Post #86 - January 5, 2013 - Mumbai (Bombay), India

What we did: bus tour of Mumbai, booked hotels
Budge: 3500R/$70; Spent: 4318R/$86

Our day began bright and early. We were told that there would be hot water in the morning. They lied. So, miserable, we walked down stairs to the lobby to find someone waiting for us. We took an auto-rickshaw to where our bus would be picking us up and met another employee there. He waited for us until the bus arrived.

We were pretty shocked to see a completely naked man, except for a piece of cloth draped over his shoulder, walking down the street as we waited for our bus. He stopped across the street from us and started a small fire with garbage on the road. He was quite old, and looked very cold. He had a stick that he used to bring garbage closer to him to use as fuel for his fire. What circumstance could bring someone to that state? As we waited for the bus, the street became more busy with more and more people passing by. He seemed to be aware of this and kept his head down. If I were to guess, he appeared embarrassed of his condition. At one point, with his fire running low, he got up to collect some more garbage. He raised himself slowly with his stick and, when his stick wouldn't grab a piece of garbage, he put it aside and bent down to pick it up. It was immediately obvious that this was extremely difficult for him. He shook as he bent downward and picked up all the garbage he could grab. It was a shocking thing to witness. We wanted to do something for him, but what? Our first thought was our blanket, but it was back at our hotel. The suffering this poor man must endure on a daily basis is beyond our ability to know, I think.

Our bus picked us up a little after 7am. It was pretty cold, especially since they were determined to never close the door at the front. We sat there in a state of half sleeping while the bus picked people up and drove toward the city. Two and a half hours later (!!!) we were at our first stop. We hadn't been able to have breakfast, and we had spotted a McDonald's just before the bus had parked, so instead of seeing the sight at this location, we ran to the McDonald's. We both got sausage and egg and they were wonderful. McDonald's is our little taste of home, and man do we enjoy it.

We got back before our bus was scheduled to depart. One lady approached us to offer us a "free" flower bracelet. Patty reluctantly agreed. Of course we knew there was a catch, but Patty had stressed she only had 10 rupees to give the lady, so she probably thought she would be OK. When Patty offered her the 10 rupees she declined them, and instead asked Patty to buy "baby milk/formula" from the store. She claimed she wasn't allowed into the store because she is a beggar, although she looked pretty normal to me. This was an odd enough request that it had us confused, but we never did get a chance to decide what to do, because our tour operators pushed us onto the bus right then. Patty shoved the 10 rupee note in her hand and apologized.

From there our bus took us to various other sites. It was difficult to undertand what exactly we were seeing since the tour operators spoke in Hindi the entire time. Luckily there are English words that are used often in their communication so we did grasp a little bit. We were so tired though from all our travelling that we were okay with sitting back and being chauffered around. We stopped at several spots near the ocean. There were so many couples sitting on the ledge near the water breaks. There were also many locals sifting through the garbage on the shore as if they were looking for something in particular. It was sad seeing the ocean water there in such a toxic condition. Though Mumbai does have beaches, they are most definitely not the kind of beaches you want to swim in. Too many locals simply don't care about the condition of their environment. Littering is all too common and there are no gov't initiatives to be seen to curb this habit and educate their citizens. Goes to show the importance of gov't and the role it should serve.

We drove by many of the key sites in Mumbai but really only got glimpses of most of the places. We stopped at a planetarium and bought tickets to enter it and explore. Luckily we passed on the film being shown since we later found out it was all in Hindi. We were pretty lazy from the lack of rest we had gotten in previous nights so we kind of gandered through. There were so many schools there on field trips. Basic science principles were being explained in fun and interesting ways. We had fun seeing ourselves in funky mirrors.

From the museum we headed to a Hindi temple. We walked passed many impoverished families on our way in and felt sad that we had nothing to give them. We then thought of the idea of carrying healthy snacks to give to the children as opposed to giving them money. The temple was really unimpressive so we just walked back to the bus and hung out there until the next and final stop.

Our last stop was at Juhu beach which had a fun, tropical vibe. The whole place looked upscale compared to the other places we had seen. There were very fancy hotels nearby including a Radisson hotel. We decided to see how much their walk-up rates were since we needed to find accommodations for our last night. Turned out to be too pricey and we walked out.

We made our way to the beach where there were numerous food stands serving some amazing looking food. All of which we were too scared to try. It's so frustrating not having the immunities to eat the local food. There were so many different exotic fruit juices, floats, ice creams, and chilly lime flavoured snacks being served. So many people were oddly staring at Patty, it was quite awkward.

We finally got on the bus back to the hotel. 3 hours later through a very large traffic jam and we were in our room still unable to take a warm shower. The past few days have been rough and really not very enjoyable for the most part. Hopefully things are looking up.

Our dinner was the highlight of our day for sure. We shared a cold beer, had hot n sour soups and another nice dish. The service was great again.

After dinner, the owner Satish called us into his office (kind of like a principal would in school). He asked us how are tour went and we chatted with him for about an hour. He is quite the gentleman. He agreed to refund our money for the last night and also for booking an extra room by accident. He also added Jeff on facebook. He gave us some solid advice on where to go in Goa and he basically planned out our entire two days in Mumbai. It was so nice being taken care of like that. Did we mention the day before that he had his manager upload two Bollywood movies onto our laptop for us?!

Tomorrow we return to Mumbai city and we'll check into a new hotel for the night. We'll have a taxi driver to ourselves for the whole day so we are hoping to see much more of the city.