Houseboat Part 2

Arriving back at the houseboat was bittersweet. A bed, bathroom and hot shower were lovely, but we were back in the hostage situation of Sunbeam. We got our itinerary a little later than planned but quickly set about changing it as the original had us down to spend the WHOLE month of June in family home/ houseboat. No thanks.

Raj quickly made the changes and we would now be seeing Leh, Manali, and Dharamsala instead with an extra week in Rishikesh. Happy days! This meant we would be leaving the houseboat in three days, if Ali was going to try to sell us things it was now or never to get his commission for bringing us to shops…

It was subtle at first, sudden conversations about the carpets on the houseboat, how people had offered him thousands of dollars for his grandfather’s rug but he could never sell it. Maybe we would like to go look at carpets?

Next day, we’re going on another day trip to see the Shiva Temple, which sits on the hill overlooking the houseboat, and the Mughal gardens. It was Sunday and two days before the start of Ramadan so everywhere was packed and the traffic was hellish. The places we went that day may have been nice on a quiet day, but they were full of people and rubbish. Still got a few nice shots of Srinigar though:

By 8pm we asked to go back to the boat but the carpet people had kept the shop open especially for us, so we grudgingly looked at and walked over the very lovely, extremely expensive carpets, and saw the pashminas which cost £50. No thank you.

When we finally got back to the boat we found a new person there! We had company on the houseboat! It was a lovely guy called Tadas (not at all how you spell his name) who was from Latvia but now lived in Bristol.

Now, there's no nice way to say this, our clothes stank. The only option we were given to get them washed was to pay Shao £25 to do it in their washing machine. Nah. We just washed them in bath! Worked pretty well actually!

The next day we got confirmation that we were leaving the houseboat and heading to Leh on the 9th June and felt a lot better about the world. So we were much happier when we headed out on the boat tour of Dal Lake. The boats on the lake mostly use paddles because if they all used motors the sound would be unbearable! Only a few, such as the police and companies offering “water sports”, use motors.

The water sports offered on Dal Lake were brilliant to watch, Greg named it “washer-boarding”. The participants were all Indian tourists and they didn’t even have to wear swimming gear, just roll up their jeans. They stood on a board and were slowly pulled around the lake and pulled poses to make it look like they were going really fast.

Another popular tourist attraction on the lake was… well… us. Turns out that the paddle boats would deliberately drift close to our houseboat in the hopes of their clients being able to take pictures of the westerners, a bit like a safari. I considered starting some sort of booth “TAKE A PICTURE WITH A WESTENER! ONLY 1000 RUPEES” but thought better of it.

Anyway, back to the boat tour of the lake. It was quite nice being paddled around the lake on a hot day, we got some nice photos of the birdlife e.g. eagles and kingfishers. We went around the back of the tourist houseboats to where the locals actually live and school had just finished. The water was full of school boys swimming and splashing around. Some of them swam up to the boat to try to sell us chocolate, or ask for chocolate, they didn’t really seem sure which one.

It was all boys swimming in the lake, we saw one girl on a jetty who clearly wanted to be in the water, but the culture means she can’t reveal that much of her body, so they’d given her a bucket she could splash her feet in. When the boys were all pretty much naked this did seem unfair, but this is still a very male dominated place. It could be frustrating when Shao or Ali would only speak to Greg about important decisions, but I didn’t want to speak to them much anyway so silver linings and all that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-icdW5umYg

The boat paddled serenely through the floating market, and Greg joked that we were probably on the way to a silver shop… he hadn’t even finished his sentence before the boat moored up next to, you guessed it, a silver shop! We went in and the salesman motioned for us to follow him into the back for some green tea. We said no thank you and asked a put out Ali if we could leave now. No we don’t want to be shown any silver. Yes, we’re sure.

The rest of the day we relaxed and read our books on the front deck, the mosquitos started to come out so we packed up our stuff to head inside, Ali intercepted us and said to wait. Turns out he called ANOTHER silver merchant to come and try sell us jewellery on the chuffing boat! There was no escape! I went back to the room and refused to come out whilst Ali was there, for fear of ambush salesman popping up from the lake. Bring on Leh!