Mumbai (Formerly Bombay), India

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MUMBAI (FORMERLY BOMBAY), INDIA. Monday 19 March, 2012.

Arrived at the port entrance about an hour late. Then had to negotiate the lock to get into the inner harbour and Indira Dock. This was quite interesting to watch and we had a good view from deck 8 forward. The tug boats were brilliant. We had two behind and one in front. They carefully pulled and pushed The Discovery until she was parallel with the side of the lock and then gently prodded and pulled her inside. Once the lock gates were closed we waited about half an hour for the lock level to be the same as the inner harbour. The gates were opened and Discovery proceded inside with yet more pushing and pulling from the little tug boats. We were already late, but negotiating this lock had made us even later. We were eventually in position in the Indira Docks nearly 2 hours after we were due to arrive. Luckily we were in no hurry to disembark as we knew that we had two more days here in Mumbai (with a guide and driver) that we had arranged before leaving the UK.

Mumbai is known as the Gateway to India and we had seen the physical 'Gate' on the way into Mumbai Harbour. Mumbai is a crystalisation of the diversity of India - with all its languages, standards of living, food, clothing, religions and races all in microcosm. It is supposed to be one of the best introductions to this vast subcontinent of 1.08 billion inhabitants - a sixth of the world's population.

Mumbai is home to 15 million of these people. Hindi is the national language in India, but English serves as the common tongue, surmounting scores of other languages and dialects - lucky for us! Mumbai is India's major harbour and one of the biggest ports in the world. The city occupies a tongue of land (once 7 separate islands) sticking out into the Arabian Sea. This means that real estate is very expensive as, being on a peninsula, it can only expand in one direction. Mumbai is the home to India's stock exchange and boasts many industries including textiles, petrochemicals, banking, machinery and movies. Mumbai is the film capital of India, outstripping even Hollywood!

The other reason that we weren't in any hurry to go ashore was that M had caught the Discovery lurgy. She had been poorly last night at dinner but now the sore throat, cough and cold had really taken hold. She was also running a fever. We stayed on board, had lunch and waited until everyone else had disembarked. We then got off and went to look for our hotel which was close to the Docks. All the dock gates have a colour, Grey, Yellow and Blue being the others that we saw - although there are more. We caught the shuttle to the Green Gate and easily found the hotel which was only 5 minutes walk away. We introduced ourselves and picked up a free map before returning to Discovery. It was hot and D was now also feeling under the weather.

We had a cup of tea and rested until dinner. We didn't make the farewell show as neither of us were too well. Dinner was nice and we were able to say our goodbyes to Marcia, John, Irene and Dave (Annette and Darryl had disembarked at Goa in order to do the ship's tour to Agra). M exchanged emails with Quo Vardis (our tour company) and agreed that we would disembark around 11 am the next morning and that we would be met on the quay by one of their agents.

As there is nothing much to look at we will include a few pictures of the ship with this blog.

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Photos

The Discovery Lounge
You can just see D striding into the distance!

Palm Court
A good place to sit and watch the ocean go by, read or log on to the Wi Fi