A cold night ensued, and I slept on and off with a vague sense of unease and the friendliness of our hosts. I was not put at ease when something scampered up my side and scrobbled about on the blanket covering my head. I thought that a bat had flown in through the window and into me, but when I sat up a mouse was deposited on my pillow (the light was on as the power had been restored sometime during the night).
In disgust I swept it viciously into the far corner of the room where it disappeared into the shadows. I donned my thick jumper and curled up into a foetal ball to combat the cold and dozed until dawn. In the daylight the lake looked like a totally different place. Coloured shikaras plied up and down the calm water which reflected the sky and the trees. In the distance the vast mountains of the Himalayas could be seen.
We were joined in the living room of the boat by the family that owned it. Abdul was disabled and squatted on his useless legs and beamed as he produced letters of recommendation for his hospitality from as far back as 1882! He and his sons assured us that they were “our brothers” and that everything we desired was “no problem”.
After a cuppa we were rowed ashore by the youngest brother (who’s services as our guide we declined) and we walked into town to find a bank and the Tourist Office. After a short walk past various local handicraft shops and a luxury two-seater shikara called “The Jolly Swagman” we stopped for a vegetable curry and tea in a vegetarian café. Our teenage camping and backpacking club was called the Hounslow Swagmen and I had Swagman panier bags on my Honda 90.
Abdul’s team had said they could organise a trek into the mountains and this seems like an exciting prospect for the days ahead. After a bit more wandering, we discovered the well-disguised bank and while George was cashing a Traveller’s Cheque we became acquainted (conveniently) with the old boy who ran the handicraft shop downstairs below the bank.
He showed us his wares and warned us against the “monkey business” of the local people, especially the houseboat owners. He told us to organise our own trek and cut out the needless expense of a middleman. He mourned the passing of the days of the “British Raj” when “India was the bones and the English were the flesh”.
Now India had gone downhill and all the people were looking after number one and were out for all they could get, thinking that every tourist “had an oil well behind them”! As he lay out a mountain of shawls for our inspection his assistant gave us some useful advice and addresses in regard of our trek.
We returned to the boat with me feeling a bit disgruntled as somewhere along the line the back had come open on my Ricoh KR-10 Super SLR camera had come open and I was not sure how exposed the 35mm slide film had become.
We lazed about on the roof of the “Gosani Palace” as scanty clouds flitted across the sun. I wrote a letter home while George tried washing his filthy clothes in cold water in the bath and then went on to trim his beard with some blunt scissors. We had a tasty Kashmir meal cooked by our hosts, which was not free as they had us believe.
After supper we were paddled back to dry land and we wandered into a vegetarian restaurant where I continued eating with a vegetable korma. We supped lemon tea and discussed plans for when we returned home to Blighty (naively expecting our fellow Hounslow Swagmen friends to be keen to hear our travel tales and see our photographs and 35mm slides from exotic foreign climes).
We were caught for 2 Indian Rupees for the short row back to our boat, where equipped with extra blankets and quilts (and bottles of drinking water too) we bedded down to a good night’s sleep.
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