Mumbai

We arrived in Mumbai in the early morning and began walking from the station to look for a place to stay – after 10 minutes we gave up and jumped into a small taxi - that had a roof a foot too short for our long necks – and headed to the Mumbai backpacker district of Colaba.

I had been reading a popular book called Shantaram - mainly set in the Colaba district of Mumbai - in the weeks leading up to the trip to Mumbai and so I was excited to see all the sights the book had described (unfortunately many of them had turned into tourist traps!). We eventually found accommodation in a dorm room before we headed out to explore Colaba which is home to the India Gate and the Taj Hotel which was the scenes of the terrorist attacks a couple of years ago.

We walked around Colaba and eventually found our way to a park where we found thousands of young people playing India’s favourite game. Whereas in the UK we have a leisurely game of football (and sometimes cricket) in the park, in India the sport of cricket is a religion. Every blade a grass was taken up by a cricket game, with tennis balls flying in every direction and fielders running at top speed through everyone else's’ games of cricket we were amazed at how no one seemed to run into each other let along how everyone knew which ball was theirs. After an hour or so of watching the spectacle we headed to a bar so Matt and Rob could watch a football match.

It’s surprising to find out how popular English football is abroad, often the first question everyone asks you after the obligatory ‘where you from?!’ is ‘which football team you?!’. And so it was that as we were watching the football we began talking to some Indian students who were also watching the football. After the match we went for a drink with our new friends at one of their favourite bars. As we drank together it reinforced the three things we had learned about Indians; Sport is religion to them, they are all very accommodating, and every Indian is either a business man or has a cousin who has a business and would really like to take you on a tour for an exorbitant price.  We finished our drinks and went back to our hotel before we got sold anything – they really were very nice people though!

On our second day we decided to try and go on a on tour of the infamous slums. We managed to find a good deal of a guy we found on the street who informed us ‘I believe in karma so I won’t rip you off’. After ripping us off we went to a coffee shop in a despondent mood to contemplate our next bit of tourism.

So, what happened with our tour? We had negotiated a 3 hour guided tour of the Dharavi slum. We jumped in to the taxi that was taking us to the slums, on getting to the slum our driver, in broken English, bundled us out of the taxi and said he’d meet us back at the same spot. We were pretty confused by this point and we asked our taxi driver to ring the man who had organised our tour. We spoke to the tour operator on the phone and he convinced the taxi driver to walk us round the slum – what the man actually did was walk round a couple of main roads for forty five minutes. On the way back our annoyance was somewhat abated by being shown Mumbai’s cleaning district – a large area which was covered with clothing which was either being washed or dried – where all the laundry in Mumbai is sent. When we returned to the tour operator we gave him a token amount of money to pay the taxi and went to a coffee shop.


While we were in the coffee shop we asked the waiter about Bollywood movies. it wasn’t long before we were in a cinema and enjoying the famous staple of Indian culture; We loved it. We went to see ‘Vishwaroop’ which was an action film that – as far as we could work out – was about an Indian secret agent infiltrating the Taliban and foiling a terrorist plot to attack New York. The film was in Hindi with no subtitles so at first we had a hard time understand what was happening though we were happy to see that every now and then a bit of English was used if there was no adequate way of saying the phrase in Hindi. So we were treated so bits of English phrases such as “My wife loves chicken, and I love my wife” spuriously interspersed amongst the Hindi.

On day three we intended to go to Elephanta island, first though we looked for a new place to stay. The dorm room we had been sleeping in was frequented by several world class snorers which meant Rob and Matt had got no sleep and wanted a quieter place to catch up on sleep. By the time we found a place to stay it was too late in the day to head to Elephanta Island. Instead we went for a short boat trip around Mumbai harbour where we were able to see how dirty the sea surrounding Mumbai really is (it’s pretty bad!). Afterwards we went to Mumbai’s beach (not to swim) and enjoyed the sun setting over a couple of cool beers. We got an early night so we could get up early for Elephanta Island.


On our last day in Mumbai we got an hours boat right out to Elephanta Island which is an ancient Hindu thingy-wotsit. Hundreds of intricate Hindu carvings that had been carved right into the rock in a human made cave. The carvings were amazing, and when taking into account their age it’s nothing short of a miracle how well preserved they are.


After we got back to Mumbai from Elephanta Island we had time to gather our things before heading to the train station for our overnight train to Goa. The taxi ride to the station was an adventure in itself as the engine kept on cutting out – usually as the taxi driver was flying across a junction at top speed, or as he was trying to over take someone on the wrong side of the road. Eventually the car broke down completely and we walked the rest of the way. We got on the train and that was that.