"Welcome To India" Mumbai Travelogue by travelinxs

[please note that due to the length of time the films were transported, with temperatures from -20C to +40C, the later pictures are of considerably higher quality]

Walking down through the cold dark streets of my home town that November night to catch the 'Midnight Express' bus to London one would suppose I would have felt elated to be off on another journey once more. But it felt different this time. Perhaps I was just tired from the seemingly endless build up and months of work. Perhaps a lingering hangover from the farewell night of before was draining my enthusiasm. Perhaps it was because I had left my world behind me and perhaps a little of myself too.

Despite a bunch of airline tickets in my pocket I had little idea of where I was going. The trip had been worked out over a coffee whilst perusing a world atlas. There was a rough itinery for the first 24 hours, but no further. I had an unread guide book in my pack and an insuppressible desire to travel. Why I choose travel over so many other more worthy dreams in life,
I have no idea. Why I am prepared to make so many sacrifices to pursue these seemingly pointless dreams elude me. To either quash or come to an understanding of these ideals was what this journey was about. At least for now.

Mark and I caught the bus without a hitch and boarded the plane at Heathrow for Mumbai (Bombay). We had anticipated hell upon arrival and had therefore booked a hotel from England for the first couple of nights, paying a frightening ?20 ($30) a night for the two of us
(prices are always for a room unless otherwise stated) but it was worth it to enable us a relatively easy transition through the ?stargate? into our new world. India.

It was 2am and a pleasant 23C. Our taxi driver spoke no English so I gazed out of the open window into a dark new world passing by.

Shacks of wood and tin lined the road from the airport toward Mumbai. Pungent smells of rotting vegetables fused with effluence from open sewers and before me a sprawl of silent humanity I would have not believed. Along the 24km road were thousands – tens of thousands of people sleeping. At the side of the road in the dirt, on vehicles, under vehicles, on walls and under bridges. Whole families with young children and babies slept out on any space available. ‘Welcome to India’, I whispered.

lads down by the Gateway

Our prebooked accommodation would be available at noon, so with nowhere to go we wandered down to the waters edge and sat on a wall beside the Gateway To India monument with a pack of stray dogs for company and played ‘spot the rat’ for five hours.

Elephantine Island

India awoke with the rising of the sun and we took a boat to Elephantine Island 9km away to escape the city. Here, there were rock-cut temples and carvings from around 500 AD and lots of monkeys. So here we were, sightseeing, in oppressive heat, having not been to bed for three days. I seemed to have escaped the afflictions of culture shock so far and everything would have been going to plan, had we had one. But I had never felt so exhausted in my life. I would need a decent nights sleep before taking on the rest of India…

the lookout point

We moved on from Mumbai (Bombay), taking a deluxe overnight coach south to a colonial hill station called Mahabaleshwar. It was a welcome relief to escape the polluted deprivation of the city, which I had found neither inspiring nor interesting to explore, high into the clean air and cooler temperatures. That Mumbai housed the largest slums in Asia did little to justify a longer stay.

We relaxed for a couple of days, pottering around the bazaar of this small resort aimed almost exclusively at Indians on holiday from Mumbai and walked to a few scenic lookout points in the area. It was slightly strange to be asked by Indian tourists to pose with them for their holiday photos!

There was only one way out of town to continue south and that was on the super deluxe ‘sleeper coach’ where we were promised our own bunks. I should have known better. Mark and I were bundled into a bunk about three foot wide and just over five foot long, up against the roof, for nearly ten miserable and claustaphobic hours. That we had both just experimented with our first true Indian curries that evening made for a painful, butt-clenching journey.

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