A friend of mine in Philadelphia area gave me a contact name of her friend Mohammed Deen in Leh, Kashmir. Last year we could not contact him during our failed darsan to Amarnath. This year we decided to go through a local travel agency in Srinagar itself. I researched a lot and communicated with other bloggers on line. Finally, The same person recommended this
Shangloo travels. The next thing we know is that Mr. Noor M Shangloo, who is the director of operations is communicating with us. We paid the money as soon as we decided who are all going with us. The usual three of us, Bhuvana and her older brother, Umamaheswaran.
Shangloo delivered more than we expected. House boat rooms were beautiful and comfortable - meals were so so.
Our package included picking us up at Jammu on the 5th at the train station, taxi at our disposal during our stay of three days, Helicopter return fare, accommodation for 2 nights at boat house or hotel (our choice) and drop off at Jammu station on the 9th. We agreed to pay 17000 rupees each. Our Taxi contact was Lalit. His mobile # was e-mailed to us. When we contacted him from the train, he gave us the driver's name and number. We promptly located each other and met with him around 7:30 a.m. on July 5th. The driver Suresh is seen in one of the photos. Very satvic wonderful guy. It took us 12 hours to reach Srinagar due to heavy traffic, slopes and wet weather. Actually, there was a scare of the roads being closed from Jammu to Srinagar when we were about to leave Delhi. By God's grace, the roads were opened for our arrival.
The distance between Srinagar and
- Amarnath: 143-km
- Jammu Tawi: 293-km
- Delhi: 900-km
- Sonamarg: 87-km
- Pahalgam: 86-km
- Leh: 434-km
- Yushmarg: 47-km
- Aharbal: 51-km
- Gulmarg: 56-km
- Katra: 285-km
By the way, in case you go to these regions, make sure you have a postpaid mobile phone and that too only BSNL seem to work. The prepaid ones don't work there. Umamaheswaran got one and all of us used it when needed, especially to communicate with our agency and families.
