Post #85 - January 4, 2013 - Mumbai (Bombay), India

What we did: train to Mumbai (Bombay), taxi to hotel
Budget: 3500R/$70; Spent: 5090R/$102

We slept great on the train.

That morning we started watching Men in Black 3 to kill some time before arriving. The train arrived just before finishing the movie.

Upon arriving in Mumbai the poverty and poor living conditions became were very apparent and were quite in your face actually. We walked off the train and were immediately met with a lot of heat and some seriously foul odours of garbage, urine, and feces literally. There were numerous tents along the tracks where many families call home. We had never seen this kind of poverty in all our time on this trip.

We had to take a taxi because our hotel is very far away. Turns out we had no idea how far. The taxi ride took over two hours, and the taxi drivers, two younger guys, got lost on several occasions. We saw so many people on the way living in shacks on the street, children squating on the sidewalk to pass their bowl movements. Babies with their naked bumbs sitting on the sidewalk. It was all quite a shock for us.

The drive to our hotel felt very long and was very tiring. We had no idea where the heck we were being led to. At one point, we were driving down a bumpy dirt road in the middle of nowhere. That was uncomfortable.

We finally arrived at our hotel in the middle of nowhere in a place called Ulhasnagar, and knew we had to do something about switching back into the city. The thought of making the 2 hour trip to Mumbai and back for the next few days just sounded awful. We talked to the people at the front desk, and they said they would ask their boss when he arrived about refunding our money, so we sat down for a meal at their restaurant.

We were only the second table being served in the restaurant so we weren't sure what to expect, but it turned out to be a fantastic experience. It was a little pricey for India, but we had wonderful service. The staff at the restaurant are great at what they do. Wow. This was definitely the light on an otherwise kind of miserable day.

After dinner, we were eventually directed to the owner of the hotel who has an office next to our room. We were nervous to see how our interaction with him would go. Indian customer service can sometimes be none existent. The owner's name is Sattish and he turned out to be a really great guy. He's a young, very friendly fellow. He helped to reassure us that our decision wouldn't be all that bad, and he would try to get most of our money back, though we are skeptical at just how generous he will be. He suggested we do a bus trip tomorrow to Mumbai, which sounded great to us since we would otherwise be stuck here with nothing to do. He also recommended staying two out of the three nights in his hotel and then staying for one night at a hotel near to where our train departs the following day. This seemed like solid advice, so we took it.

While we were waiting to see whether Sattish could get us onto a bus tour, we tried to take showers. There was no hot water, and when I asked about it, they said there is only hot water between 5am and 10am in the morning. Awesome. So we haven't showered in days, and we can't shower tonight. That's just great.

Sattish got back to us with the details of the bus a little later. We will be meeting a driver in the lobby at 6:45am and onto the bus by 7am. We will be returned sometime around 7pm or 8pm. It apparently is quite cheap, so I don't think we can go wrong. It should be a nice way to familiarize ourselves with the different areas of Mumbai so that when we come back we stay in a nice part of town. The location of a hotel in Mumbai is probably the most important feature unfortunately for us our location could not have been much worse.

It was around 10:30pm when the music started. There is apparently a wedding going on tonight and it's just one floor down from our room. The bass sometimes literally shakes our walls and bears a close resemblance to what a tremor must feel like. We can also hear pipes banging in our washroom. Thankfully, the music died down around 1am, but that only left us around 5 hours before we had to wake up for the bus tour. Another short night!