Day 99:

So, Srinagar.

I was a little bit lost tonight, trying in vain to find my hotel. I was scared - not of wandering the streets at night and stumbling into a bad neighbourhood, but rather of wandering into a nest of razor wire.

Yikes. It's that kind of town.

Indeed, Srinagar has the feeling of a city under occupation. This was evident to me from the beginning - on either side of the road into town soldiers strolled, carrying automatic weapons and walking slowly, seeing everything. The interior of the city proved to be similar - soldiers, razorwire and pillboxes are everywhere. The region's population is predominantly Shiite Muslim, and the territory is part of what India's 1948 war (and subsequent wars) was fought over.

I didn't explore too much today. Arriving at about 8:00 am after a fourteen hour jeep ride from Ladakh, I sacked out a t a hotel for a few hours before spending the afternoon walking around Dal Lake a bit, which lies at the centre of the city. The lake is pretty enough - full of touristy houseboats and little rowboats it is easy on the eyes. There's a lot of tourist infrastructure in that part of town, though it seems to be catering to only a small number of tourists. It seems that most of the foreign tour groups stopped coming here after the last round of violence, although I spotted a lot of domestic Indian visitors.

It's a shame that the industry is dead, but I'm sure it will come back soon enough. C told me that when the Maoists launched the last general strike in Kathmandu the tourist trade there simply died... but to look at Thamel now one would call her a liar... business is booming.

Oh.... I found a photography shop in town run by a toothless old Indian guy. I went in to buy some postcards (for some reason, postcards are hard to find around here). The guy had an awesome stack of cards left over from the 70s and 80s. I picked out twenty for myself, and as I flipped through the stack I came across a whole lot of old photos, sometimes of Indians and sometimes of westerner: all developed decades ago but never picked up.