January 06, 2019

Kashmir - where is everyone?

I'm in Kashmir at the moment with Nick.  It's very interesting and quite cold, being winter.  And there's no-one here.  At least no westerners, and I'm not sure why.  We saw at least 5 or 6 westerners come in on every flight to Eritrea when we were there in the summer, but two days in Srinagar and literally we haven't seen a white tourist anywhere.  There are tourists from Asia.  We're sharing a houseboat with someone who claims to be a Bangladeshi 'film star', which seems unlikely given his itinerary.  Going to Gulmarg tomorrow to ski, which I'll cover on snowlimitz.com.

The staff on the boat are extremely hospitable, which is fortunate because I have to keep asking them to light fires and bring more hot tea.  Alcohol is legal but very hard to get. Christ it's cold.