Kashmir if you can

To be perfectly honest, the place I most wanted to visit in India was Kashmir. It's as close as I can imagine getting to Pakistan or Afghanistan without an NGO. Blame the whole thing on my mom reading me all the articles of National Geographic every month during my formative years. But for our parents' sake we were going to abstain.

Maybe you follow world events and know that in the past twenty or so years, said region has been troubled. You would be ahead of our fellow swindlees who we met at the Srinagar airport.

At one year and one day of travel, Abby and I were in Delhi, running fevers from something we ate, languishing in an air conditioned cafe in the comforts-of-home part of the city. We finally rallied and I moved to another cafe with a table by a bathroom and Abby set off to find the government bus office so we could go to Dharamsala for the Dali Lama's birthday.

The pretty boy who'd also coincidentally been at the first cafe asserted himself and offered to help Abby find a nearer ticket office and left me to chat with his minions. One was engaged to a girl from Srinagar and all I needed to be convinced to go was botulism and someone normal who said it was safe. I'd like to think they would not have gotten us to Kashmir if I hadn't already wanted to go. We weren't the girl who was a $2 train ticket from Agra and the Taj Mahal and ended up $280 away in the Kashmir summer capital.

It's so textbook in retrospect, but it's been like figuring out Momento as we asked ourselves, "How did this happen?" Even though our travel agent screwed us at considerable premium to himself, we were thankful to end up in a nice houseboat to recover. Srinagar has a huge lake with thousands of houseboats which look like a floating trailer park.

The boat manager met us with as much hustle as his Delhi counterparts, hounding decisions on his $2,200 trekking package which finally stopped with strong and firm words about us being sick and not considering any such thing until we were better. And then a few more days of cat and mouse until we had our bus tickets booked for Leh.

What a cultural ride! There was a commercial thread similar to what I experienced in the markets of Turkey or Jordan or Egypt. At home, I have a much better sense of what is a lie, an appropriate price, my options are. I don't have to operate as if a third of what I'm being told is an outright lie, a third is a version of reality, and the other third is the truth. What we found in Delhi & Kashmir was only one extended family's worth of businessmen, but I don't think they're the only ones of their ilk in the region. Trust is of highest economic value. When we finally left today, Abby said she felt like we'd been freed from captivity.

And yet, I loved it there. Not the city it's self, but the Kashmir Valley. I know I'm prone to superlatives, but our bus ride today . . . if I don't find a way around the exclusive Kashmiri-only land ownership laws in this life (most handsome men in the world, seriously, but in the More Trouble Than They're Worth category), you can all come visit me here in the next. We're now in Kargil, a half way point for the bus ride and considering delaying our trip to Leh for a day or two as their annual festival starts tomorrow.