the local cow taxi...

Some of my unwelcome audience.

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2003-08-15 - Water Trek (Day 122)

Morning broke and a beautiful mist was on the water. One of the first things I see is a woman polling a shikara up the river with a cow standing in the middle of the shikara looking at me. She rowed the boat up the river then to a bank and the cow very nonchalantly walked off the boat and into the pasture beyond while the woman turned the shikara and headed back the way she came, presumably to get another cow. This local "cow taxi" I found very amusing.

Continuing on we passed many signs of life on the river, families in the back of their shikara which is presumably home cooking morning breakfast as the children peer around the sides at me and young boys up early to do a bit of fishing before school. We came to the second lake of the trip at Alchara Lake that is a large lakebed covered with pastures in which horses and cows were grazing and boys were fishing by the riversides. Again, just a beautiful peaceful place unspoiled by the passage of time.

We turn back and head back down the river from where we came and start heading upriver back towards Shrinigar. Since it was rowing upriver, we stopped a bit early as the rowers were tired and pulled onto the bank about 4:30pm and I raised a book to read. In just a few minutes, several of the local adolescent boys had gathered around the trees at the side of the bank and simply sat there staring until sundown past 7pm, seemingly without seeing anything at all rude, or at least boring about sitting under a tree watching a guy read. I had gone and sat under a tree myself to get away from the incessantly talking cook but as soon as I sat down the boys would gather next to me, peering over my shoulders and trying to read the book or starting up what has become the common but too often repeated conversation of "What is your name? What country are you from?" which stops there or is repeated by the next guy that comes along. I finally just gave up and got back in the boat resigning myself to the less annoying of the two evils. At sundown though we had to move further up the river as the cook and rowers felt uncomfortable with the boys that had been watching us referring to them all as "troublemakers and thieves." Even so, the band walked along the banks following us for a kilometer or so before giving up.

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