fixed agenda, but in many cases it is not as self-determined as we think.
A return journey to forget
The return trip to Jammu is not conducive to dispel these doubts. In contrast to the outward journey, the road seems to us to be longer and more tedious. Bend after bend on the bad roads, a struggle at a maximum of 40 Km per hour, one does not get ahead and the mood is at its lowest point.
The roasted chicken for dinner in Jammu manages to alleviate the hardships to some extent, but the view back to the north is full of doubts. In addition there's another minor disaster. When inserting a new film into the camera, we realize that the whole film about the Kashmir has been destroyed. It makes you want to cry.
Matching song for the year: Kraftwerk - Autobahn
And here the trip continues… towards Delhi
