Tourist's Mumbai

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Tourist’s Mumbai

Our friends, Chris and Terry, a British couple, who are on a two-year round-the-world tour, landed in Mumbai in August.

We had met them in Turkey when we were on our Gallipoli-Troy trip.

You can’t help developing an easy friendship with like-minded people when you have traveled on the same bus, seen the same sights and heard the same anecdotes from the guide.

An added common interest was blogging.

We had exchanged email-ids and website-addresses when we had discovered that they too upload their travelogues on ‘travelblog.org’.

Chris and Terry had traveled through Iran, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan - countries that you have to search on a map before you locate them -- before landing in India and then travelled through Rajasthan, Kashmir and Ladakh till they landed in Mumbai.

As they told us, in all these months of wandering and feeling like aliens, for the first time they felt ‘at home’ in Mumbai because the city reminded them so strongly of London, their own city.

This is hardly surprising. As we told them, “This city is your own creation. Your people built it up from a fishing village. (I mean the British people)

I believe the Fort area of Mumbai is the most ‘westernized’ part in India. However, there is much more to Mumbai than an anglicized appearance.

Actually, Mumbai is not one city but a conglomeration of many cities. Matunga might be mini-Chennai and parts of Chembur may look like mini-Karachi while many Western suburbs have a predominantly Guju atmosphere.

Mumbai is the most cosmopolitan city in India.

Here, I am not even trying to define the ‘quintessential Mumbai’ because it defies definition. I am only going to show you the face of Mumbai that tourists see, the ‘touristy places’ that we took Chris and Terry to, in the course of one day. Of course, the city has more ‘touristy places’. Many sites like Elephanta are missing in my photos, but you can probably do only this much in one day.

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Photos

Victoria Terminus (VT)
This building is renamed CST now. (Chchatrapati Shivaji Terminus)