Hello all,

Our stay in ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Srinagar continued to be nothing but idyllic and the town was quiet the whole time we were there, at least in the areas we frequented. From our houseboat on Nageen lake we did hear occasional bangs in the distance. Fireworks perhaps, but during the day? And the smoke could've been from burning waste. It's the way they coincided that caught our imaginations. We lived and now I am telling the tale, so it's all good, but I'm quite sure that you'd have to be extraordinarily unlucky to be caught up in any scuffles. The abundance of military police in the town might make you feel otherwise - khaki on every street corner, patrols scouring the town every day, sandbag pill-boxes at junctions, armoured vehicles, the works. They charter entire hotels along the main tourist boulevard and deck them out with bundles of razor wire at the gate and around the walls. It feels like a city under occupation, and for the many Kashmiris who just want to get on with their lives it effectively is - the Indian army, controlled from Delhi, has national political motives behind its presence there as much as an interest in protecting the people who actually live there, many of whom would like to see Kashmir granted independence.

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Alas, as we have witnessed on so many occasions during our trip, the Indian approach to problem-solving is rather more confrontational than in the West. Take bartering with a rickshaw driver, for instance: you have to firmly employ a set of unspoken rules in order to reach a compromise or you will get screwed over almost every time. It can be a very satisfactory way of going about things, as after a good barter with a reasonable outcome both parties are happy and have earned a certain level of respect from each other. The situation in Kashmir is obviously more complicated, as the bullish nature of the antagonists is not supported by one reasonable outcome. India and Pakistan want it all, and the Kashmiris generally want neither. What a pickle.

I mentioned that we'd be visiting the vegetable market on Dal lake (pron. 'Dhale') in the previous episode, and it turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole trip for me. Setting off from the houseboat in our Shikhara (small paddle boat, a bit like a gondola) at 4am, we got under our blankets and registered the events of the starting day through half-sleep, lulled by each push of the paddle by Sharif the Shikhara-wallah. An hour or so later, the deep blue everything had turned into a purply grey, and the director of the morning was slowly turning up the contrast when we passed under a bridge and arrived at the market. We were in the company of about thirty other shikharas, ours conspicuous in its cheerful yellow livery, bobbing and milling around tightly in an area enclosed by a few buildings on stilts, a small island and the long grasses. The sellers had predominantly harvested their crop from the floating vegetable gardens on Dal lake itself. I've seen them, they exist; no idea how it works - clumps of soil and roots on the surface of the water, marrows, watermelons, cucumbers above, roots below. I suppose it's a natural hydroponic system, but how it all floats is a mystery to me. There's a hubbub, a fight breaks out between two traders, quickly resolved. We're offered peas, coriander, flowers and seeds, and we're reminded how long it's been since we last cooked ourselves a meal.

We moor by one of the buildings, and go into a bakery to buy a little breakfast. I quickly have to duck, as the suffocating heat and smoke from the tandoor (clay oven) swims around the top of the room. They're making a batch of half-leaven round breads and we buy one each, fresh from the oven, before heading outside. Then we hear energetic Kashmiri music emanating from a small marquee on the island, and Sharif gets very excited. "You are very lucky!" he says, leading us inside. We go in - thirty or forty people sit around a band, complete with harmonium, clay-pot drum, percussion and a number of singers, all playing into one or two microphones which run through a single straining speaker. They even have a basic echo effect on the PA, it sounded just like the recordings you hear in the town. I made my own, of course - if anyone would like to hear it, let me know - it's totally stomping, not least for 5:30am. We're present at a wedding party, and while we're something of a curiosity, everyone was very welcoming. A group of four rather pretty Kashmiri girls beckoned me to come and sit with them near the front. They were quite forthcoming, apparently they found my Western complexion attractive, or at least intriguing. I had been told how to count to ten in Kashmiri beforehand, but it wasn't fresh in my mind so chatting them up was going to be particularly difficult. I made my excuses. It was all too familiar.

Later that day we moved to Jamaica houseboat on Dal lake, similarly luxurious and far cheaper, before moving again to Julliet (sic), a smaller, cheaper, more rickety and altogether more charming vessel for the last two nights. Each journey down the the walkway from the mooring point at the front of Jamaica to Julliet's door could've ended in a travesty, the rotten planks bending under our weight, and I think we were staying in the family's rooms; photos, bookshelves and personal articles in the cabinets, and a tapestry of Mecca on the same wall of each room. We sat on their kitchen floor and ate with them those nights, which was made particularly memorable thanks to a run-in we had with a rat which ended with the lady of the house whacking the pans with a great plank to scare it off. For a moment, she was the vision of an Indian Wilma Flintstone. She cooked us a small 'waswan', a Kashmiri feast which can consist of two dozen dishes or more. Ours had about four or five, and our hosts gladly finished what we couldn't eat. Kashmiris really know how to cook. Whatever we had, be it sweets, standard Indian vegetarian dishes or the traditional local meat preparations with their characteristically rich and thin gravies, each meal presented a perfect combination of virtuosic subtlety and outright quantity. Wicked.

Another aural phenomenon that I was delighted to record in Srinagar was the Azan (call to prayer) at sunset. The town is predominantly Muslim so there are mosques everywhere, and each evening at 7:45 they would all kick off with their impassioned songs, all singing in different keys in a fantastic holy din. Sat on top of Jamaica I was as high up as anything else on the lake, and so there was nothing to obstruct the passage of each voice through the air; they came from every direction, some feint, some clear, the air a sea of song. It's as though I had suddenly acquired the ability to listen to radio signals, and every channel was audible simultaneously. Again, if you'd like to hear it, it'll soon be in my archive if you're curious.

The difficult political situation in Kashmir has damaged its tourist trade to such a great extent that we were plagued by our hosts to bring a party of Westerners back with us - every conversation seemed to end with a discussion about it. So I need fifteen of you to go. Exactly fifteen, they didn't seem interested in any more or fewer. I imagine this might not happen, but suffice to say that it's a great shame that no one's going there any more - we saw at most 20 westerners there throughout our five day stay - as it truly must be one of our planet's great treasures, having so much to offer in terms of beauty, hospitality, cuisine, climate, wildlife, landscape, culture... The best that India has to offer, rolled into one troubled little corner. We were sad to leave that morning, both the lake and Mehraj the Shikhara-wallah who had been our loyal chauffeur on Dal lake; over the hours we'd spent in his boat we conquered our language barriers sufficiently to have a good laugh with him. We exchanged shirts. I'm wearing it now, it's white with a turquoise and blue floral pattern. I gave him the ludicrous 'ride the riders side the slid' David Beckham t-shirt in return, which probably meant more to me than it did to him.

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I'll document the journey back to Delhi and my return to Britain in a final installment in a few days time - I think there's enough to digest here already, not too much I hope! But I'm home safe and sound, and currently writing from Edinburgh where I'll be for a few days before returning to Bradford and jetting off to Poland on the 24th. I hope to see some of you before then, and as always it's great to hear from any of you.

All the best,

Nick