Crossing over from Ladakh into Jammu & Kashmir, the landscape transforms slowly but dramatically. Leave the browns of Ladakh’s cold desert to enter a postcard of alpine forests overwritten with glacial streams, a land that was famously deemed ‘paradise’ in Sufi poet Khusro’s immortal lines. And paradise it is indeed, for there is something about the landscape, its people, and culture, that I have not experienced in other parts of the Indian Himalaya. If it weren’t for its politically volatile situation, Kashmir would be a world-leading trekking destination.