Mumbai:

December 2nd, 2004 - December 6th, 2004

Greetings to all from Mumbai (Bombay).

We arrived Thursday evening after a nightmarish flight from Hong Kong. There was the "Tom Cruise" of the Indian film industry on our flight and he was sitting in the first row after the entrance door so people were freaking out trying to take photos with him and they would not sit down. Not to mention the crying babies for 3.5 hours...

Bombay is a trip and a half. Luckily we were met by a driver who took us to our hotel. The drive was pretty crazy and if you are not honking your horn you are doing something wrong. We made our first encounter with a cow on the road about 15 minutes into our time in Bombay. Actually, there were two cows.

Our hotel is nice and is a bit away from the touristy area which is nice. They serve traditional Indian meals with the odd western food like omlette in the morning.

Our real adventures began on Friday morning with what we have termed the "Bombay Cab Ride." If there were an international world theme park, this would surely be the highlight. The cabs are tiny 1950's style fiats that are not really made for people of our size. The cabbies drive with half their body hanging out the window with one hand on the wheel and one hand, of course, on the horn.

We ventured down to the local beach which was brutally polluted and empty so we went for a walk up the hill. It is about 30 degrees and smoggy so we made it most of the way up the hill and had to get directions as we had no idea where we were going. We finally found some stairs with the help of a local guy, and came up the back way into a cool Jain temple. We rested for almost an hour in the shade there...

From the temple we ventured to the Hanging Gardens after walking down another weird road. There are no sidewalks so you take your life into your hands with each step. The gardens were peaceful and we were the only foreigners there. But, there were tons of Indian tourists. In fact, we became more of an attractions than the gardens. They were shocked to see "white people" as they were from rural areas and they all gathered around us and started taking photos with us. We probably had our photo taken about two dozen times with close to 30 people and their dear friends. In fact, some guys followed us afterwards because they wanted to get one-on-one photos with us, as well! Crazy...

The heat was getting to us so we returned to the hotel for a nap... Our hotel was situated near a mosque and they were having a nightly speaker series with various guests. While India is generally noisy, this just added to the noise pollution. They speaker series went on well into the night and the massive flood lights lighing the outdoor area in which the lectures were taking place were right off our balcony. Due to our jetlag, we might have been the only people in a 2 kilometre sqaure radius who actually got some sleep.

We met up with Kavas, our travel agent and now best friend. Our 1 hour meeting became an 8 hour night... full of drinks, stories and other Indian flavour. Him and three local guys who are working for him ordered up some tasty local delicacies for us to try... including sheep brains which we were tricked into trying. Mushy, but good...

Kavas orders most of his food and groceries - he is part of the upper class. When making the order we asked if they could order us some toilet paper b/c we had been stealing napkins from our hotel to do the deed! We got a resounding "that's disgusting" from all the local guys in the room! So, while we consider wiping with the left dirty, they consider toilet paper dirty. To each their own! Anyway, the toilet paper did arrive much to our delight. We now have our special roll that we take everywhere...

It is now Saturday and we are using the business centre of the amazing Taj Hotel down by the Gateway to India. Some festival has prevented us from doing what we wanted to do today so we will indulge in another Bombay Cab Ride and check out some other stuff...

We head to Goa on Monday morning and away from the world's most chaotic city...

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