Looking for Peace
We finally got our new car, and to celebrate having our own wheels, we took an overnight trip out of town. We drove up into the mountains to Gulmarg, a lovely valley surrounded by pine forest. The mountains here are greener and wetter than our California mountains; the area reminded us of Switzerland. 
Braving Indian traffic, driving on the left side of the highway, and negotiating winding mountain roads were challenging, but we found our way there and back again in our new vehicle, and it now wears a proud coat of dust and muddy tires.
Gulmarg is a tourist destination for Indians who can afford to escape from the summer heat further south. As a result, it was difficult to completely leave the crowds and honking traffic behind, even high in the mountains. But we managed to find a trail to hike into the woods, and later, a quiet table with a view where we drank chai.
Gulmarg has been a vacation get-away spot for many years; it became popular during the British colonial era. A landmark is the 125-year-old Anglican church, now surrounded on three sides by a golf course. In this Muslim-majority area, only a tiny congregation of Indian Christians meets there on Sundays.
The lush and dramatic mountains we traveled into are the Pir Panjal Range; if we were to continue our journey over a few more ridges, we would reach Pakistan. The India-Pakistan border is one of the most heavily militarized in the world, and our local news reports deaths of both soldiers and civilians nearly every week. Both sides are armed with nuclear weapons. Can the peace we experience in these lovely woods ever be mirrored among the peoples of this region?
Posted in Uncategorized and tagged mountains by Lisa