OUR STORIES for our stay in
Delhi - Wednesday (Blog) / Thursday (Blog)
/ Friday (Blog)
(LAST INDIA POST IS HERE (12/April/18 - Amritsar and wrap-up of India Trip)
Mumbai
08 – 13 February 2018
Things that are
surprising. Toilet paper and tissues are cheaper in Australia. Indian food is
so good. It’s better than in Australia. Lots better, consistently. That might
sound weird but our experience in northern China was that we preferred
Australian Chinese food to the local slimy version. (though not always)
Surprisingly, I slept
like a baby in the rocking AC1 berth which we had to ourselves. These trains
are actually pretty good for insomnia. Not sure why, the bed was hard, but you
sleep without really trying, no pills involved.
Yesterday we took some
random bus rides. These are always surprising. Our first one took us deep into
a military zone, navy we think. It was a nice road, lots of trees but some very
definite signs that said “if you enter this area you
may be shot”. When we asked if we might be an exception, we got pointed to the
bus stop with a head waggle and a smile. Maybe they would not have shot us
after all.
Then there are the
people you meet on these buses. Two English speaking Indian ladies “took us on”
as their project. First, they instructed us to sit on their side of the bus.
We, asserting our independence, sat on the other side, only to find that this
was the sunny side; which did kinda matter. They asked us if we were here “for
the festival”. We responded with blank looks. Then they really got bossy and
told us all about the art, dance, theatre, and food there was to benefit from
this festival.
We were a little
focussed on simply getting back to the hotel for a nap so some of their
enthusiasm was lost on us. But tomorrow we will endeavour to find the festival.
Actually, we saw it. The bus was stuck in an hour long
traffic jam very close to home, and there was lots of colourful stuff going on
there….must have been it.
Kala Ghoda Arts Festival -
Mumbai is different
from Rajasthan. More New Yorkish in an Indian sort of
way. Busy, buzzy, people on a mission, hotel staff unfriendly (or at least
disinterested) and smelly. There is also a resemblance to St Kilda, or perhaps
Miami with the Art Deco style beach side buildings. Nice. The shore is pretty,
with a skyline of modern high-rise. 
Our room is enormous.
Nothing New Yorkish about that! I think they ran out of our budget class and
put us in a 4 person giant room which spans the width
of the building. It has a grand dining table in the middle and 2 sets of twin
beds at either end. An exterior toilet/shower, but one just for us. The beds
are hard. All 1920s style, furniture, lots of wardrobes and mothball filled
storage cabinets, even the switch board has really old style
switches. Cool. Plus, a giant porch. There is a lift which you have 2 open
grated doors you have to close….you can see all the
floors as you go up and down, and the level of the lift does not quite match
the level of the floor.
Photo below is the best we have – it is like one of those
images of BigFoot that were circulated in the 1970s to prove that Bigfoot
indeed did exist somewhere in the forests of Oregon – this photo proves a
70-year-old person went into a lift built a hundred years ago. Unfortunately,
we have no proof of this person exiting this lift. There is a one-minute clip
here:
There’s a place nearby called Café
Leopold’s. Readers of Shantaram will recognise it. In 2008 it was attacked by
Pakistani terrorists, who sprayed it with bullets killing about 10 people in
this café alone. The
bullet holes still exist in the mirror.
The biggest loss of life of at other
targets in Mumbai, the large hotels the Taj Mahal and the Oberoi Trident, and
other targets were The Rail Terminus, and the Cama Hospital. In all 164 people
dies, and a further 308 injured.
08 February Thursday
The train was good, sort of. We took the Surya Nagri Express, leaving Jodhpur at 6:45 pm (Wednesday) and arriving 11:45 today (Thursday) in Mumbai. Good, we had a two-bed berth, with room to spread out -as I do with gadgets and unrelated stuff. The not-so-good, the bed was so hard, add the bumpy train ride and I got little sleep, the toilets as always were close to unusable. However, we had our privacy, it was quiet, we got to where we were going.
Arriving in Mumbai, we had booked an Uber on our
you-beaut-Uber app; upon exiting there were so many tuk tuks, taxis, trucks,
people pushing and shoving and grabbing, that we gave up looking for our Uber.
The app said one-minute away, but one-minute is very complicated at the Mumbai
Train Station. The first taxi person quoted 680 rupees for the drive, the Uber
app was 280, another driver we got down to 500 and went with him. We gave him
600 ($9.34 USD) at the end for the hour and a half journey through crowded
streets, over India’s super bridge, Bandra–Worli
Sea Link, that was completed a few years ago and is unique – look it up, I did.
We are at the Bentley’s Hotel, http://bentleyshotel.com/, a budget hotel, but highly rated in various places. Our room is huge, especially compared to where we have been lately. It is the size of two, perhaps even three, rooms, with a balcony, ten-foot ceilings, and finally, fast internet, like about 24 Mbps. The last place we stayed at we got to about a half Mbps (Megabits per second), never made it to one, and the place before, about one-fourth that, meaning I could not plaster the internet with my videos.
We took a shower, nap, and were out into the local traffic
by five pm. We are a couple of blocks from the sea, ‘The Gate
of India’ is a five-minute walk and the hotel that got shot 2011, and where
John Lennon and Oko have stayed as well as Obamas and many other celebrities is
nearby. We walked through the hotel but gave the overprice menu a miss. The
restaurant was filled with rich looking men all dressed in white – Arabs,
probably shahs of some sort, not at all friendly looking.
We went to a local pharmacy to get mustard oil which my yoga-nutritionist person in Jodhpur recommended. I got a Muslim woman to smile, not often a fellow from New York gets a local Muslim to smile – maybe she was being polite. I said I needed the mustard oil to make me look young. Difficult to illustrate the moment but I enjoyed it. A clash of culture but we are in fact all mates.
The Gateway of India is an arch monument built during the 20th century in Bombay, India. The monument was erected to commemorate the landing of King George V and Queen Mary at Apollo Bunder on their visit to India in 1911.We did one of our famous (to us) random buses day.
Elephanta Island
People we met.
Mumbai: no one really.