Sooo far.....so good

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As it turns out our train journey(s) to Mumbai wasn't too bad. We had a whole set of berths to ourselves for the first leg of the journey and for the overnight leg we had two berths alongside the window on their own...and no screaming children in sight! With much trepidation of the horrors awaiting us we arrived in Mumbai nice&early (7am) and had a unbelievably tranquil drive from the train station to the foreigner's district of Colaba where we found ourselves a lovely huge room with tv, fridge, air con and hot water for a reasonable price (by Mumbai's standards). After freshening up we headed out and meandered around broad leafy streets, walked along the harbour past the Gateway to India (a memorial monument built around 1924 for the arrival of the then Prince of Wales later to be King Edward VI), and into the heart of Mumbai's financial/fashionable district. Though it was obviously to be expected Emma and i were amazed at indeed how much of the architecture was of the British style...many times we generally felt like we were walking past London's St.Pancras station or on the fringes of Hyde park! Mumbai has a massive electronics/camera bazaar (probably something to do with all the Bollywood studios in the area) with competitive prices...which was fortunate as a minor moped incident in Hampi resulted in my thumb ending up through my camera eyepiece and in much need of repair; within four hours and at reasonable cost (very unlike London) my camera was fixed and we were back wandering around Mumbai. We walked across the maidans, open ideally-grassy-but-sunburnt greens where Indians converge in multitudes to play cricket, and eventually found ourselves sat in an Arabian style coffee shop smoking a Hookah (a lovely delight we first tried in Dubai) observing the Westernized Mumbai-ians....boys and girls dressed in jeans and shirts socializing together, and drinking alcohol nonetheless! We hadn't seen any interaction between the sexes elsewhere in our travels and we were somewhat taken aback by such a 'normal' scene. Following an early night's sleep we spent the following day meandering around the city a bit more and took advantage of the Western benefits Mumbai has to offer...pizza for lunch, shopping at Marks&Spencers, and dare i admit it...McDonalds fries&chocolate shake before saying Goodbye to Mumbai and heading on an overnight train for Jaipur.
Although Mumbai has some of India's biggest slums on the outskirts, we didn't see that much poverty in the area we were in - no more than the usual few beggars and disabled/disfigured people that we have come to expect in India. No sightings of public defecation or dead bodies in the streets; though we had, in a morbid sort of way, kind of wanted to see the Towers of Silence. The Parsi people, adherents of Zoroastrianism, believe that earth, fire and water are sacred and don't wish to pollute any of these elements and so they do not bury their dead instead they put their dead in hollow open-topped circular concrete towers to be eaten by vultures (however, due to loss of habitat the vulture population is declining and the Parsis have, in recent years, had to resort to other methods to speed up the decomposition of their dead, such as chemicals and solar-powered heaters...bizarre stuff but strangley interesting!). Tourists cannot get anywhere close to the area of the Towers however.
Overall we saw very little of the horrors we'd been expecting to see in Mumbai...I think we got lucky, were exposed to more affluence than poverty, and managed to see the city through rose tinted glasses -which is okay 'cause there's plenty more degredation and sadness out there to see, unfortunately.

More photos to follow soon.............. ps Check previous entry for photo update from the last leg!

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