What’s it like
to live on a
houseboat?
Chhavi Doonga, who
stayed in one, has a
crystal clear answer...
58 Travel Secrets March-April 2015
I
spent four nights in a houseboat in Kashmir.
The weather was a welcome change from
the mugginess of Delhi, and I straightaway
headed to Boulevard and hired a boat to row
me to my house-on-water. This would be my
home for the next four days.
Hmm. So the view is slightly different
from what one expects – there aren’t any
moving houses on flowing water (though
later it turned out only I had such a
fascination, but there has to be someone else
too!). The houseboats or ‘Doongas’ as they
are traditionally called, etched on the edge of
the still Dal Lake are in fact more like long
elongated boats; boats with walls.
It costs about Rs 4,000 a night to hire a houseboat, but it’s totally
worth
the splurge. After all, this long stretch of boats lined one after the
other, encircling the lake, almost creating a colony of their own, is
one of Srinagar’s paramount attractions.
Our destination was the Shabnam Houseboat, a seeimgly
Bollywood-inspired name. There were others, like ‘Meena bazar’,
‘Queen Elizabeth’, ‘Robinhood , ‘Happy Dawn’ , ‘Taj Palace’ or
‘Buckingham Palace’, lending a touch of spicy romance to the local
Kashmiri gondolas called the Shikara.