[Why
can’t we go skiing in Austria, like everybody else? the writer’s wife asked.
Instead, they were in Kashmir, where the powder’s thick, the crowds are thin
and the territory is, well, disputed.]
By
Jeffrey Gettleman
 |
|
Gulmarg, one of the
highest ski resorts in the world, is known for its feathery,
high-altitude snow.
Above, local guides take visitors on sled rides.
Credit Atul Loke for The
New York Times
|
Last winter, as I was riding in a car with my
family through the Kashmir Valley, the driver’s phone rang. He listened
carefully before frowning.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Man killed in avalanche.”
“Who?”
“A Russian, skier, went by helicopter.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Where else?’’ The driver shrugged.
“Gulmarg.”
Gulmarg. That’s exactly where I was taking my
family for a ski trip. Gulmarg is Kashmir’s underdog ski resort, tucked in the
snowy Himalayas, a place of magnificent skiing and no frills. Few foreigners
visit, for reasons I will get into, and as we drew closer, I began to wonder if
this was such a great idea. I looked out the window. It was now dark and
snowing, and we were winding our way up a narrow road into the mountains. After
we passed another military checkpoint, the driver nodded to me.
“You see that spot?’’ he said, pointing into
the woods. “We saw a bear there last week.’’
My wife, Courtenay, who was sitting in the
back, tapped me on the shoulder.
“Why can’t we go skiing in Austria like
everybody else?”
I laughed.
“No,” she said. “I’m serious.”
Floating
through a forest
I had always dreamed of skiing in Kashmir.
That name alone conjures up adventure: white-toothed mountains and deep green
valleys, wide open slopes and tough highland people. Draped in a mysterious
beauty, Kashmir is one of those places most of us have heard of, but know
little about. And I had a personal agenda. My children are among that strange
breed of Americans who have never lived in the United States. They were born in
Kenya, raised (so far) in Africa and India, products of the tropics who go to
school all year round in shorts, and I wanted them to experience snow.
So one weekend about a year ago, while we
were sitting around our apartment in New Delhi, I suggested a trip to Kashmir’s
winter wonderland.
“Are you kidding?” Courtenay said. “Isn’t
there an active conflict up there?”
“I wouldn’t necessarily call it a conflict,”
I said.
“What would you call it then?”
“A dispute, maybe?”
I’m an average skier, trained on the snowy
pimples of the Midwest, with a few lucky trips to Vail and the Alps. But I love
skiing, and the thought of plunging down the Himalayas, the world’s tallest
mountains, fired me up. I soon learned that Kashmir’s ski spot, Gulmarg, is
huge (about seven times the size of Jackson Hole), with some runs so long they
take all day to ski. I also learned that Gulmarg is cheap, never crowded and
blessed with perfect high-altitude, inland snow. One experienced skier
described it as being so soft and feathery that skiing through it was like
floating through a forest. I wanted to float through that forest.
But before getting more excited, I needed to
check out the safety of the area. This was a family trip, after all, and my
wife was right: Kashmir is contested territory, torn between India and
Pakistan. It’s a long story, flaring up in the 1940s, when the British divided
the subcontinent into Hindu-dominated India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan. The
people of Kashmir fell in between, religiously and geographically. They were
ruled by a Hindu maharajah, though the population was mostly Muslim. And their
area, with its fertile orchards, deliciously cool climate and legendary
scenery, lies right between what is now India and Pakistan.
After the British left, India and Pakistan
fought three wars over Kashmir, and today the conflict has settled into a
thorny standoff, with India controlling most of Kashmir and Pakistan a smaller
slice.
Many Kashmiris don’t want either country
controlling them: They want independence, and a small, dogged separatist
movement operates in Kashmir, attacking police posts and civilians believed to
be collaborators. Gulmarg, however, is rarely affected; it lies in a nook of
the Kashmir valley tightly controlled by the Indian military.
I was obsessed with getting us there, but had
no idea how to pull this off. As luck would have it, right when Courtenay and I
were haggling over the trip, we were invited to a dinner party in New Delhi
where I was seated near a charming, fit-looking Indian with a bald head and
handlebar mustache. His name was Akshay Kumar and he was a former champion
skier. He had skied Gulmarg countless times, ever since he was a child, and he
and his wife, Dilshad Master, run an adventure tour company, Mercury Himalayan
Explorations.
When I asked him if Gulmarg was safe, he
said: “Very. I’m taking some families up there in a couple of weekends. Want to
come?”
I now had the necessary cover.
Akshay offered to do all the hard work:
organizing ski rentals, lift passes, hotel bookings and, most important, the
seamless string of large bearded men who would schlep us around. He made what
could have been a complicated trip simple and safe. He also made it inexpensive.
The kids’ lift tickets were less than $3 (that’s not a typo). A gondola day
pass was $25. Equipment rental was about the same and the gear was solid:
parabolic Atomic skis and Salomon boots. A ski trip to Austria, for example,
would have cost us thousands of dollars.
I cover South Asia for The New York Times,
and I was working on a story in Kashmir that same week on the life and times of
a young militant named Sameer Tiger. Like many others, Sameer Tiger had been
pulled into the insurgency by a mix of anger, naïveté and lack of economic
opportunity. And, like many others, he went down in a hail of bullets, cornered
by security forces. I had spent weeks researching him and was familiar with
flying in and out of Srinagar, Kashmir’s biggest city. I also knew that the hot
spots where the militants conducted their attacks tended to be in southern
Kashmir, miles away from Gulmarg.
“Like
ice, Daddy, like ice”
As I waited at the Srinagar airport for my
family, I was giddy with excitement. It had just snowed and the trees were
delicately coated, the roads wet and shiny. When I picked everyone up, Asa, our
7-year-old, pointed to a lumpy bag tied to the taxi’s roof and asked, just as I
knew he would, “What’s that?”
I untied the bag and told him to put his hands
in. “Ooh, that’s cold,” he said, turning over his first clump of snow. “Like
ice, Daddy, like ice.”
I would have loved to linger in Srinagar, an
old town built on a lotus-covered lake, where you can stay in a gorgeous
houseboat, wake up with kingfishers plunging into the lake next to you, and
then stroll through rose-filled gardens sculpted by Moghul emperors hundreds of
years ago. But we only had the weekend to work with, so we had to skip all of
this.
It’s about an hour-and-a-half drive from
Srinagar to Gulmarg, and Courtenay was quiet the entire way. I did not blame
her. Kashmir isn’t a war zone, but everywhere you look, you see Indian soldiers
running checkpoints, patrolling the markets and peeking their helmeted heads
out from the turrets of scarred-up gun trucks. The American government warns
citizens to stay away, though I feel that’s overblown. I’ve been to Kashmir now
more than half a dozen times and I’ve never heard a single gunshot. The Indian
troops exert control in just about all parts of the valley, especially in
Srinagar, and I know several other expat families who have visited, and all
said they felt safe.
With evening approaching, we left the city on
a smooth highway running west. The long shadows of minarets fell across the
road. The men in the villages we passed were bundled up in heavy woolen cloaks
called pherans. When we stopped to buy water, I noticed one man with a large
round bulge under his pheran. When I asked him what it was, he lifted up his
cloak to reveal a small pot of burning coal he was cradling to keep himself
warm.
This is what I love about Kashmir. While
India is such a feast of the senses — the food, the fashion, the colors, the
deities, the clanging of brass bells and the constant whiffs of incense and
fragrant oils — Kashmir radiates its own distinctive charm.
We crossed a river. This is when the driver’s
phone rang, and after we heard about the deadly avalanche and then the bear in
these same woods, the car fell silent.
Selfie
sticks and samovars
The mood brightened when we pulled into the
Khyber hotel, Gulmarg’s fanciest. It was a supersize ski chalet, and its green
pointed roofs were dusted with snow. The kids’ eyes were peeled for bears. But
as soon as we stepped into the lobby, with its dark, gleaming wood and fine
carpets, I spotted what I really wanted to see: children. Packs of them.
Clearly this was a family destination, and in the Khyber’s downstairs rec room,
Asa and our other son, Apollo, 9, instantly bonded with their Indian comrades
over foosball and air hockey. I had to pry them out of there. There aren’t any
bars in Kashmir (it’s dry) or anything resembling an après-ski scene, so we
went to sleep early.
The next morning we mustered outside in the
hotel’s portico, waiting for our skis to be delivered. I thought we’d just slap
them on and slide the couple of hundred yards to the base of the slopes, but
no, a Jeep dispatched as part of Akshay’s operation zoomed up with three men
inside. Kashmiris are some of the warmest, most hospitable people, and before
we climbed into the Jeep, the men greeted us with big hugs. When we climbed
out, they insisted on putting on our skis. I had one guy on my left, another on
my right and a third young man kneeling in the snow at my feet.
“Guys, guys, guys,” I said, trying to wiggle
free. “I can put on my own skis.”
But the young man at my feet either didn’t
understand or didn’t care. And for the first time since I was about 5, I
watched someone untie my shoes and carefully pull them off.
The sky was a flawless blue, the air
peppermint fresh. It wasn’t even that cold — maybe 30 degrees. Kashmir rarely
gets bitterly cold; Gulmarg lies at the same latitude as Atlanta. All around
us, the white teeth of the Himalayas gleamed, and from nearby chimneys I
smelled wood smoke. It was the most romantic alpine scene I had ever entered,
and part of it was the scale. Behind the mountains that stood in front of me
were even higher mountains, and behind them, the real titans. On a clear day,
from the top of Gulmarg, you can see into Pakistan and glimpse K2, the second
tallest mountain in the world after Everest.
Gulmarg doesn’t feel like a ski resort; it
feels like a village. At the base of the gondola, men with wooden boxes
strapped to their shoulders sold chocolate bars, selfie sticks and cigarettes.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pack of cigarettes on a ski slope.
Others wielded silver samovars and poured
steaming cups of kahwah, a light Kashmiri tea, made from saffron and other
spices, that carries a delightful aroma. Of the several hundred people on the
mountain that day, most were not skiers but Indian families content to pay a
few rupees for a ride on a sled. I watched the sled wallahs — a string of young
Kashmiri men with battered toboggans — begin their long trudge uphill. They were
working for the equivalent of a few dollars a day and didn’t have the money to
take the lift. They slowly made their way up the mountain, heads down, bodies
leaning forward, the wind tugging at their pherans.
Akshay arranged for my sons to take lessons
with a Kashmiri skier named Ishfaq. He told them to call him Eeesh. We waved to
Eeesh and the two roly-poly shadows beneath him as they tramped off to the
bunny hill.
Courtenay and I hired our own guide, Wali.
Wali was in his late 40s with curly gray hair and orange mirrored shades. He
wore no hat. He had been working on these slopes since he was 8, beginning as a
sled wallah. He had never been to school. When I asked Wali what he loved about
skiing, he looked off into the hills and smiled.
“I love it for the money,” he said.
It wasn’t exactly the poetic answer I was
looking for, but fair enough. In strife-torn Kashmir, where there aren’t many
jobs for an athletic, adventurous man, this was a good one.
Gulmarg’s slopes cover everything from green
to double black diamond, but few are marked. Part of the mountain is groomed,
but advanced skiers love the ungroomed, backcountry skiing. The gondola reaches
around 13,000 feet, one of the highest in the world. Some skiers hike up even
higher or take helicopters to virgin spots. Gulmarg’s vertical drop, a measure
of the altitude from where you start to where you finish, can be as much as
6,000 feet. With good snow, some runs stretch more than four miles. They can
take the better part of a day and end in the woods, near some old temples.
We started with a medium-difficult run,
taking the gondola to the middle of the mountain (Gulmarg has one gondola, one
chair lift and several tow ropes). We stepped off into thick snowpack. This was
mid-February, the best time for snow; sometimes the area gets eight feet of
powder.
Wali led the way, dropping into a wide track
that ran through Himalayan cedar trees. He stopped intermittently to look back
at Courtenay and me.
“Up and down, up and down,” he shouted as we
made our turns, trying to keep our skis together. “Yass, yass, that’s it. Good,
good!”
Hmm, I thought. This place doesn’t just feel
like a village — it is a village. Seminomadic Gujjar herders live here in the
summer, when the slopes are carpeted with grass and wildflowers; the name
Gulmarg means meadow of flowers. Just as I was thinking “How sweet is this?” —
observing some culture while working on my parallel — I dug in too deep on a
turn and face-planted. Courtenay and Wali didn’t hear me wipe out and kept
going, leaving me in the snowbound Gujjar village by myself.
A bear of a man appeared out of nowhere. He
ripped me up from the ground. After I got my hands through straps in my poles
and could stand up without falling on my face again, I said, “Shukria” — thank you.
“Where from?” he asked.
“U.S.”
“America?”
“Yes.”
His bristly face broke into a huge smile.
“Welcome, brother, welcome.”
Paradise on Earth
For lunch, we met up with our children at
Hotel Highlands Park on the slopes. Again, this was not a Western imitation. We
didn’t thump along in our ski boots in a packed cafeteria, pushing a tray along
a track for a $10 cup of cocoa and a $25 hamburger. We sat down at a proper
table in a proper restaurant and polished off a feast: naan bread, curried
vegetables, fresh yogurt and an exquisite lamb dish of tender meat hammered
flat and rolled into a baseball-size meatball. The hotel felt like a hunting
lodge; deer heads and bearskin rugs hung on the walls.
I hadn’t seen any other foreigners, so when I
heard an American accent down the hallway, I was curious. I wandered through
the lodge, pushed open a door and found three rugged, sun-tanned guys sitting
on cushions in a cozy, wood-paneled room heated by wood-burning stoves.
“What do you guys do here?”
“We’re the ski patrol,” said one.
His name was Luke. He was 39 years old. He
grew up in Alaska, became an avalanche forecaster and a paramedic and came to
Gulmarg seven years ago to run the ski patrol.
As my skis cut through the snow, I felt the
air against my cheeks and that addictive sense of speed. My thighs burned and
occasionally I heard the sssh, sssh of a better skier descending past me,
though there were only a handful of us on the slopes. It had been nearly 10
years since I had last skied, and bombing down the mountain felt as pure and
intoxicating as galloping on a horse.
Courtenay agreed it was thrilling. But she
was more distracted than I was by Kashmir’s misfortune of lying between two
rival nations. Her take on Gulmarg was that it was “a stunning ski resort in
the middle of a zone of sadness.”
We skied around some low-slung houses made of
wooden planks. “What are those?” I shouted to Wali.
“Gujjar houses!” Wali shouted back.
“It’s the warmth of the people,” he said.
“That’s what drew me here.”
He explained that Gulmarg has 17 ski
patrollers with snowmobiles to rescue injured skiers. Avalanches were always a
risk but only in the off-piste areas, he said, like where the Russian tourist
was skiing on the day we arrived.
After lunch, I watched my sons ski. Eeesh had
taught them well. Asa turned back and forth, carving large S’s and ending with
a confident snowplow. Apollo was less orthodox. He shot down the bunny hill
like a bullet.
“Stop! Stop!” Courtenay yelled as he
approached the bottom.
I doubt he heard but somehow, right before he
was about to crash into us, he stopped.
The next morning was sadly our last. I
persuaded Wali to take me higher on the mountain. When we got off the chair
lift, we were by ourselves. The views were breathtaking. It was so bright, so
clear, so crisp, so still. I just wanted to stay up there and stare at the
jagged white mountains and etch those images into my brain.
I was reminded of a Persian couplet inscribed
long ago on a pavilion in one of Srinagar’s majestic gardens: “If there is a
paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.”
I gazed across the valley.
“You go first,” Wali hollered. “I want to
watch your form.”
I didn’t know where to start. We were poised
on the lip of an enormous bowl. In front of me, for as long as I could see, the
snow was untrammeled. There wasn’t a single track.
Jeffrey Gettleman is the South Asia bureau
chief, based in New Delhi. He was the winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for
international reporting. @gettleman
