CRUISING THROUGH THE SIND

Like a love affair, the hunt for tracing the source of the Sind river took me years of trekking deep into the gorges and mountains. Finally, I hired boats and sailed through this charming river till it embraced Jhelum at Shadipora,

- Mahmood Shah

As my boat glided gently over the turquoise slow-moving waters of river Sind I was riveted by the amazing journey of the river, which provides livelihood to the thousands of locals living along its banks. I hired a boat near the Doderhama a village, named after the driftwood that people have been collecting for ages. Nowadays people are more attracted by the sand the river brings. Extracting sand here is easy due to the river’s slow-moving nature.

LOST CAMPING GROUND

Much before the advent of modernity and mechanical convenience, Euro peans used to get their boats upstream the Sind and camp under the Chinar studded Doderhama camp-site. As the boats have stopped ferrying foreigners the campsite was has been converted into a site for a degree college. The ugly cement concrete buildings have damaged the beauty of the place and Chinars are fighting a lost battle for survival. European travellers would embark upon a long and uphill tiresome journey towards Zoji La and thence onwards to Ladakh, Tibet, Central Asia and Baltistan, a long lost historical connection postindependence.

Until the eighties, Kashmiris continued the tradition of the upstream journey where they would hire Dongas to participate in the annual urs of Qamar Sahib.

WILLOW PLANTATIONS

As the boat flows downstream, many villages have come up along the banks of Sind. Every household allows the effluent to discharge into the river and heaps of polythene are dumped along its banks. It is not an unusual sight to find polythene and plastic flowing down current.