Srinagar & Dal Lake — Four Nights in the City

Met at Srinagar airport and taken to the lakeside, which is about half an hour and the only driving the first day asks for. Check-in from two in the afternoon. The rest of the day is the included hour of shikara — a flat-bottomed boat paddled from the stern, which is how the lake is properly seen: past the floating gardens, the lotus beds and the lines of moored houseboats. The lake is much smaller than it once was and the restoration work is visible from the water.

The gardens on the eastern shore, in the order the Mughals built them. Chashme Shahi is the smallest and highest, laid out in 1632 around a spring still drunk from. Nishat Bagh of 1633 has twelve terraces for the signs of the zodiac and the best outlook over the water. Shalimar Bagh, made by Jahangir for Nur Jahan in 1619, is the grandest and the one the phrase Mughal garden really means. Pari Mahal above them is a Sufi school turned pleasure terrace, and the light off the lake from it in the late afternoon is the reason to save it for last.

The half of Srinagar most itineraries drive past. Jama Masjid, first built in 1394 and rebuilt after repeated fires, stands on more than three hundred deodar columns each cut from a single tree, and its courtyard is one of the calmest spaces in the city. Shah-e-Hamdan nearby is a shrine of painted and carved wood with no nails in its construction. The lanes between them hold the papier-mâché, khatamband ceiling and walnut carving workshops, and the afternoon is better spent slowly in them than adding another monument.

Hazratbal on the lake's western shore in the morning, the valley's most revered shrine and the only domed mosque in Srinagar. Then up Takht-e-Suleiman to the Shankaracharya temple, on a hill above the city with the entire lake system laid out below it — a climb of about two hundred and fifty steps from the car park, and phones are not permitted at the top. The afternoon transfers to a houseboat: cedar-panelled, carpeted, with a verandah on the water, and dinner served aboard.

Out on the water before five if you are willing, for the floating vegetable market — growers paddle in from the lake's own floating gardens and trade from boat to boat for about an hour before dispersing, and it has worked this way for generations. It is over by seven. Breakfast back aboard afterwards, and then the half-hour transfer to the airport. Security screening at Srinagar is thorough and slow, so allow considerably more time than the distance suggests.