Lost and Found in Srinagar: A Tourist’s Tale of Beauty, Chaos, and Mild Existential Panic.
Ideally, paradise had a postcode, and it probably would have landed in Srinagar. This Kashmiri city, sitting on the Dal Lake with mountains for neighbours, is so beautiful it’s almost unfair. You arrive expecting a serene Himalayan postcard and, to be fair, that’s exactly what happens. Except for the occasional traffic jam involving shikaras (those charming wooden boats) and local pigeons, who seem to have an uncanny sense of timing when you’re on Instagram snapping your perfect shot. Srinagar looks good, sure, but it’s cinematic. The Dal Lake is the star attraction at the moment, and for good reason. Floating gardens, floating markets, floating hotels, (yes honestly), if it doesn’t float, it probably doesn’t belong here. You can spend an entire morning roaming the lake in a shikara and listen to your boatman give you back-story lines that are part folklore, part comedy and part marketing pitch. All you know is that you have accepted to purchase a papier-mâché box, a saffron packet, and perhaps even a rug that will be more expensive to ship than a flight home. The houseboats are your true test case for what you expect romantically. “They groan, they’re charming, and they leak, but that’s all part of the fun.” Its wooden carvings are so elaborate that you’ll wonder how anyone has the patience to work with something like that. Then you’ll discover your Wi-Fi signal has vanished, and suddenly there’s time for you to think a lot. Srinagar has plenty of Mughal gardens too, and if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to traipse through centuries of royal parkland, this is your chance. Shalimar Bagh and Nishat Bagh are so well arranged that each becomes the basis for you to wonder which plant you’ve ever accidentally killed. The fountains gurgle in that self-gratifying way that only fountains in ancient gardens can, the mountain setting all looks Photoshopped. And then there’s the food, which deserves its own pilgrimage. Kashmiri wazwan is a multi-course feast to the point where you will have to re-evaluate all of the diets you’ve tried. Lamb cooked in twenty different ways, rice that tastes like a celebration, and kahwa, a fragrant green tea with saffron and almonds that makes you feel like royalty, even if you just don trekking shoes and a windbreaker. But Srinagar is a mirror, too, for all its postcard prettiness. The calmness of the lakes and the quiet dignity of the locals keep the fact painfully apparent how noisy you are in your own life. You are here to escape, but you realize you have lived in fast-forward. There’s something humbling about the setting of the sun behind the Zabarwan Range as everything around is slowing down to the speed of a drifting boat. If you leave, you’ve lost track of time, you probably’ve lost track of your schedule, you might not even bring along a modicum of your cynicism. Srinagar does that to you, it’ll take you apart lightly, tell you what remains effective and then give you a cup of kahwa for the road ahead. |
