It was a four and a half hour drive from
Dharamsala to Jammu.
Today is a sad day because we have said
goodbye to Deepak. He has been so
good at looking after us these past 3 weeks.
5km before we crossed the border into Jammu
Kashmir, Deepak rang Rashid (our travel consultant in Delhi) to check about the
driver from Jammu to Srinagar.
Our
travel plans were about to change.
We pulled over to a roadside service centre to wait to hear back from
Rashid. The sign said “Fast
Food”. The coffee and cookies were
good. They were baking their
cookies in what looked like a pizza oven.
The situation is due to heavy snow from last week the Jammu
Srinagar highway has only one lane open. Traffic is taking turns departing and arriving from
Jammu. We were meant to leave
tomorrow (Thursday) but we’ll have to wait till Friday, that means an extra day
in Jammu. Not ideal as foreign
tourists are not common in Jammu so English is not widely spoken.
The hotel room is clean and comfy enough, it will be home for the next two days. At least it has windows to let in some
air (notice I didn’t say fresh air), even though it is like being in a box
because the building opposite overshadows our room. It is difficult to communicate with the staff with the
language barrier. They seem more
comfortable at reading English than speaking it so we are pointing a lot. We are managing. It’s like playing charades.
We have been without Internet access for
the past two days. The hotel in
Dharamsala didn’t have wifi and our usb stick wouldn’t work either.
The mobile card we have been using for the
rest of our trip stopped working at the Jammu Kashmir (JK) border, this is
normal practice. The government
makes it very difficult to obtain phone cards and Internet access in JK due to
the past years of terrorism.
Bashir, operations manager of Ski Himalaya in Gulmarg will organise a phone card and usb for internet when we arrive in Tang Marg. Tang Marg is the village below Gulmarg like Tawonga/Mt Beauty to Falls Creek.
See what happens in the morning.
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| A stray that kept nudging me for a pat - notice the reflection in the window - the boys tying the skis on yet again |
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| Writing the daily blog, even though we can't post them, in my yak hoodie and newly decorated laptop |
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