Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
Over three days, we saw this post’s hero repeatedly, each day.
I am pretty sure that he has been “selling to tourists” for at least several decades.
He was unfailingly courteous, persistent, assiduous.
On any given day, he would call in on a great many of Dal Lake’s “better” houseboats, in addition to often happening along to wherever some of the more “deluxe” tourist-carrying Shikaras happened to be.
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Dal Lake is the “Alice’s Restaurant” of lakes.
As some of us are old enough to have heard when the relevant lyric was new, in 1967 a 20 year Arlo Guthrie delivered the following words:
You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant
Excepting Alice
Imagine that you are out on Dal Lake – or relaxing, somewhere along its shoreline – at any daylight hour, on any fine day…
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If “your” Dal Lake houseboat is in the quieter part of the lake, you almost certainly will “feel the serenity”…at times.
You will also, there, be able to appreciate what still is an intrinsically very beautiful location.
And, before or after breakfast, without having to move beyond “your” boat’s verandah or landing, you are very likely to enjoy nice encounters with local birdlife.
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I took the photo at 6.35 am on 06 May 2024, as we were nearly back at “our” luxurious houseboat, after a very early morning visit to Dal Lake’s (floating) vegetable market.
The pictured houseboat is one of the lake’s biggest; “ours” was pretty substantial, but much smaller…and rather nicer, I suspect.
Atop the big hill – and widely visible from many points in and around Srinagar – is Hari Parbat Fort.
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The largest, most luxurious boats on Dal Lake do not traverse its waters.
Its “houseboats” stay put.
In most cases their keels are grounded.
However, in the event of high floodwaters, the houseboats eventually also rise – they float, and thus escape being “flooded”.
The grandest of them – such as the pictured example – are “palatial”.
Elaborately carved woodwork is a signature feature.
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This post’s pictured persons are not directly engaged in Dal Lake’s now-dominant industry: tourism.
They are members of the circa ten thousand indigenous half-amphibious families who row Shikaras on the lake, clean it, cultivate vegetables and fish in the lake for their livelihood.
(The above-mentioned are not Dal Lake’s only human residents; the total current number is circa seventy thousand. Then there are the tourists who stay on its more than nine hundred houseboats, almost all of which expel untreated waste. And don’t forget that only circa half of the human waste from the other 1.7 million residents of Srinagar – plus who knows how many tourists’ ditto – is properly “treated”. Much of that also ends up in Dal Lake)
Most watercraft on Dal Lake are Shikaras – distinctive, locally-made wooden boats.
Shikaras owned by those who transport tourists, or sell things to them, are colourful, usually elaborately decorated, and “comfortable”; they often have a name which includes the word “deluxe”.
The “non-touristy” Shikaras are unnamed, smaller, plain; their occupants are fully exposed to sun, rain and snow.
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