India - first impressions

---

I’ve decided to give up on the missing weeks in my blog. I might write up about them later, but without the Guidebooks any more, or Internet access, it’s even hard for me to remember exactly where I went in an orderly way. Anyway, rather than constantly trying to catch up, I’ve decided to post this current one, and maybe later go back over the four weeks that are missing.

---

I arrived in Mumbai airport around midnight Tuesday morning. By the time I got through customs and baggage collection and all it was about 01:00. I hadn’t read up about where to stay, so I approached the hotel reservation office inside the airport, which is obviously a bad idea. This was inside the restricted area so I thought it’d be reputable enough. They found me a place for the equivalent of about $40, which they told me was in the centre of Mumbai. Their driver took me about 15 minutes drive to a dodgy little hotel, clearly not in the centre of Mumbai.


“Yes Sir, this is the centre of Mumbai. It doesn’t look like it from here, but you ask anybody where is the centre of Mumbai and they will tell you it’s here” said the hotel receptionist. It was a lousy hotel with building works everywhere and annoying bellboys. The bed was double or queen sized, with the sheets consisting of two single-bed sheets placed sideways across the mattress, and likewise for one blanket. I left early the next morning and got a taxi into the Fort area in central Mumbai. After wandering around there for about three hours in the humidity, carrying my backpacks, I gave up on finding a place there and headed for the Colaga area, also in central Mumbai, a couple of kilometres away. Eventually I was able to find a room for about $20. This was pretty basic, no air-con, shared showers/toilets with buckets for the water …, but I guess that’s what Mumbai’s like - expensive.


With another traveler I met at the hotel we hired a taxi for a few hours to give us a city tour, it cost a couple of dollars each. We visited Chowpatty beach, a popular promenade for Mumbaikars but which long ago became too polluted for swimming; Malabar hill, a small hill with neat gardens and a bit of a view over some of Mumbai’s ritzier suburbs; Kamala Nehru Park, near Malabar Hill, a smaller park with a view of vultures circling the well-hidden Parsi cemetery nearby (of course, Parsis worship the three elements and therefore don’t believe in burying or cremating their dead); visited a large Jain temple with a sign asking, among other things, for us not to turn our backs to the “idols”; we passed a hospital which was one of the many targets of the 26/11 terrorist attacks; Gandhi house; a bridge with a good view of Mahalaxmi dhobi ghat, where much of the city’s laundry is washed in a large frenzy of wringing and clothes-beating; and finally the Gateway of India, a local gathering spot dominated by a giant basalt arch commemorating the 1911 visit of Britain’s King George V. Gandhi House is where Mohandas Gandhi frequently stayed on and off between 1917-1934 and now consists mainly of a bookstore, photos, newspaper articles, photocopies of some of Gandhi’s letters (including a letter he wrote to Roosevelt and another to Hitler, in 1939) and a few dioramas of his life, plus the main highlight, the room where he worked, with the spinning wheel on which he spun his clothes.


It was after this that I discovered that I’d lost my battery charger, the universal charger which I’d been using for my old phone and for my camera, and the battery charger that came with my new phone. This was a Bad Thing. I then spent about four hours one day and about three hours the next day wandering around all the electronics stores in Mumbai trying to find a charger. After repeating this about a hundred times I got a bit annoyed:

“Hello, I’m looking for a universal battery charger”

“Certainly sir, what brand of battery”

“Umm … universal"

“yes sir, we have.”

Followed by a wait of about five minutes while their assistant rummages around out the back; then he shows me a Nokia phone charger or a AA battery charger or anything other than a universal battery charger. A few places sold me a little gimmick that plugs into the wall and has a couple of wires that connect to the battery. It only cost about $2 so I tried it. The first one did nothing, then I found a fancier version somewhere else, and that one did nothing other than give off smoke and completely drain my battery. I found one place who could sell me an Olympus battery charger, which would at least have got my camera working, but they wanted $100! I did have a really cool universal charger which charged pretty much any battery known to mankind, which I bought in Australia.


At one shop they referred me to another store 10 minutes walk away. I was dubious, but one of their guys walked with me. I told him not to, as I knew he’d want a tip, but he did anyway. He was early-middle aged, dressed in business trousers and immaculately pressed shirt, as most Indians men are - men and women both seem to be very particular about personal grooming. Along the way a beggar with one hand and half a face accosted me asking for money. You can’t give money to all the beggars in Mumbai even if it were a good idea to do so, but I was surprised to see that the guy who was walking along with me, who didn’t seem to speak English, made the hand gestures for “ha, a beggar. He’s only going to spend the money on drugs anyway” (to show this with hand gestures, roll your eyes, then do the action for “smoking” and “injecting”). I guess this is a universal excuse.


I find that I’m staying on the same block as the Taj Mahal Hotel, one of the targets of the 26/11 attacks, and eating at Leopald’s café, a popular tourist/expat spot which was another target, which I guess explains the guards out the front with what looks like shotguns. There are a few beggars in the area, not enough to be annoying, but if you go out before the shops open at about 10:00, there’s lots of kids, some I’d say as young as five, sleeping literally on the footpath. There’s a brother and sister (I assume) probably around eight years old who sleep cuddled up together under an old sheet the size of a beach towel, a boy who says his name is Ganesh - like the son of Krishna - with one eye, and a guy in his late teens who tries to sell me cocaine. That last one tells me that he knew other Australians, one “old man about forty-five with a young girlfriend about twenty or twenty-five” who came to India often and used large amounts of cocaine and whisky. “I tried to tell him to stop, I said ‘slow down’” he says, but in the end, he tells me, the Australian guy was found dead in a hotel room. “The girl was sad she was crying, lots of tears” he adds unnecessarily. “I try to comfort her, I tell her … ‘don’t cry. Go back to your country, at least you are save.’ “






I finally walk out on the incredibly rude ticket agent (who sells train tickets with a 50%!m(MISSING)arkup) and go to the station to buy one myself. It turns out to be remarkably easy for tourists, as there is a tourist quota so you can buy tickets even after the train is full. I was planning to get a 2AC (Second Air-conditioned - not to be confused with Second Class) ticket, but then realize that Sleeper class isn’t much worse (just lacks the air-con) and is less than one-quarter the price ($AUS 10 for the super-fast - nearly 24-hours - express for the 1293-kilometre trip from Mumbai to Chennai; the slower trains would be even cheaper) so I book that instead. I am on my way to Chennai to then connect down to Trichy (Tiruchirappalli) to meet up with my sister and her partner who will be travelling with me for ten days.


Unlike most other Mumbai-Chennai trains, this express doesn’t leave from Victoria (Mumbai Central Station) but from a suburb called Dadar. I get a taxi ride out with the taxi driver who turns out to be the same guy who’s given us the city tour two days earlier. The trip takes about an hour (and costs 200 Rupees - $5 - although I give him a 100 Rupee tip). I forget his name, but he turns out to be from Kashmir. His family is still back there and we talk about how hard it would be to relocate them. He asks me about my travel plans, and in telling him about them I mention that I will be flying back to Australia for a week or so for my other sister’s wedding.

“How old is she?” he asks

I tell him

“Oh, very young” he says. “I think it must be a love marriage, is it?”

“Umm, well yes, that’s really the only sort we have in Australia. No Australian young people would let their parents arrange their marriage for them”

“My sister too, she also had a love marriage”. He seems slightly happy about that.


Just that day one of the English-language broadsheets had a report about an area “only 50 km from Delhi” in which “love marriages stand no chance” because all marriages are arranged by the village elders. The report asserts that in that particular rural area, when young people marry against the elders’ wishes, their entire families are banished from the village, leaving them no support networks and little option but suicide, and bad girls have a habit of dying in mysterious circumstances. Admittedly the only examples mentioned in the report are of first-cousin marriages, which in that area are seen as incest. “Only whores chose their men” one of the village elders is quoted as saying. I have no idea if that’s just journalistic beat-up, and I understand that in the cities it’s very different.






Despite my poor first impressions of Mumbai from the rude store owners in my first two days and my shock at the prices, I’m starting to think that Mumbai isn’t too bad (now that I’m sitting on the train on my way to Chennai, safely out of Mumbai). It’s obviously massive, but not as frenetic as Cairo was, and it does have much of the colour that you’d expect from India, the same seething mass of humanity. Perhaps I didn’t see enough of it, but I was surprised that there weren’t more temples and more cows on the streets. I hardly saw any cows. I liked the way everyone speaks English and virtually every sign is in English (sometimes without the Hindi counterpart). I think strangers talk to each other in Hindi, but in terms of reading roadsigns, shopsigns, etc., you’d probably get by better with just English than with just Hindi. I liked wandering around and finding unexpected things - the optimistic advertisement “Keep Mumbai beautiful” (“Keep”!?) and its more wordy equivalent invoking the memory of Gandhi to implore Mumbaikars to not litter; the strange things you come across all of a sudden such as barbers shaving their clients with the old cut-throat razer on the footpath, or a shopful of men typing out business letters for their clients on massive, old, typewriters.


In case you haven’t been paying attention, I didn’t get many photos from these last few days because I can’t charge my camera battery. Almost all of these photos are from that short city tour I did with the taxi driver. I’m writing this on Sep 10, but by the time you’re reading this (unless it has no photos associated with it at all) I’ll have found a battery charger or some sort for my camera, and hopefully my phone too! I’m writing this on the train, I’m sharing the compartment with five guys probably in their late 20s who’re heading to Tirumala (maybe 70 km before Chennai) for a nine-day festival for Lord Vishnu at what they claim is India’s richest and biggest temple. Speaking of religious festivals, I timed my flight wrong, I arrived in Mumbai a couple of days after a massive ceremony to everyone’s favourite god, Ginesha, in which a massive statute of him are ceremonially dunked into the Arabian Sea, with other smaller statutes being likewise dunked at various other times throughout the month. I read about it in the newspaper while I was in London.

11/09/2009 - OK I know the photos are out of order and many are there twice, and some have captions and some don't. This isn't my fault, but it's travelblog's fault again, after spending an hour uploading all the photos with captions, it only decided to save half of them. Since I'm in a very old Internet cafe and have to go soon, I don't have time to re-sort them or to add the captions again, so I just uploaded them all again as is.

---

Photos

Mumbai
I can't remember why I took this photo, but after my camera died it's the only sort of general shot I have of Mumbai

Mumbai
looking across Chowpatty Beach to the posh southern suburbs (Churchgate?)

Mani Bhavan - Gandhi museum
diorama of Gandhi at the hearing into the 1919 Amritsar massacre (I think?)

Mumbai
looking across Chowpatty beach a bit further north of the previous photo

Jain Temple
supposedly the main jain temple in Mumbai. I forget the name

Mani Bhavan - Gandhi museum
The room where Gandhi stayed when he was in Mumbai

Comments

[ATUL JOSHI]

painting
hai this was painted by me