In June 1986 Cornelius and I flew from Kathmandu to Srinagar, Kashmir to take a bus across the Himalayas to Leh in Ladakh. When we arrived in Srinagar we found that there were still 5-meters of snow on the passes. We would have to wait until the army had cleared the road. We rented a house boat on Dal Lake with the name "Ark Royal." Its owner Mohammed turned into a very nice man - after he had found that we had the money to pay him. His wife and his beautiful daughter also cooked for us.

House boats and shikaras on Dal Lake. This was the view from our dining room window. The two shikaras in the foreground have been rented by Indian "honeymoon-couples" who, behind closed curtains, cruise the lake in the evening, leaving a sordid trail of silverfish in their wake.... Our houseboat was less fancy than those you see here and it was much further to sinking than we knew....

From the verandah one entered straight into our cozy English sitting room, in which we never sat because the sofa had only three legs and the little table was so rickety that one cup of tea would have toppled it. Next came a dining room where Mohammed and his son served us breakfast and dinner which the women had cooked every day, and where I told them Kashmiri stories straight from Rushdie. Mohammed was especially impressed by the one about the physician (Rushdie's grandfather) who had to treat the daughter of a rich man through a hole in a bed-sheet held by two ferocious women attendants. After a year the doctor had treated her every part but never seen her face. He asked her father for her hand — and regretted that for the rest of his life. As Rushdie says, my grandmother was a dragon.

Further down was our bedroom and a "luxurious" bathroom with a European toilet and a shower with gilded fixtures — but no water. I asked Mohammed, he clapped his hands and his two daughters and wife appeared and with a bucket from hand to hand they heaved lake water into a large tank on the roof while he directed the operation. Lake water would have been ok, especially in the evening when the water had warmed up, had I not had the feeling that not only the fish and the honeymoon couples peed into the lake... There was a sewage system on the bottom of the lake for solid waste, but was it leak-proof?

Voices woke me in the middle of the night, was someone rifling our possessions? A streak of light was coming through a crack in the living room wall, and then I saw what was going on out there. Mohammed had pried up the loose floor planks and his son was busily scooping water with a can from the hold into a bucket which his father occasionally emptied into the lake: They were keeping the boat from sinking....

On the left is the off-Broadway side of the "Ark Royal" and in the center Mohammed's personal boat. The blue shack contained the kitchen where....

... his beautiful daughter prepared our dinners.

A great honor, one morning Mohammed invited us to an evening on his boat. It was a genuine invitation and I accepted curious about how they lived. The first impression, the boat was spotlessly clean. Here you see Mohammed in Cornelius' arms, his wife and three daughters, a befriended couple, and the youngest son. Everyone was full of mirth — and the women un-shrouded! The black purdah sacks, which they wore in town, hang on the rack in the back.

I asked the women's permission for a separate picture....

and when the flash was over and they rolled with laughter pressed the shutter a second time. The mirth would not end when they dressed Cornelius in one of the black sacks. It had one densely crocheted net-window in its head piece and Cornelius went on one of his irrepressible clowning routines: "I can see you and you cannot, etc.."

 In 1986 life in Srinagar was still normal, in 1989 the city had deteriorated terribly. If this merchant doesn't sell his beans and rice he can still suck his blue water-pipe for consolation.

 In search of a milk tea we happened upon this crazed Sufi. He is pouring heavily perfumed masala milk through tea leaves in a sieve.

By Bus Across the Himalayas

On the morning the road to Leh opened nearly twenty buses of all kinds left Srinagar. We had reserved two preferred front-seats on the De Luxe Bus. The entire caravan got stuck in Sonamarg where the Indian Army controlled traffic on the pass road. We would have to wait for the military convoy, then for the downhill buses, and finally for any private trucks.  The trip to Leh took 2 days of over 10 hours each. We spent the night in Kargil, the last Moslem town on the Indus before Ladakh.

We waited in Sonamarg drinking tea, having some lunch, and talking to an odd collection of people.

 One of them was this Japanese Kamikaze and his woman friend who had ridden his motorcycle all the way through Southeast Asia and planned to continue to the shores of the Atlantic.... At dangerous stretches of road she would take the bus. We stayed in contact with him for several years.

 After a convoy of 50 army trucks, all empty, as every other army convoy I saw on this road would be empty — pure show to fool the Pakistani? - the buses from Kargil and Leh rolled down the slope.

A close up look at the road from my window seat — three feet of loose gravel between the wheels of the bus and the abyss.... Women, seen in the distance, were shoveling rocks into a landslide where a truck had recently gone overboard.... 

 But the scenery became more spectacular the higher we climbed. Soji La (3900 m) is the lowest of the three passes on the road from Kashmir to Ladakh, but it receives most of the snow in winter.

The wildly eroded summit of Soji La.

 On the pass the road became a narrow river between 4-meter-high snow walls.

 We slowly creep downhill now following a valley towards the northeast, which....

...soon widens. Four horses are grazing by the river. You may have to enlarge the picture to see them and guess the size of this landscape.

 Eventually the valley becomes wide enough to sustain meadows and a few houses. Night overtook us and the light became to dim to photograph from the moving bus. We reached Kargil and against all rumors, that the guest houses were hopelessly infected with bedbugs, found a very decent place for the night — as Mother Kiddar in Leh would later say: "no tourists having, no bedbugs having..."

The buses started a 5:30 next morning, anyone not there would be left behind.

To continue click here: Leh