Bad times

We spent our last full day in Kashmir going on an amazing horseback trek through the mountains, guided by two men from a local village of self-identified "mountain people," who have a distinct language and culture from the rest of India. Afterwards, we enjoyed some delicious Kashmiri tea with them before heading back to the city. We have tons of pictures, which we will hopefully post someday, but we have an enormous backlog of photos now that need to be sorted through, resized and uploaded. And it doesn't help that Caleb managed to take 1800 pictures during his trip here.

Unfortunately, our trip to Kashmir ended on kind of a sour note. Our houseboat host, who appeared at first to be extremely kind and hospitable, turned out to be kind of ripping us off. He offered us dinner the first night we were there, and when we asked him if he would charge us for it, he said, "No, no, no problem," so we accepted and had dinner there. He also offered us tea on our first day, which I accepted and Jordan and Caleb declined, but he brought all 3 of us tea and biscuits anyway. We thought this was just hospitality, especially considering that offering tea is extremely common if you go into anyone's house or place of business for more than 5 minutes, but it turned out that he was adding all of this to our bill without telling us. And for an unfair price, to boot. We ended up getting into a big fight with him and the owner, which resulted in us paying for the tea (at 20 rupees per person, when a fair price for tea is 10 rupees at the absolute most) but not paying for the meal, because we explicitly asked about the price and were told there was no charge. Our host's explanation that "I was telling you that it was no problem to make dinner for you" did not hold up as far as we were concerned, since it was in direct response to our question about how much dinner would cost. The owner's argument that he could have charged us more didn't really help, either.

Even though we ended up getting minimally ripped off, it still was a really unpleasant way to end what was a otherwise very peaceful and pleasant trip. Except for the day when Jordan got wicked food poisoning or something and was throwing up. But yeah, except for that, it was nice.

Our experience at the airport tacked more stress on to the residual stress we were already feeling from our argument with the houseboat proprietors. Upon check in, we were told that we must check our bags, and were told by the lady checking us in that we needed to hand them over immediately. As soon as she told us that we would need to check our bags, I started writing luggage tags for us, but as I was doing so she kept insisting that we hand over our bags right away, even telling me directly to "please do that faster." When I finished scribbling our information on the tags as fast as I could and handed over the bags, she handed us our boarding passes and told us to hurry. This was totally uncalled for, since we were quite early for our flight and ended up waiting at the gate for an hour and a half before we could board.

When we unexpectedly had to check our bags at the Srinagar airport, we were too rushed and disoriented to think about our valuables. The unfortunate result of this was that when we got to Delhi, we found that our iPod and our camera battery charger had both been stolen out of Jordan's bag.

So we spent a while dealing with security at the airport, who told us they had frisked all of the baggage handlers at both airports and didn't find our stuff, so they had us file a complaint (just so we could feel like we had some degree of control over the situation, I'm sure). That took a while, and then we got stuck in traffic on the way home, so by the time we got home, we had just enough time to pack for Amritsar and head to the train station.

We ended up being 5 minutes late, but the train was delayed by an hour and a half, so it was okay. Our trip to Amritsar pretty much consisted of seeing two sights: the Golden Temple, and the border closing ceremony. Both of those were very cool, but I think I'm going to leave the telling about those for later, since I'm really worn out after the last couple of days and want to rest.

By the way: the lack of a battery charger does mean we won't be able to take pictures, but Corey told us tonight that he'd be sending us a new one in the care package he was planning to send out today anyway. So never fear, we will soon be able to document our trip again, although you may not be able to see the photos for quite a while, since we now have a backlog of literally thousands of photos.