How many days do you need in Kashmir? · ZoonCabs

How many days you need in Kashmir is the first question an agency answers when it sizes a package, and ZoonCabs's answer, from the transport it runs every day, is five: what three days covers, what five adds, what seven adds, and how each length changes the booking.

The honest answer is five. Three is possible and people do it, but the valleys are further apart than the map suggests and the driving eats the days you thought you had for walking around.

Three days: Srinagar and one valley

Enough for the city — the lake, the Mughal gardens, the old quarter — plus one day trip. Pick a single valley and accept you are choosing. Gulmarg is the usual answer because it is closest, but a Gulmarg day tour still runs about 104 km of driving and most of a day once you include time on the meadow.

Three days works if you arrive early on day one and leave late on day three. It does not work if either end of the trip is a half day.

Five days: the first length that breathes

Five is where a Kashmir trip stops being a series of dashes. The usual shape is two nights in Srinagar, then Gulmarg and Pahalgam with a night in one of them — around 320 km over the whole circuit, spread across two nights rather than crammed into daylight.

The difference is not the extra sight. It is that you stop driving back to Srinagar every evening.

Seven days: the full circuit, at a walking pace

Seven days lets you add Sonamarg and still have a day that is not about getting somewhere. A three-night circuit covers roughly 420 km. The same ground in five days is legal, and tiring.

Seven is also the length where the quieter valleys become possible — Doodhpathri, Yusmarg, the Lolab valley — which are the days people remember and almost nobody plans for.

The bit that is usually underestimated

Arrival and departure days are not travel days. A Srinagar airport transfer is short, but flights land in the afternoon and the light goes early for much of the year. Plan the first afternoon as an afternoon, not a day.

The same applies at the other end. A morning flight means leaving your hotel in the dark. If your last full day is a valley trip, you will be packing at midnight.

If you are travelling in winter

Add a day. Snow does not usually stop a trip, but it slows every part of it, and the Sonamarg road in particular is closed for a stretch of the winter. A plan with no slack in it becomes a plan with a cancelled day in it.

Frequently asked questions from agencies