Dear family,

At the moment I am sitting on a houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinigar, Kashmir. I don't know whether it has reached the English papers, but there is a lot of political trouble here at the moment. There are armed policemen and riot squads everywhere, while at night we hear the sound of bombs. Sitting here in the middle of the lake is very safe though, so you have the very surreal situation of all the foreigners hanging around on the lake, doing all the tourist things they normally do, buying papier maché, sunbathing &c, while on the shore a nightmarish political scene develops where we are into day eight of a strike in which people who fail to close their shops are blown up, and locals mutter and brood and say darkly that they have never seen anything like this, nobody knows what is going on and who is behind it.

The lake is extraordinary. I imagine that nowhere quite like it exists anywhere in the world, covered in huge houseboats built by the English to avoid restrictions put on them by the Maharaja of the time over building. It is fed by thousands of shikarars; thin elegant boats that carry you around for a few rupees and supermarket shikarars which are loaded with everything that a lazy houseboat occupier could want. You also get endless boats laden with jewellery, saffron, papier maché &c, which constantly drop by your boat and try to make you buy. The problem with this place is that it is so relaxing that it is difficult to motivate yourself to do anything, though I did climb to a temple on a hill here (twice) which was more strenuous.

Maybe I shouldn't really say in case you get worried, but the bus I was coming here on crashed on the way up. It was one of those really twisty mountain roads with huge drops, and the driver basically fell asleep at the wheel. I was asleep myself and suddenly we went smash into the wall at the side (thank God it was there). The wall was totally destroyed (fifteen foot of rubble), and one of the wheels of the bus was over the edge, but no problem, they just pushed it off and we carried on. The really frightening bit, though, was the descent on the other side, a similarly dangerous road. We could see the driver’s face, he was obviously on the verge of collapse, in the mirror you could see him try and force his eyes open, then his head would fall, he would fall forward, then jerk himself up just as he had to execute a hairpin bend with a drop of about 1,000 feet. The Indians (being fatalists) did not react to this at all; the Europeans were "freaking" out, shouting at him, panicking, grabbing each other. It was really mad actually – the driver had become a total zombie, and we were in a huge heavy fast bus trying to negotiate a difficult mountain road that made the most dangerous Alpine pass look marvellous.

I met up with Nasim and her friends, and they are living on the houseboat next door. Yesterday we borrowed a shikara (a tiny one) and went on Nagim Lake, a lake where you can swim. To get there we had to paddle through old Srinagar – an incredible area, like something out of Tolkien: huge eccentric houses, with bits and gables coming out of them, narrow bridges, huge houseboats with vast families living on them, pumpkins growing over stone walls and actually reaching as far as the water.

Last night we were sitting on a houseboat and an electrical storm could be seen in the distance, but the lightning seemed very odd. We went out on to the veranda to have a look and we could hear a noise approaching, and we could see something was coming across the water. The houseboat men started shouting "get inside, get inside" – just as we did a huge wind struck the boat and it felt as if it were going to be pulled off its mooring, and hailstones seriously half an inch across rained down on the boat. For a few minutes it felt as if we were in serious danger as the boat bounced about, and then as quickly as it came so it went, and the veranda had turned white due to the quantity of hailstones lying about, and the air temperature dropped incredibly. A few minutes before it had been T-shirt weather, such an extraordinary temperature change.

Today we are going bicycling 26km around the lake looking at the mosques &c. It should be energetic, a slight change to here, at least to living on this boat. Hope you are all well, I’ll write again soon

Dear family,

These white blotches are not some strange, dangerous Indian bacteria, but soap powder. I think Hugo would be interested by where I am at the moment, I am in the Kumaon district, in the Himalayan foot hills in a place called Almora and yes they still have man eaters round here. Yesterday I went to look at two man eating leopards that they have trapped rather than shot – even behind bars they were still rather frightening, they were still totally wild. One looked me in the eye and growled at me, and if the bars weren’t there I am certain that it would have leapt straight at me.

We are living the most incredibly rural lifestyle in a village called Kalimat at about 2500 metres. Next door (through an adjoining window) we have a buffalo which snorts at night. There are snakes – I almost trod on one on the road, and spiders the size of saucers. The countryside is amazing and we have very impressive views (Gandhi apparently called this "the Switzerland of India"). As we are quite close to Nepal, the people are probably fairly similar; the women walk around with big loads on their heads, piles of wood almost as tall as they are, baskets filled with vegetables &c. The men seem to sit in Chai shops and play games all day, a very equal system (this is typical all over India).

It is time to add the death and danger element to worry mummy, first the physical and then the social. We were delayed for two days in a placed called Naini Tal on the way up here, an ex-Raj hill station, with an incredible library filled with pre-1947 books, some very old and probably quite valuable in England. The reason we were delayed was again because of landslides. The roads are mountain roads bordered by incredibly steep cliffs, and when it rains they become very unstable. We were driving up in mists and rain in a mini bus when suddenly, only about fifty foot ahead, huge boulders rained on the road; some were lumps of rock the size of refrigerators. This was just a tiny van, and I think would have been crushed. Luckily the driver skilfully ducked through them, though it was quite scary driving under the danger zone as you felt the noise would bring another, even bigger shower. In another place we had to get out and walk several km over a hill because the road was impassable; so getting here was quite an adventure.

As for the social problem, well this is another story of Indian lunacy and madness. In Haldwani, the rail head we came through, an appalling incident happened. Three policemen raped and killed a woman, rioting broke out and apparently sixty people were killed by the police; hence extreme tension has broken out here, and in all the district. When we wandered down to the town earlier today the noise and chanting of five thousand students could be heard, all the shops were shut (at the risk of being blown up if they stayed open), there was a feeling of brooding tension in the air, and a government contractor we had ended up having supper with warned us not to go into the town in case we were stoned. But I don’t think it is a problem for tourists actually, that is what is so weird, they just get on with things and you are seen as somehow removed from this process.

I have just been to collect some water: it is sunset and I must admit this is one of the most idyllic places I’ve ever seen. Not even Hugo, with his blasé approach to the east, could fail to be impressed. Tomorrow we are going to leave for Rajasthan via Delhi which should be good. I don’t think I told you, but I have met some friends of Mungo’s from New College and lived with them for a bit in Kashmir (we met in Baghdad airport, small world). We are meeting them to go camel trekking on the eighteenth in Jaisalmer, a desert town described as something out of the Arabian nights.

A really strange thing here, though I don’t think you will be all that interested, is that everywhere are fifteen-foot-high marijuana plants: even the cows eat them, it’s all completely wild and they grow like weeds. Anyway I shall write from Rajasthan.