Mumbai, India (Day 2)

---

Well today turned out to contain more than we bargained for! We asked the hotel concierge to get us a taxi to go to Lower Parel for no other reason than I had read it supposedly has 'little plazas of activity in one of most up and coming areas of Mumbai. The former cotton mill exported to England...and is now transformed to a relaxed and trendy development'. I should have stopped when the first concierge we asked had never heard of it! But a more experienced one said yes he would get a taxi and it would cost 600 Rupees ...so off we went. An hour later we were still crawling through honking traffic when the driver told us it would cost 80 rupees to go over the Ravi Gandhi sea bridge...which was actually quite a spectacle..,being 9 km long over the Arabia sea. Then another half hour brought us to our destination. It was a modern shopping mall we could have seen in any city! We agreed to meet the driver two hours later for the return as we thought that maybe as we were so far from our hotel across a bridge we might have difficulty finding someone to take us back. So we walked around.,, had coffee in Costa went to Marks and Spencers most of the other shops were designer labels! Our driver duly arrived and we started back. Two miles on the taxi air conditioning stopped, another mile or so the car over heated..we were parked under a motorway under construction with traffic passing us on both sides. We ended up stopping 3 times...finally the driver left us and went off to buy some cenent stuff to repair the header pipe of the radiator. So they say everythinghappensfora reason and I wanted to see more of life in Mumbai...and I certainly got my wish this afternoon sitting in a broken down taxi all of life passed me by in three different locations. I am eternally grateful for being born in England!

---

Comments

[Kate & John]

Mumbai
What an adventure!