9th to 10th March, 2017

Apparently this is my 100th post! And I am splitting it in two as it seems to have grown into a short travel book. So here is Part One.

We had a pretty uneventful trip from Bali to Mumbai, though Malaysia Airlines does not give you a great deal of legroom and, considering the amount of space you get in the way of elbow room, serving spaghetti was not the best idea! Anyway, we had an ok leg to KL followed by about 4 hours in transit and then the nearly 5 hour flight to Mumbai. This meant we arrived at our hotel at the equivalent of about 3am Bali time (though about 1230am Mumbai time). At least I caught up with The Accountant in the movie channel on the plane, which proved quite diverting, but we were quite tired by the time we got to sleep at something like 1.30am.

Now, I had booked us for a day tour of Mumbai, which was looking a bit daunting after not much sleep, but we were up and ready by 0830 when our guide Rakesh from Reality Tours picked us up. Reality are an unusual tour company as 80% of their profits go to help children in the slum areas, where they run a primary school, girls football academy, cricket team and more. This was obviously an attraction to go with them, but also, they provide a tour of the slum area called Dharavi, which sounded like it would be educational at the very least.

“Wait a minute!”, I hear you cry, “I thought you just said that you had checked into a new hotel. WHERE ARE THE ROOM PHOTOS???” I am SOOO sorry, here you go (and I hope you are impressed considering the time of night we arrived in said room!). It is the Residency Hotel in the Fort area of town, nice and central, reasonably priced and ok for a couple of nights. I like the fact that they give you a complimentary automated foot massage in the lobby, though you are warned to take your shoes off first!

Ok, where was I? Oh yes, the tour. Rakesh was superb, chatty and knowledgeable and passionate about what he is doing. Before we commenced the slum tour, we drove to a few of the famous landmarks of this fairly ancient city, the land on which it stands originally being 7 islands ceded to the Portuguese in 1534. It was then passed to the English as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry when she married Charles II in 1661 and it has effectively thrived from there on in especially once the East India Company leased it and it is now the financial and commercial centre of India – and, of course, the home of Bollywood! It is also home to some 16 million people.

The first attraction we saw was possibly the most famous, the Gateway of India, built in 1924 to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911 and designed by George Wittet. The original idea was that P&O liners would pull up alongside and deposit their passengers in front, but now it is a bit of a ferry terminal, but it is still very impressive and a big attraction among local tourists.

I was busy trying to get the best angle, when Val became our star for the day and modelled for a family with their less-than-impressed son. The large building in the photo below is the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, THE hotel in town, built by the original Mr Tata, a Parsi businessman who had been denied access to the ‘whites only’ hotel of choice at the time, Watson’s, which, in a twist of fate, is now a crumbling pile in danger of complete demolition. Parsis are Zoroastrians who originally fled from what is now Iran, but was then Persia in the face of Arab invasion between the 8th and 10th centuries AD. They were (are?) very influential in Mumbai especially and have contributed in wide fields of endeavour way beyond their numbers, not least through a core tenet of their religion, charity. I can recommend a quick look at them in Wikipedia and also about Zoroastrian practices. For example we passed on our tour the Towers of Silence. This where the Parsis bring their dead. Since they believe strongly that earth, water and fire are sacred and should not be contaminated by the dead, they place the corpse on the top of the pillar where the flesh is eaten by vultures. Once done, the sun-dried bones are swept into the central cylinder of the pillar and placed in an ossuary. However, they have a modern-day problem in that there are no more vultures, who have fallen victim to farming practices of feeding cattle antibiotics and diclofenac, both of which are harmful to the birds (you wouldn’t think anything a vulture ate could harm them!). The bodies now take longer to decompose which is annoying the neighbours so they are trying out something to do with solar panels and are thinking of breeding vultures to do the job. Problems, problems.

Back to the Taj, you may also remember that the Taj was the target of 10 Muslim extremists who landed from the sea in 2008 and attacked not only the Taj, but 9 other sites as well, eventually killing 166 people over a 4 day period. Indeed, the Gateway itself made the headlines in 2005 when a car bomb killed 107 people.

Next stop was the Oval Maidan, basically a large open area home to innumerable cricket matches at every hour of the day. There were a few informal ones happening even when we visited early in the day.

Mumbai abounds with sturdy British Raj architecture in a variety of styles usually combined into the same building. Next to the maidan you can find the old Secretariat, described in 1903 as “a massive pile whose main features have been brought from Venice, but all the beauty vanished in transshipment” and the University, established in 1857 and designed in England by Gilbert Scott. I couldn’t get a photo of Flora Fountain, now renamed Hutatma Chowk or Martyrs’ Square. It was originally erected to commemorate Sir Bartle Frere in 1869. My guidebook, as ever, is acerbic in its comment: “It is hard to see quite why they bothered – the Raj architecture expert, Philip Davies, was not being unkind when he said, ‘The fountain was designed by a committee, and it shows'”. I managed to snap some lovely ladies either on their way to or from market too and Prashant, our driver, standing next to his chariot!

One of the highlights of any architecture tour of Mumbai is the UNESCO World Heritage Site that is Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus aka (and still very much known as) Victoria Terminus or VT. The travel journalist, James Cameron, succinctly described it as “Victorian-Gothic-Saracenic-Italianate-Oriental-St Pancras-Baroque”, which pretty much covers it. The sculptures that festoon the exterior were executed at Bombay Art School by the Indian students of John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s father.

The train is, of course, the main commuting choice and is teeming with people. We were there at the end of rush hour, but still had to be careful not to be caught up in the rush and carried off to some unknown destination. The last estimate for the usage of the suburban network is a daily ridership of 7.585 million or 2.64 billion annually, one of the largest in the world. It is also one of the most crowded. In a 9 carriage train , the official capacity is 1,700, but they usually carry around 4,500, defined as Super-Dense Crush Load of about 16 passengers per square metre – and there is no air-conditioning! Women can travel in ‘ladies first class’ or ‘ladies second class’, where men may not travel. Many passengers hang out the door and fall off or sit on the roof and get electrocuted or try crossing the tracks without using the footbridge resulting in many fatalities. And when I say many, I mean many! Over 36,000 were killed between 2002 and 2012, with another 37,000 injured. 17 people every weekday were killed  in 2008. Things have improved when the railway made improvements (e.g. the train will not move if anyone is on the roof!) in 2011, resulting in a 75% drop in fatalities – but there are still about 2,000 a year and this is just on a suburban network! About 28,000 died in railway-related accidents in the whole of India in 2014 (and about 145,000 on the roads!). The numbers are mind-boggling even when you take into account the huge population.

Ok, time to move on and move on we did, to the market, specifically Crawford Market aka Mahatma Phule Market which is the fresh food and domestic animal market. The usual bustle though special mention must go to the meat section, which I entered and rapidly exited as I forgot to hold my breath and I sneaked a couple of pictures in the pet section surreptitiously as apparently they don’t like photos as they have been accused of poor animal welfare, which sadly was probably right.

There is a wonderful area specially for flowers and particularly those used in religious practices, especially the ubiquitous marigolds. Very atmospheric and photogenic (or, to put it another way, I took a lot of photos!).

We continued North passing through Kamathipura, the red light district, a very sad, sorry-looking area and considered by Rakesh as a decided stain on the city where prostitution is legal, but is mostly indentured labour of trafficked women or girls from the countryside with no other opportunities. There was not much to see at the time of day we went, but my, admittedly old, guidebook suggests as many as 25,000 plying their trade of an evening, though as it was written 10 years ago, these numbers may have declined due to the use of the internet. In 2009 a police report estimated 100,000 prostitutes across Mumbai.

Ok, time to post this. Lots in part two including the tour of the slum and the dhobi gats. More soon!