Destination: Kashmir
  
Images of houseboats on the lake, icing sugar clouds floating overhead .... and the Vale of Kashmir was the gateway to the fabled Tibetan realm of Ladakh

Snow capped peaks soar above the fertile checkerboard of the Jhelum Valley; vestiges of the British Raj. But there were always a few darker clouds on the horizon... uneasy peace with Pakistan; cease-fire lines drawn across high altitude glaciers and the windswept corners of the Tibetan plateau.

Now the nightly news brings more immediate images of violence ... gunfire, riots, brutality. A once-familiar name leaps out from the front pages: Hazratbal, a Srinagar mosque where defiant militants held Indian forces at bay.

During the seventies and early eighties overlanders could confidently cross the Punjab from Pakistan, stopping to marvel at the Golden Temple of the Sikhs in Amritsar, then continue north through Jammu across the mountains to the Vale of Kashmir. Adventure travel companies in Australia and the UK could freely promote trekking itineraries through the Hindu Kush ranges, relying heavily on long-established local entrepreneurs like Abdul Gaffara Doono and his family.

Slightly bolder travellers found they could rely on the Doonos to arrange and guide a trek for them, dealing direct. A series of almost-missed connections could not quite keep me from a rendezvous in Srinagar with a like-minded group.

For ten days we climbed centuries-old pack trails up through pine forests, crossing rushing streams, squeezing past the mule trains of Gujar nomads whose cottage cheese we sampled. Gaffara's people coaxed our own mules over snowbound passes at passes to reach alpine meadows beckoning with massed wildflowers; glacier-fed lakes offered campsites and trout. And every night we sat down on carpets to a three-course, silver service meal.

But there was still more, for the Vale of Kashmir was the gateway to the fabled Tibetan principality of Ladakh, a corner of the Tibetan plateau linked with the world by a tortuous military highway climbing as high as 4000 metres (13,000 feet) above sea level. Two days of excruciating bus travel - or a dramatic, on-again, off-again flight brushing the peaks of the Hindu Kush - earned the oxygen-starved traveller a glimpse of the old Tibet, a high, windswept arid land of devout Buddhist faith, of monasteries, demon dances and butter lamps.

For centuries the Vale of Kashmir, a high fertile valley ringed by peaks, has been idealized as an earthly paradise. Local produce included saffron and cricket bats. In the days of the Raj the tradition of houseboats on Dal Lake developed, it was said, from the intransigence of a ruler who refused to allow Britons to settle on dry land.

The Hazratbal mosque was a few short miles across the Nagin Lake where our party spent several very comfortable nights in the Doono houseboats, before and after our ten day trek, our idyll interrupted only by an incessant stream of shikara-borne hawkers circling us like sharks. Tailors, leather workers, woodcarvers... unrelenting in their hustling yet calmly trusting the customer, once snared, to take the goods now and remit funds later. Kashmiri silk carpets, carvings and papier-mache were particularly fine wares.

At Hazratbal, a large gleaming white mosque in classic Islamic style beside the lake , the faithful were gathered in their hundreds for Friday prayer. On the foreshore vendors offered mounds of sticky sweetmeats. It was Eid al Fitr, the end of Ramadan and a time of prayer, celebration and feasting for Kashmiri Muslims.

Herein lay the germ of the problem: most Kashmiris would rather be united with their Muslim brethren across the no-mans-land in Pakistan, than remain bound to infidel India. This unholy mismatch came about only through the actions of a Hindu maharajah ignoring his peoples' true allegiances at the time of Partition, when British India was split, nay torn apart, into two mutually suspicious nations.

Like most cities on the Indian Subcontinent, Srinagar was an exhausting but rewarding place to explore. As so often happened, a British quarter or cantonment was grafted onto an indigenous city centuries old, its maze of winding alleys and canals unchanged to this day. The cantonment too was a living museum of late forties English stuffiness so authentic it was rather depressing. Here one found the General Post Office, the Government Handicraft Emporium and the Tourist Reception Centre - fine specimens all of Indian officialdom. It took me half a day and two visits to mail home a medium-sized parcel.

Srinagar offered much more than this. The eighteenth century fort of Hari Parbat stood proudly on a hilltop above the valley, its stout wooden gates braced in iron although the mudbrick walls were now crumbling and being overtaken by flowering weeds ; down below, historic mosques like the Khanquah-i-Mualla claimed origins back in the eighth century. The Jame Masjid or main mosque was relatively recent - a fourteenth century compound lined with vendors' stalls and besieged by beggars. Long-gone maharajas had bequeathed to posterity their formal gardens: huge spreading chinar trees shading geometric watercourses and regimented beds of roses.

Meat shops, so matter-of-factly described, sold goats' heads and trotters; metalworkers displayed teapots and brassware. Breaking at last through the maze of alleyways, bales of merchandise, handcarts and crowds, the visitor at last emerged on the riverbank to gaze upon the ancient bridges spanning the Jhelum, a tributary of the Indus.

Returning to our lodgings by canal took some hours straining against the currents, through districts with names like Khanyar, Rainawari and Naidyar.

Ordinary Kashmiris could be seen living their lives as they had always done; women draped in head scarves and dresses of iridescent greens, pinks and purples washing and bathing in the canals or peering from behind the latticed shutters of ornately-carved window boxes that clung to facades of handmade bricks, rising straight up from the murky waters.

And so back at dusk to our cosy houseboat on Nagin Lake, the lights of Hazratbal twinkling across the water.