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The Amritsar to Jammu bus had hard seats and we sat at the back over the rear wheel where a hole in the wheel arch gave a draft of exhaust fumes and water sprayed up from the road to puddle on the bus floor even though we tried to block the hole with newspaper. This rain is the tail end of the freak flash storms that have caused havoc over many areas of India and it has washed the road surface away in a few places.
Jammu is a rip off. We have to fight our way off the bus through the hordes of husslers trying to get us into their hotel or taxi. We book our ticked for the next stage from Jammu to Srinagar in Kashmir but make sure the seats have padding for the 11 hour trip up the mountain pass to Srinagar in Kashmir. The tickets were 23Rs £1.56 each. We stayed at the Tourist Guest House after seeing the alternative. Another couple chose a 13Rs double room in the Picnic Hotel and when showering they shared it with a toad and some birds and when on the toilet a rat appeared from the hole over which you squat. Local food was equally disgusting.
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I have bad shits and now have to endure 11 hours on the bus, it is going to be agony but fortunately Lomotil works its blockage. The road is an alpine switchback with no road surface in parts an no shock absorbers on our bus.
When we eventually arrive in Srinagar we are too exhausted to think and are thankful for the hussler who takes us on a free taxi ride to this houseboat on Lake Dal where I am writing this journal for 10Rs for a double room. To be more accurate, we had the centre part of a wooden punt / barge and slept on rush mats on the floor but we had our karrimat rolled mattresses that we would use for camping so it was slightly better than being in the tent. At least we had electricity but the wires ran on the outside over the water and connected by twisting them together. At one end they cooked and washed the plates we ate off, at the other end the kid craps in the water. At least the water flows away from the cooking end but there are dozens of similar punt barges upstream and downstream so we inevitably got the latest version of stomach upsets. Walking from our floating “hotel” to the lakeside involved balancing on planks that went between the punts and was precarious especially after we found that the Sikh restaurants serve decent beer.
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Trekking seems to be quite a casual affair if they think you know what you are doing. There is skiing here for 20Rs to hire gear and 20Rs for a day of tows. That is for January, should we come back then?
We could go to Kishtwar and even see Sickle Moon if we want, the peak that the Carlisle Climbing Club trip was aiming for that I nearly went on. But I opted for a longer trip with an adventurous journey and without the sponsorship and reports that were obligatory with the formal mountaineering expedition. We didn’t have sponsorship, we just made our own stuff and did it by DiY. I realised that if we had the gear we could knock off a peak, though we are advised to keep that quiet.
Our landlord, or was he our captain, says he will take us to a factory to see woollen things being made. We agree but find ourselves in an obvious tourist trap warehouse where we are supposed to sit and watch a floodlit stage on which very professional husslers perform their selling techniques. We get some balaclava hats which we need in any case for our mountaineering trekking for 10Rs 75p.
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Today is spent just washing then sunbathing then shopping. Late in the day we took a bus 12 km for 3.5p to the Mhugal or Chalimargh Gardens which are formal fountains with fountains and very beautiful. We saw the sunset over Lake Dal wth the mountains behind and a kingfisher hovered over the water then plunged down for its fish. In the garden we saw some bats in the dusk light as they wheeled and cavorted after insects.
We welcomed a really odd cup of tea, which we needed because our spur of the moment excursion meant that I only had a shirt on and it was getting cold in the mountain air. It’s strange that they make tea by boiling the tea, milk and sugar together, I’ve had better stuff camping. The local tea is like granules of instant tea and tastes like it. The milk comes from either cows that roam the street eating melon skins, rubbish or sewerage and it is essential to boil it. I think they mostly use powdered milk which when made in this tea tastes like Carnation milk, though maybe it is Carnation which would make sense because they don’t have refrigerators. We have started putting lemon or cinnamon in our tea to give it some sort of good taste. Darjeeling tea is as expensive as in England.
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We sunbathe, shower, wash clothes and watch huge birds which I think are Kites. An English skinny girl who is with her boyfriend living in the next door punt (the walls are paper thin) tells us she has just had hepatitis and they both have had dysentery for a week but have made no attempt to cure it with antibiotics because “antibiotics are unnatural and kill off other good bugs in the body” they lecture us. She is trying to starve it out but I advise her to get her guy to hospital because he is shitting blood sometimes. They have an attitude that we heard repeated on our travels that if you look at the locals you see them managing OK and they must be immune so just rough it out and you will get their immunity. I explained that you do not see the ill ones, they are at home or dying and immunity is for the lucky ones who don’t die.
I have no sympathy for people who ignore proven medicine when they are seriously ill. We are a bit worried about catching germs; the lady in the houseboat washes the pans in the river into which all sewage goes. In fact one day I had a smelly time and a woman was washing her clothes just 5 feet downstream from the plop! It’s all part of the accepted facts of life here though and something that reminds us that we take our public health at home for granted. Open sewers are everywhere and though there is not much traffic, when crossing the street you must keep a sharp eye out for cows, people and open sewers that are all waiting to catch the unwary.
The people are the worst hazzard because “oh hello there, come into my shop, no obligation no problem” is so good and sincere sounding that it is difficult to refuse, (especially if you are woman shopaholic, sorry Joy) Seriously though, the silk is cheap; a 7 metre sari 36 inches wide printed with fantastic designs will cost 55 Rupees for Terylene and silk mix to 300Rs for pure silk with a good silk one about 100Rs ie £3.75 to £20.
Soft Kashmiri woollen shawls are often really beautiful and we met some children who make them for very low wages, 140Rs for two weeks of work if they are lucky. We met a guy who took us to his house for tea. He was a salesman who normally worked on the streets and said he could make 200Rs in day from the tourists. English is the tourist language all over so what an incentive to learn it. He said Kashmir is 95% Moslem with an affinity to Pakistan and he said that there could be another border war in future years.
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We pack gear for trekking and grandad from the floating bedroom goes shopping with us. Porridge is to be our light and cheap diet, £1.30 for 2lbs. Rice, lentils (dhal) flour for chapatis, nuts, cheese etc cost about 80Rs £6 but it will hopefully last us for seven days in the Himalaya where there are no villages.
One of the mothers of the family on our boat has a cut which Joy treats and the next moment two kids turn up for treatment and Joy acts as nurse while I try to play the consultant. The kids are barefoot and wade in the liquid sludge sewage that is the river we float on. They rarely seem to wash and on the few occasions they do wash they use river water so may make themselves less clean with a wash! I saw today someone wading in the river collecting rubbish and then washed his hair while standing in the river with raw sewage floating past.
Nothing is hidden on the streets of India. Joy was returning from shopping and started to come through a gate beside which sat a woman covered with red blotches. She moved away fast. Sometimes the beggars are so dirty that when they are persistent and start to grab me I usually push them away but some are so dirty that I dare not touch them and use a rolled up newspaper to keep them at bay, a good deterrent. After seeing the filthy way that some Indians live in and seeing that they have no concept of hygiene or soap and water, I can readily understand why the caste system was necessary. I certainly wouldn’t want my food touched by the “dirty ones”.
They don’t use toilet paper but was the orifice with the left hand or if there is a proper toilet of a hole in the ground there is a short copper pipe aimed upwards a bit like a bidet. Now imagine cooking and eating; always eat with one hand only, the right hand. There is no cutlery in ordinary eating places so you use the naan or chapatti in the right hand to scoop a bit of the dhal baht (lentils with rice) to eat. It is the height of bad manners to eat with the left hand. When we were kids left handed kids were called kack handed because of the same reason. We are now so rich we can throw paper down the toilet.
Back to the trekking. We missed the bus! So we went up to Shankaracharya Temple on a hill overlooking Srinagar. Inside is a huge marble lingam, a penis, of Lord Shiva who created the universe. And what a creator, a 5 feet high marbel thing erected (oops) in the middle of a tiny room. People were walking around it and pouring oil on it, putting flowers on it and generally reckoning it was a big deal (it was!).
From the hill we could see the plains below which were flooded and marshy in places with a few lakes and canals all over it. Any dry land were houses and on water were the house boats. In the distance was the Himalaya and we watched the sun slowly sinking over the distant peaks of the wonderful Himalaya.
We met a salesman on the way down and went through the back streets with him to his home for tea. Open sewers and no street lights and narrow high alley ways made me realise what England was like in the bad olden days before public health laws.
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We catch a bus to Pahalgam at the foothills of the Himalaya, 94km for 30p each. We shared the local bus with a sheep whose arse was too near my leg so I kept booting it away. Also in this travelling Ark were some hens and as many people standing and falling on us as were sitting down. Overcrowding does not describe the state of the bus. We stopped half way at a garage for some welding to be done underneath the bus which does not give much confidence in the safety or the chances of finishing the journey safely. Someone took us into his garage workshop for tea.
The spare part shops were like a chamber of mechanical horrors; gearbox mainshafts with teeth missing from cogs, but being split and the shaft re-welded to other old bits with good parts. Spares are hard to get, this is real backward country life but with amazing ingenuity and resourcefulness. Safety standards are consequently low on all things. Sharp projections stick from the bus insides; the roof rack has as much freight on it as a small lorry and on one bus there were no pillars inside the bus ie the ones you hold on to and also serve to hold the roof up. Consequently the windows and walls buckled and wobbled alarmingly from the weight above.
The windows are painted with pretty patterns on the glass but that means that you cannot see much through them! Tyres are often bald. Fleas jump from one dirty passenger to the next. In the houseboat switches are outside and exposed to the rain. Wires cross from one boat to the next and are joined by twisting the bare wires together and leaving the wires bare, and then have to be ducked under or jumped over, a risk especially in the dark. This is very difficult because the boats are like barges with cabin walls coming straight from the hull. On one boat there is a plank 10inches wide around the sides but the roof overhangs this so it is quite a balancing act especially at night when you have the runs.
Yesterday I touched some wires which flashed and fell in the water. They were promptly dried and pushed back into the junction box. We had a choice of a comfortable room for £1 per night an OK one with beds at 75p which we had for 5 days and now we sleep on the floor for 35p for the room and a boy bails the boat out sometimes when it takes on too much sewage water from Lake Dal.
At Pahalgam in the foothills we get a double room with shower at off peak rates of 10Rs 75p for the room. It’s off peak because the snows are expected soon so we are the only tourists / trekkers around and husslers try to get us to use ponies and porters and guides but we ignore them; we want to be self sufficient explorers. We prepare for our trek with a good vegetarian restaurant meal.
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Aru is a tourist spot in the Anantnag District of Jammu & Kashmir, India. It is located around 12 km from Pahalgam, 11 km upstream from the Lidder River at 2,414m elevation.
Our first short stage from Pahalgam was only seven miles which took us three hours along a wooded valley road with a big river to our right. It was very alpine and quiet. Aru is the end of the driveable road with only walking paths continuing into the mountains. There are a few huts for locals and a few tourist hotels are there with more being built. Thousands of people come to Kashmir in the summer to escape the heat of the plains but winter is approaching and places are closing down.
We camp near the river with nobody around, no sign of habitation except a very tame calf and path that we would follow in the morning. The calf was so tame that I gave it a cuddle, but it left us to graze in the wide alpine meadow with just us two and the friendly calf, or so we thought. We want to light a log fire but it is raining and I am trying to save fuel for our higher altitudes where we wouldn’t find wood for our cooking. An army officer appears and helps us to start the fire with some solid fuel and says he has just crossed the Kolohoi pass, 16,000 feet from Sonmarg Valley, a very simple trek he assures us and he gives us directions. We get the log fire going and he told us rather ominuously not to worry about noise. Suddenly his comrades in arms attack us with thunder flashes, using our camp as the focal point for their coordinated attack. It was all part of their training and great fun for us.
We are invited to stay with the boss, Captain Swami at the High Altitude Warfare School at Gulmarg in January for skiing. It’s wonderful who you meet and the interesting situations you find yourself in when you take the first steps in an adventure. We have no maps because this is a disputed region and maps are potential use to the enemy. We have no real idea where we want to go to but the valley he describes sounds good. We have also heard of a place that is a pilgrimage site high in a cave near the glacier where an ice lingam arises from the floor and is worshiped as Lord Shiva’s ice penis, wow he cannot be affected by the cold.
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I make a successful log fire on my own and make chapatis from the bag of flour we brought. I feel like a native.
A 3 hour 7 mile walk along the track to Liderwat and we camp beside a torrent with no sign of any habitation, not even a calf this time. I make a log fire and settle down to solitude but a Dutch guy appears so we socialise until he goes.
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We are tired and have an irritable day but the camp site is beautiful. Some locals come along and are called Gujars and are shepherds, very dirty and always asking for baksheesh – presents – for no reason except poverty or greed. I am blatantly asked for my socks, shirt and stove. We take to making hitting gestures to kids who come begging. We worry about hasslers becoming thieves or robbers. They go, we realise that we are alone in deserted trekking country that is expecting winter storms
We were told that the shepherds have brought their animals down from the high pasture, deserted their villages until the spring and in order to deter trekkers and thieves they have removed the bridges to deter any travel in the area and the only people that we were likely to meet would be robbers so don’t go trekking now! The stories become explicit with the armed bandits wanting money, sex, passports but we hope it is a clumsy ruse to get us to use local guides. They should have added that the wild animals could get us; I opened the tent door in the morning to see a fresh bear track, there is no dog that big, and the track was still filling up with water so maybe I should be careful when I stick my head out in case I come face to face with an unwanted visitor!
With no map and in the foothills of the Himalaya with 16-18,000ft mountains around and passes not much lower, there was the recipe for our adventure to turn into a difficult situation. I decided to try to persuade the shepherds to tell me where to go and so I walked back to their camp which was basically a log fire that they were huddled around. We chose the hardest hightes route to Sonmarg via Baltal with a chance of seeing Amarnath ice lingam in its cave that is suppose to get bigger and smaller, fluctuating according to the state of the moon (well, I suppose the moon has an effect on all of us?). I exchange some sweets to the locals and use hand signs and bits of guessed language, hand signs for Lord Shiva’s lingam being best left to the imagination.
One of the shepherds explained that we needed to go to the meeting of the five waters, or was it seven, I could not understand because one meeting was wrong and the other correct and I should turn left. Eventually one of the locals, realising that we were not going to hire them, took a fag packet, ripped it open and on the unprinted side he took a piece of charcoal from the fire and drew a map on it. I wish that I had kept that map, our only way to find a 14,000 feet high pass to our destination, or so we hoped.
Being careful not to smudge the charcoal off the map we continued for two and a half hours and camp on a deserted meadow, slightly concerned about these bandits. We stargaze in the perfectly dark sky and see shooting stars and a sputnik. A log fire keeps us warm but we worry the fire and smoke may attract the bears and bare bandits and Joy is so afraid that she doesn’t go for a pee in the night. I prepare some defences for if the bear tries to get in the tent for our food.
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6:30am we have a good breakfast cooked on the re-kindled log fire and set off for the wild country. We find a stream that meets the river but how many splits in the stream are there, five or seven? Oh just do it, we can always come back and in any case there is a mountain up on the right of this pass that looks walkable / climbable and we have food for a few days. So we follow a track up the steep gully in the valley side beside the stream. A bit like walking up to Sty Head Tarn.
We reach some huts in a hanging valley which seems to match with our fag packet map and I use the compass and guess work to decide we must go NE up another pass to another hanging valley. We do this and reach a meadow below a pass. We climb this pass and find a false pass (see map). We climb an adjacent insignificant mound with pony tracks to its summit, it’s about 14,500ft and nothing to get worked up about, like High Pike near Caldbeck. It’s obviously wrong because it would only lead to the valley that we started from.
So now we see a pass to the north between two peaks and we slog up to it – it’s higher but we have to drop nearly 1000ft to the valley floor we have just come from and then we follow a well marked path on the other side of the valley. The path led to a lake that was formed by a glacier and is surrounded by jagged newly formed peaks. The path continued around the lake and we reckoned it would be too hairy even if there was a pass around that other side. We later saw on a proper map that there was a pass round there but we were told that you need ropes for that pass and on the other side of the pass was a gorge so it seems that we took the correct decision to ignore that route. The mountains all around had rocky pinnacles and bare steep cliffs with some beautiful looking ridges all about 17,000ft.
We realised that we had to wearily retrace our steps to the Gujar summer pasture huts in the valley 3000ft below. We could see due north the valley stretching into the distance. We thought that it cannot be too far and it would be good to see where we should have gone, and we had enough food for an evening meal if we decided to camp just below the pass, or if we were lucky, just after we cross it.
It was one of those elusive ends – the vague path sometimes petered out and we stumbled over vast boulder fields with boulders as big as cars. Sometimes the path appeared so big that we were sure that we must be right, other times we wondered if it was a trick of our hopes and imagination. On our left were steep rock sides of mountains with snowfields clinging to their faces. Below one, a newly formed glacier lake. Finally the pass, but it’s a broad saddle with another glacier lake in it. The difference was that its shape, although normal, had its outlet going into the saddle and disappearing, slowly re-emerging on the other side as a newly formed waterfall.
[see Oct 8th steep camp]
Well, the trouble was that it was the waterfall that was the only way down the other side. The path had stopped and though we could see the valley bottom way below, there was no obvious path, but an apparent track led to the edge of this drop by the waterfall.
We were worried, it was 6pm and dusk and we were exhausted to the point of feeling quite ill and in urgent need of food and drink. But we were at 15,500ft and I wanted to descend so that we could be warmer. Last night there was ice on the inside of our single skin tent and that was at 12,000ft so tonight was potentially going to be dangerously cold. We tried to force a way down the other side, only to find ourselves in a sticky situation in the pitch black of night. We couldn’t see a descent and were surrounded by silver birch trees clinging to rocky terraces with cliffs below and the sound of the waterfall now some distance away.
Emergency camp was the only solution on the only small piece of flat land that was not covered with boulders but although flat it was not horizontal, in fact it was very steep and after we pitched the tent our nylon sleeping bags slipped down the nylon groundsheet nearly out of the door. I wondered if there was a way to anchor the sleeping bags but by now we were too exhausted. It was pitch black and although we knew there would be the stream somewhere, the torch decided to break so it was too dangerous to feel a way to the water source in the waterfall. The thought of bears and not being able to retrace our steps or the thought of trying too hard to continue our descent tomorrow down the steep sides and maybe slipping were on our mind.
For our long awaited evening meal we shared one small can of tuna fish, the only ready food we had, but we couldn’t find the can opener without a working torch. I would have used my teeth but we fumbled to find a pair of scissors and managed to open it in the dark without injury. Unfortunately the salty fish and no liquid was a torture and our only solace was one boiled sweet each. Somehow discomfort, exhaustion, dehydration and the fear of slipping down the steep slope all combined to allow some moments of sleep.
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At first light we retraced out steps upwards and realised just how steep and precarious our descent had been in the dusk. It took hours to ascend back up the 1000ft we had descended because we were down to our body reserves and very dehydrated and still had no water. At the top of the pass I got water at last and cooked the handful of porridge that remained and we swilled tea like camels at an oasis. Then the long slog back down to the valley. We saw yet another pass that could have been the correct one with a well worn path going up it by we ignore it and return to the Gujjar huts to cook our rice and lentils.
We continue to descend to the lower valley and we reach the Lidderwat hut at 6pm after starting the day walking at 8:30am, the second day of such long walking. We buy a huge plate of rice and potatoes and a thought of cauliflower and silently curse the locals for giving us wrong instructions. We later learn that we had been told to turn off the main valley far too early and should have walked to the actual Kolahoi glacier! Not our fault but quite an experience.
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We finished in true epic style by not having a proper breakfast only two cups of tea and two chapattis each then walking 17 miles in 6 hours to the bus. Our feet were blistered and bruised but we had learned a lot about ourselves. Joy certainly has got the stamina and staying power of any man in the mountain environment and she surpasses or complements my efforts so I have full confidence in her ability as a walker and mountaineer.
Don’t worry back home, any more treks will be much better planned in route detain and we certainly showed that we can extricate ourselves from potentially sticky situations. Our gear kept us very warm, even while camping at 15,000ft.
{By now you should have a letter posted in England about everything to Istanbul. Your letter implies that you received it. You should also have a letter from Amritsar about over the Khyber. Now this letter from Delhi. Don’t send film to India but to Kathmandu if you bother, otherwise we will manage to get one ourselves. Thanks for writing, it makes a huge pleasant treat to hear from home. Hope all is well.
Ps we’ll be in Kathmandu 20 Oct to 20 Nov then Delhi to 27 Nov then anywhere!}
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Fifty years later after my wanderings getting lost in the mountains in Kashmir, with the help of the Google search engine I finally find out what Amarnath cave is and where it is, or more importantly, that it is not situated where those locals scribbled with a piece of charcoal on the back of the fag packet.
However, having seen the webpage (the Internet was not even invented then) the Sacred Sites Amarnath show pictures of such horrible overcrowding and mess that I am very pleased that we were misdirected to the pristine hanging valley with a little adventure thrown in. We survive our misadventures again!