At night we landed in Mumbai, walking through the refreshing and unexpectedly modern airport where we found the taxi desk after a tour company tried to sell us an aircon van trip to the hotel for 3x the normal price.  Not a big surprise, but also nothing out of the ordinary in a lot of places.  We were ushered into one of the ubiquitous antiquated black and yellow taxis that roam the city, with a box-shaped passenger section and likely a lot of hope and repair work packed in under the engine.  We rumbled through the city, the sidewalks awash in people and the roads in a similar state with cars before finally arriving and seeking out a hotel to crash promptly after a cold water shower.  Cold water showers may become a theme of the trip.

The next day we walked down a few blocks from the hotel to the Taj Mahal Hotel and the Gate of India, the latter of which is typically regarded as one of the true symbols of Mumbai and was built over a hundred years back for the visit of King George.  From there, we took a ship into the harbour to stop over at Elephanta Island, home to a number of carvings in caves from 1,200 years ago or thereabouts.  Whilst there we had the pleasure of seeing the islands most aggressive inhabitants- resident monkeys- hassle other tourists for their food and even succeed in getting a Sprite and Coke away, unscrewing them, and drinking from the bottles.  Guess in a few years the Indians will have obese, hyper-sugared monkeys to look forward to.

The neighborhood of Colaba, where we are staying, and the Fort, near the main station, are littered with the grand decaying architecture that graces so many former outposts of the British Empire.  Large green trees tower over the smaller streets and offer a comfortable respite from the busier thoroughfares nearby, and it is actually a surprising pretty place to walk about and just enjoy.  Initial visions of touts and beggar children have, at least here, yet to materialize, and the general aggressiveness of the street vendors is on par with the Chinese, so there is nothing new there for Tori or I.

Today we visited a mosque and a Hindu temple not too distant from one another before retiring back to our neighborhood.  The food is wonderful, as to be expected, and the prices are so low that I think I’ll experience sticker shock going back to China, and we have only been to Mumbai, the most expensive city in the country.  This evening at Tori’s insistence on ‘being outside’ we went to the square around the Gate of India to peoplewatch and I brought my Chinese cards, ostensibly to study.  However we were soon bombarded with a plethora of friendly smiling Indians who wanted to take pictures with us.

This continued for hours, literally, with small lapses in between.  The cameramen that roam the plaza did a brisk trade cashing in on our all-American good looks, and some of the highlights were a group of gradeschool boys, one of whom earned the respect of his comrades when he dared to put an arm around Tori for a picture.  The cameramen gave us free copies of a few pictures and one bought us some tea from a chai-wallah circling nearby.  Despite the curiosity of the Chinese, neither of us had ever been so besieged for photos before.  We know now how to spend a day if we get bored.  Soon we will leave for Jodhpur, to the north in Rajasthan.  It looks amazing in pictures, so here’s hoping the reality will match.

Pictures are linked here