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Published: September 16th 2015
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After a great three weeks road tripping in the USA, it was time to start the backpacking. 36 hours of flights, airports and a brief jaunt into Singapore later - India!
First stop was Mumbai. Mumbai was a brilliant city to wander around and adjust to life in India; the place is completely hectic and assaults all your senses at once (often with smell being the sense assaulted the most...). We walked up to Dhobi Ghat one day, which was interesting - a large proportion of Mumbai's laundry is done here, including the majority of hotels washing. It's actually a slum, where somehow they manage to take in up to 10,000 items of clothing each day, get them washed and dried all together and then return them unerringly to their correct owners. A pretty impressive system considering that the vast majority of the slum dwellers can't read or write. On the flip side, seeing the slum also made me understand why it is that your bedsheets never quite seem clean in Indian hotels...
An enduring memory of Mumbai is the size and quantity of the slums. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised - after all it's one of
the things Mumbai is famous for - but the slums just took up every available space. 60% of Mumbaikers live in slums; 13 million people. Apparently it's pretty common for people to have decent jobs - office workers etc - and still to live in the slums, just because that's where they grew up, and because Mumbai real estate is so expensive. We took a wrong turn on the walk back from Dhobi Ghat, and ended up walking through the outskirts of one slum. It was pretty cool to see (although I'm not sure we were entirely welcome there); like the rest of Mumbai, it was all massive contradictions - tiny 10ft square dwellings with whole families living in them, but with TVs and satellite dishes; filthy garbage-strewn alleys, but with pristine shacks lining them.
After Mumbai it was down to Hampi. We're travelling India mainly by train - partially because it's cheap and well connected, and partially because it's a classic Indian experience to travel long distances on trains, Indian rural scenes out of the window, meeting interesting people, chai-wallahs shouting their wares down the aisle. You shouldn't believe the horror stories you hear about Indian train travel,
the days of people trying to climb into your bunk and riding the roofs of trains are long gone - in general, our experience has been brilliant, and it's definitely the best way to get around India.
Hampi was an incredible place. It's a surreal landscape of huge boulders, of high religious importance to Hindus, and a large city was build there in the Middle Ages. It was the seat of the Vijayanagara empire until it was razed by Deccan sultans in the 1500s, and what's left are stunning ruins sat among the rocks. Everywhere you turn there's a different half ruined house or temple, looking almost an organic part of the landscape, and this stretches for miles and miles - it really is an amazing sight. You could spend days and days there just wandering around, and your jaw would still drop at every turn.
Monkeys were an occupational hazard of Hampi. It's great to sit eating breakfast watching them scamper about, but I was not quite so impressed when one of the little buggers jumped onto our table and made off with my mango lassi, glass and all. I was even less impressed when we left
our shoes half way up a big hill to walk the rest barefoot to the temple at the top, to return and find my flip flops had been irresistible to a troop of monkeys who'd nabbed them and were in the process of trying to work out if they would be best utilised as food or a toy. I spent quite a while running around the boulders trying to chase them down and recapture my footwear, which I'm sure was very entertaining to see from the outside, although I didn't quite see the funny side at the time...
For the next week after Hampi we headed down through Mysore and then Mangalore. Both nice places to wander around, especially the markets of Mysore which you could spend hours in - the Devaraja market in particular. They sell the oils and coloured powders used by Hindus there along with loads of fruit and vegetables, so the whole market is brightly coloured and vibrant. It's also nice to see where the food you eat has come from, right down to the banana leaf it's served on - although once you see the meat markets it's enough to make you go veggie
while in India! The food in Mysore and Mangalore, and South India in general, is fantastic - I don't think we'd ever get tired of the delicious masala dosa, puri and parotta for breakfast, and definitely would never get tired of the fantastic thalis. The further south in India we get, the more ubiquitous thali is. Eaten at lunchtime and normally the main meal of the day for South Indians, for a pittance (the cheapest and one of the best we've had was 40 pence) you get rice, chapati, pickles, three or four small servings of different curries, and often a sweet dish as well. Without exception every one we've had has been brilliant. I love eating South Indian style as well - pour some curry over a bit of your rice and just dig right in there with your hand. Wonderfully messy.
Enough of big Indian cities for now - next stop Kerala to chill out for a week or so.
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