To Bombay, a travelling couple came. Mumbai

Mumbai

Tree-lined street in Colaba

Sunday cricket outside our hotel

I was excited to get to Mumbai. I’d been here for work earlier in 2016 and really enjoyed it; the chilled vibe, the trees(!), the sea next to the bustling city, the weather. This time we stayed in an area called Masjid Bunder, a far cry from the Taj Mahal Palace where I’d stayed for work. The guys at the hotel this time round were just as accommodating as the staff at the Taj though.

Once we arrived in the city, we dumped our bags and took a walk down to the Gateway to India and round the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, stopping in Café Mondegar for lunch. 

Gateway to India

We strolled through Colaba’s busy street market and had a quick beer in Leopolds. I had forgotten how expensive it was in Mondegars and Leopolds but I guess they’ve experienced the 'Lonely Planet' effect and more people know about them, so prices rise in line with popularity. Leopolds has also been of interest for other reasons, and travellers and locals alike flock there in solidarity against the terrorist attacks in 2008 when the bar was hit before the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, and 10 people were killed. 

We visited the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya museum (that took me 10 minutes to type), one of India’s national museums, hosting artefacts ranging from typical religious carvings, to Indian history, art and natural history. It was especially interesting to read about Harrapan civilisation that lived during the Bronze Age, around 3000BC, from Northern India to Pakistan. Harrapans seemed quite advanced in the way they lived in terms of infrastructure, such as sewage systems, construction techniques and tools, ceremonies and rites. Not much is known about them, especially as the pieces of writing found haven’t yet been deciphered. It does seem crazy how some of today’s cultures seem to have taken a step backwards from some of their ideas! 

The museum

On one day we took the train to Pune, which is a city around 3 hours away from Mumbai, as I had some meetings. We had plenty of time to get to the train station from our hotel and when we arrived, we were immediately surrounded by drivers, all advising us on where to get the train to... Goa. I suppose the majority of tourists are on their way down to the beach so they assumed that was where we were headed. Being the India train aficionados that we are, we brushed them off, telling them we knew where we were going.

CST train station, where we were meant to go for Pune!

However, it soon transpired that our train wasn’t coming up on the screen, so we checked with the police who had a desk in the station...and who told us that we were at the wrong station. Our cocky attitude soon disappeared and we were quickly ushered into a rickshaw with 15 minutes to get to the correct station. No easy feat getting anywhere fast in Mumbai at 8 o’clock on a Monday morning. Our driver, who knew approximately one word in English, was keen to show us how stressful this all was by constantly checking his watch and shouting ‘shit!’. We made it with 5 minutes to spare amazingly, and of course the train didn’t move for another half an hour anyway.

Pune

We made it to Pune and I went off to my meetings while Baby D relaxed at the hotel. Pune is a nice city and it’s getting a lot of investment for development, so hopefully I will be back one day. We only stayed over for a night, which was a pity really. I was told it was only a small town where everyone knows everyone, and at in excess of 3 million inhabitants, I guess it’s TINY for India!

Back to Mumbai

Back in Mumbai and we decided to do the Dharavi slum tour. Dharavi is one of the biggest slums in the world and was a key location for the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. There is a big debate over doing this tour as people feel it’s profiteering from others’ misfortune, but the tour we did puts 80% of the revenue into slum projects, which are generally education-based such as IT, literacy and teaching English. 

The slums were exactly as I had pictured, having read Shantaram, a novel which is partially set there. Tiny rooms in which people cooked, slept and generally lived, but kept surprisingly clean under the circumstances. Walking through the slums was treacherous at points, they were not much more than a foot wide, low, with electricity wires hanging down, pipes sticking out of the floor and water (sewage?) running in rivulets. 

The other side of the slum showed us the industries thriving there – this is probably one of the only towns in India that recycles and probably one of the most industrious. They collect plastic to recycle into pellets which are shipped off to companies to make toys, bottle lids; all sorts of things. They even made the machinery to make the pellets. They have a similar process for aluminium – recycling, melting into bars, shipping out for re-use. The men that work in the aluminium ‘plants’ don’t use any protective gear, and so their life expectancy is only about 55 years; 30 years less than average. They know this, but they want to work and it’s a relatively well paid job, so they make sacrifices!

Dharavi slum tour

We were taken to the leather making factory where they go through the process of tanning before turning the leather into goods which are sold in their shop. They sell through a small number of specialist shops but production is very restricted to avoid counterfeit products appearing at local markets. It seemed as though everyone who could work, did work. There was a bakery with a conveyor belt of loaves – none of them were marked ‘made in Dharavi’ as this would put people off from buying them. Even the women who stayed home with their children worked, making poppadums which were left to dry on upturned buckets, and are sold all over the world. Quite an inspiring place to see.

Hanging Gardens

We spent some time wandering around trendy 'SoBo' (South Bombay), as well as picking up street food at Chowpatty, Mumbai's best known public beach, on our way to one of the city's most chilled parks, the Hanging Gardens. A whistlestop tour of Mumbai before our 20 day tour of Rajasthan!

#bombay #mumbai #masjidbunder #gatewaytoindia #chowpatty #dharavi
#ChhatrapatiShivajiMaharajVastuSangrahalayamuseum #harrapan #pune