Jammu

After grudgingly stuffing a small billfold of baksheesh into Bashirs shirt pocket, I climbed into the white jeep and closed the door. I was the last passenger to arrive, so I was given the passenger seat, a crumbling cushion sitting on a wobbly pedestal. Behind were several Kashmiri families piled high in their shabby seats. Some sat on their luggage. I felt their eyes on me immediately, but in India you quickly grow used to that. I stuffed my backpack under my feet and tried to get comfortable. For the next eleven hours, this jeep would drive through the Kashmir Valley, from Srinigar to the city of Jammu, the winter capital of Kashmir. As we left Srinigar and made our way into the hills, the beauty of the Kashmir Valley started to reveal itself. A crystal-blue river slithered between the snowy peaks. Our jeep wheezed its way up a series of short hills, following the endless convoy of goods carrier trucks, veering close enough to the roads edge to offer stunning vistas of the terraced farmers fields below. Monkeys prowled the roadside, watching us carefully with an unnerving simian vigilance. Of course, Indian Army personnel stood at the roadside every fifty metres or so, making sure I couldnt take pictures. The road sloped at unfathomable angles, hugging the mountainside meekly, as if it could at any moment grow tired and release its grasp. On the sharper curves, I could stick my head out the window and look straight down and assess our probability of survival should the wraithlike, chain-smoking driver of this jeep attempt too daring of a pass, and that probability was usually zero. There was no room for error whatsoever. One hasty jerk of the wheel, or tumbling boulder from above, or wandering monkey& In Canada we take certain road-safety privileges for granted. There arent many cliffhanger roads like this one, for one thing. Nor many avalanche zones. Also, our roads have guardrails and proper paving, our cars equipped with ABS brakes and expensive tires. The rules of the road are different, too, as is the psyche of the driver. One does not, for example, even think to overtake the truck ahead by doing a blind-as-a-bat pass around a sharp bend while the weight of his shabby jeep with bald tires leans ominously over the edge of a 2,000m cliff. But in the Himalayas, they do this. And on an eleven-hour trip, they do this hundreds of times in a single day. The Indian approach to road safety in the Kashmir Valley, as practiced by the Border Roads Organisation, is to pepper the mountain roads with slogans advising drivers to take it easy, drive carefully, and so on, and to make sure that each slogan is expressed as a clever riddle or rhyme. For example: Mountains give pleasure, but only if you drive with leisure Its not a rally, enjoy the valley Theres no race, arrive with grace And my personal favourite: Better Mr. Late than Late Mr.! After a few hours, my grip on the oh-shit bar loosened. Surely the driver makes this route every day, and hes still breathing, though barely from the sounds of things. We stopped for lunch at a roadside cafe on a downward slope, the kind of place that every travel guide says stay away because youll get sick. But the locals crowded into the place and began shouting their orders to the young men tending the saucepans, so I gave it a try, and the food fried dal and chapatiwas delicious. I ate some strange Indian potato chips, and then we got back in the jeep. Somehow, I fell asleep for several hours, perhaps to assure that my death would be painless, but when I woke we were still hugging the cliffs edge and dodging gravel trucks. Behind me, the Kashmiri eyes still warmed the back of my neck. Arriving in Jammu was like entering the heart of one of those post-apocalyptic sci-fi outlaw towns, where motorcycle gangs prowl the streets, robbing and looting and shouting, and there is junk and garbage strewn everywhere, and half the city is on fire. The din of rickshaw horns and shouted Hindi blasted my eardrums. The jeep driver unceremoniously kicked us out at a roadside rickshaw stand, where I was besieged from all sides. Beggars pawed at my pantleg. I found a guy who could take me to Diamond Hotel, a place enthusiastically recommended by Lonely Planet, and quickly got in his rickshaw. The Diamond Hotel staff showed me the rooms. They were horrible. Easily the worst hotel Id ever seen. Brown stains on the walls and bedclothes, tattered pillows, bed like a slab of concrete, and a window that didnt close. Head and shoulders above the competition, said LP. Ill take it. I sat on the bed and turned on the noisy fan. An exhausting day. I felt like a shower. I stripped, walked into the bathroom and turned on the water. Nothing. Tried flushing the toilet. Nothing. At least the lights worked. Id been in India for about nine days now, and none of those days were good. It was true what everyone had told me, what people in Istanbul and Bulgaria and Vienna had told me: that India was a tremendously difficult place to travel in, and that youd better lower your expectations all the way to nothing. Tomorrow, another bus ride through the mountains, another day of breathing, smelling, rubbing shoulders against this crazy country.