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December 31st 2016
Published: January 2nd 2017
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The Agumbe-Udupi road was closed for vehicles, but motorbikes were still using it. I got a lift down this road to the village of Someshwara which is on the bottom end of the wildlife reserve (9km from Agumbe). The next bus from there to Udupi wasn't for almost two hours, so we carried on to a town called Hebri another 10km further on. For some reason, even though Udupi to Agumbe is apparently about an hour by bus, from Hebri (which should have been 20km closer) it still took over an hour to get to Udupi. There are trains from Udupi to Mumbai but all seats were booked for the next couple of days. There were only waiting list seats available, which are tickets you buy but can only actually use if someone else doesn't turn up. Instead I went back to the bus station.

It is something like 1000km to Mumbai from Udupi, or 20 hours by bus. I didn't fancy doing this in one trip. I've been on longer bus rides before and they aren't fun, and I really don't like sleeping on overnight buses, mainly because I don't get any sleep. I decided to break the journey in two and asked which were the best in-between towns for this. Ankola was about four hours away, Belagam was halfway at about eight (I know half of twenty hours isn't eight hours, but this is what they told me). It was already noon at this stage, and so I chose Ankola, figuring that if I left there early the next morning I'd get to Mumbai late afternoon.

In Ankola I stayed at the Radha Krishna Lodge which is across the road from the bus station and had a relatively amusing name, if you know what I mean. It was 300 rupees and infested with bed bugs. In the morning I had about a hundred bites across my back and a couple of dozen on my feet. Other than that it was fine.

As usual, upon arrival in the town I had to spend half an hour walking through the streets just trying to find an ATM that worked. The daily withdrawal limit had just gone up to 2500 rupees (previously it was 2000 rupees), although the machines seemed to decide for themselves what they wanted to let you take out. I was of the opinion that the seemingly endless number of days for which the withdrawal limit was set so low was a deliberate strategy by the government to try and force the country into a cashless society. There's a big push for this in India right now, trying to convince everybody that EFTPOS and credit cards are the way to go. Which is fine, it's just that India is not even close to being ready for this. It's like putting a dog in front of a piano, showing it how noise is made when it puts its paw on the keys, and then just expecting it to be able to play Chopsticks. It's not going to happen. Even for me, as a tourist, probably 90%!o(MISSING)f my spending can only be done with cash. The cheaper accommodations don't have EFTPOS facilities, most of the places I eat don't, you can only pay for tuktuks with cash, you can only pay for buses with cash unless you buy tickets online or from agents and even then I think probably only for the more expensive "tourist buses" rather than the local buses I take. Then the locals have all that (except the hotels) plus they need to buy food at the markets. A huge percentage of the population don't even have any sort of bank cards. Six days later the withdrawal limit went up to 4500 rupees which shot down my theory.

My splitting of the Udupi to Mumbai trip into two days to make each section shorter did not work. It just made it more convoluted. As it turned out, Ankola wasn't even on the direct Udupi to Mumbai route. Instead at 5.45am I took a bus from Ankola to Hubli, three hours away, and then from there a two hour bus to Belagam. From there I could get another bus for the next 500km to Mumbai. In other words, it took me five hours just to get from Ankola to the bus I needed to get to Mumbai! All these buses were of the "old school bus" type, probably rejects from other third-world countries. At least the final bus, the one to Mumbai, was mostly empty, unlike the sardine-can trips of all the others.

The Mumbai-bound bus left Belagam at 11.40am. I had asked the conductor how long the trip was and he had said ten hours. Sadly, I believed him. At 9.30pm we rolled into a big city and I'm thinking "this must be Mumbai". I was about to get my bags but the conductor motioned me to sit back down. This was Pune. There were still four hours to go before we reached Mumbai.

At 1.30am I finally reached Mumbai. Almost twenty hours since I left Ankola. All the cheap hotels seemed to be closed for the night. I drove around in a little taxi for a while looking for somewhere that was open. Most that we tried were shut or full. One was 1600 rupees and had cockroaches literally just running about on the bed; the guy just shrugged when I pointed that out. Eventually I ended up at a crappy place called the New Shalimar Hotel which was still too expensive (1000 rupees per night) but it was 3am by this time and I needed to sleep! At least with this hotel I could pay for my stay with my credit card and they had WIFI.

I'm usually an early riser, but after yesterday's twenty hours of bus rides and not getting to a bed until 3am I expected to be sleeping late. Instead I woke up at 8am (so, late for me but much earlier than I had expected). I didn't want to be spending long in Mumbai, partly because it was expensive and partly because I just don't like big cities. My main sights to see were the flamingoes at Sewri mudflats, the Byculla Zoo, the Bombay Natural History Museum, and the Karnala Bird Sanctuary. It was too late to visit the bird sanctuary today (it is a fair way outside the city), so after getting some breakfast I headed to Sewri.

Although most people (or at least me) tend to associate flamingoes with Africa, every year 30,000 flamingoes migrate southwards to Mumbai and settle at Sewri. About 95% are lesser flamingoes and the rest greater flamingoes. I'd never seen a flamingo before, except in zoos, and Mumbai had a firm place in my itinerary for this specific purpose.

The nearest train station to my hotel was the Sandhurst Road Station. Having just arrived I didn't realise the Mumbai taxis all have meters - this isn't something which is really normal in Asia - so I got charged 100 rupees to get from the hotel to the station when the real price (as I found out on the return trip with the meter) was about 30 rupees. Sewri Station is just four stops along from the Sandhurst Road Station - the ticket costs just five rupees - and once there you just cross the tracks and find one of the roads heading east. There's an actual road-crossing at the station from which you just keep walking until you hit a T-junction (and then turn right) but I followed some other local people across the tracks themselves and went along a smaller road, through some slums. A policeman on a motorbike asked what I was doing there - perhaps I looked like I didn't belong - and when I said I was going to the jetty to see the flamingoes he said he'd give me a lift there on his bike.

The best time to see the flamingoes, so I had read in a book called "Where To Watch Birds In World Cities" (it really does exist), was five hours before high tide because during high tide they all disappear into the mangroves. It was strange to imagine 30,000 flamingoes disappearing into mangroves but apparently it is so. Anyway, it was high tide when I arrived and there were zero flamingoes. The policeman said to come back at 2 or 3pm.

To fill in the day I took a taxi from by the train station to the Byculla Zoo which was not what I was expecting from a zoo in Mumbai. I saw my first Indian grey mongooses there, wild ones hanging out in the hyaena cage with some domestic cats.

I didn't know much about the Mumbai Zoo before I visited. I had the assumption that as one of the major cities in India, the zoo would be one of the major zoos. To my surprise it was so small and half-empty of animals that I was out in half an hour. It was one of those strange visits where you've seen the whole place, seen every cage and animal on show, but you've barely walked in. You think "should I go round a few more times?" but there isn't any point because there's nothing more to see and what is there wasn't worth seeing in the first place.

The entry fee is just five rupees. Strangely, water is not allowed into the zoo. Every person entering has their bag searched and any food and water is removed. I understand the food part, to stop people feeding the animals and littering, but the water part was a first for me. I can only assume it is to prevent the plastic bottles being thrown around. I argued with the guards that I can't walk around in that heat without water - I'm not Indian after all! - and after a while they got sick of me and just let me through. I needn't have bothered with the effort, given the short time I was in there.

The zoo was established in 1861, originally called Victoria Gardens by the British, and it does look like how you might imagine a Victorian-era animal collection in a garden setting in India. There are very few animals here, but also many enclosures were blocked off or empty or being demolished or being re-wired. The hooved stock had basic pens with a dry moat and wall-barrier surrounding each one. Most of the other animals were in menagerie cages. There were a few aviaries, including some very large ones for water birds. Bizarrely the emus were in a barred cage - the only other place I've seen emus in a cage is at the Calcutta Zoo.

Having spent less than half an hour at the zoo, I headed for the Bombay Natural History Museum. The taxi driver assured me he knew where it was, but we were driving so far from the zoo, to which I had thought it was relatively close, that I had some strong doubts. My doubts became even stronger when we stopped outside an art gallery and the driver says "museum". Um, no. I asked someone outside the gallery and he told my driver where to take me, which was basically around the corner - the driver had inadvertently brought me to much the right place by sheer accident. I got out at the building for the Bombay Natural History Society which is where I thought the museum was (it was next door) and was met by a guy who wanted to walk me to the museum entrance.

"You look like a Greek God," he said to me, almost as an opening remark.
"Um, okay..."
"Are you bachelor or married?"
"Bachelor" This is a standard question, to which they respond with amazement when you say you aren't married.
"So you can travel because you are a bachelor!"
"Yes."
""Have you ever done any nude modelling?"
"Um, no....?" This was a bit of a strange question from someone who only met me one minute ago.
"Have you had any nude photographs taken of you?"
"No." Must remain polite.
"Have you ever had a sexual experience with a man or a woman?"
"Not with men..." Looking around for a means of escape.
"With a man?" This was where he suddenly sounded really hopeful.
"NOT with a man!"
"So you have had a sexual experience with a woman?"
"Yes..."
"What do you like to do?" Then he starts listing sex acts.

That was when I'd had enough of being polite and told him to piss off.

When I got to the museum entrance the fee was 500 rupees. I decided I didn't need to go in there after all. After a surprisingly difficult time trying to find somewhere to have lunch I headed back to Sewri where it was now approaching low tide. And there were the flamingoes. Thousands of them.

Flamingoes are one of those animals which are really weird to see in the wild, like peacocks. You are so familiar with them from zoos and every childrens' animal book ever that it's almost like "oh okay, flamingoes" instead of "oh my god, flamingoes!!" I don't know if there were 30,000 of them - I don't even know how you would count them - but there were LOTS. And the greater flamingoes were surprisingly easy to distinguish even at a distance because they were white while the lesser flamingoes were pink. So there were great swathes of pink, and then one big blob of white, and those were the greater flamingoes. The greaters are greater too, of course, being maybe twice the height of the lessers, but this isn't so obvious except when they are standing right next to each other. As the tide moved the flamingoes moved closer, and groups of lessers were flying back and forth. Really awesome birds to see.

It wasn't just flamingoes on the mudflats of course, although the majority of the waders were too far off to identify without a scope. But there were quite a number of western reef egrets which is a heron I have wanted to see for a long time, as well as redshanks, greenshanks, Eurasian curlews, little stints, and various plovers.

The next day I went to the Karnala Bird Sanctuary. This is quite a way from Mumbai by the town of Panvel, which is an hour south by train so you need to start early. I got to the Sandhurst Road Station at 6am, bought a ticket for 20 rupees (and there's nobody else there that early, so no queues), and the ticket guy told me that train coming into the station right now goes to Panvel. I quickly jumped on and 35 minutes later I was at Andheri Station, the last stop. I had to go all the way back to Sandhurst Road Station, not in the best mood, to wait for the next train which really went to Panvel. Instead of getting to the sanctuary at 7.30am I was only just leaving (again) Sandhurst Road at that time.

In Panvel I walked round to the bus station, about 500 metres distant, and found a bus to Karnala. I had read they go every half an hour, but when I was at the sanctuary I saw at least four go by within about ten minutes. From Panvel the bus takes about half an hour and I got dropped right at the entrance. It was now close to 10am - almost four hours to get there!

The sole reason I wanted to visit Karnala was because four-horned antelope (chousingha) are found here. This is the only living antelope with four horns, and I had reasoned that they would be easiest to see early in the day before it got too hot and before many people were around. That may have been a correct reasoning because I didn't see any. The sanctuary is mostly dry forest, and would be nice early morning I think. I saw hardly any birds (all very common species) but there were three species of monkeys - rhesus macaques, bonnet macaques, and southern plains grey langurs. I think the Indian Mammal Field Guide includes these particular langurs as within the range of black-footed grey langurs (that author doesn't recognise the Southern Plains species) but they look very different. These were the first I'd seen and made the 70th mammal species I've seen on this trip (of which 36 have been "lifers" - ones I've seen for the first time in the wild - which is over half so a pretty good rate).

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