Mumbai

Our bus from Udaipur was over an hour late, but when we got on it was quite nice as we got a compartment to ourselves where we could shut the door and be private, the bus was filthy though, the once blue mattress was jet black but luckily we had a sleep sheet which we could lay out to sleep on, the cabin was about 1.5m long which meant our legs were up in the air from it being so short, and we didn't stop for a toilet for over 9 hours! we were at the back of the bus and the roads were so bad we were bouncing all night actually lifting up off the bed and slamming back down, when we got off we felt as if are had been beaten up, we didn't even sleep for one second all night!

When we arrived we checked into our hotel which was a small annex room but it had two big double beds and a separate dining room so there was nothing small about it. We went for a nap as we were so tired.

We woke up and then went out into town. Mumbai felt totally different to the rest of India, it was clean and felt quite European and the people were more friendly and there seemed to be much more of an equality between men and women, women and men and students would hang out together whereas in the rest of India it was always only groups of men, and people were dressed in western clothes and seemed to be very proud of the way they spoke English.

There was also a lot of nice British buildings all over as it used to be the capital, we planned to see the main sights the following day and just take it easy.

The next day we woke up and I felt really ill, I was throwing up most of the day and felt terrible, it seemed to come out of nowhere, I went to sleep fine but woke up awful, I tried eating and drinking but couldn't keep anything down. The bathrooms have buckets in (although they're supposed to be for washing clothes) so I could lay in bed most of the day, I also felt freezing even though it was around 30 degrees. Luckily we had a TV in the room so had a criminal minds marathon and watched a few films, so I could have been I'll at a worse place or on the move.

Towards the evening I felt OK so went out to see the gateway to India and taj mahal hotel, then went to a Lebanese where I annoyingly had no appetite.

Luckily the bug passed as quick as it came on and the next day felt OK for the flight. I don't think I would have been able to get the flight if it was the day before. On the way to the airport we got to see Victoria terminus, probably the worlds nicest train station and a few buildings we missed the day before.

At the airport we checked our bags in and went through to security. At security we went in separate queues, men's and women's and the put all our things through the xray so we had nothing on us through the scanner (as is international aviation regulations). But when going through they ask for your boarding pass and passport, which is in the bag which you cannot get to. So then the security got annoyed at us and told us to go back and get it. so even though every other country in the world abides by aviation rules, India ignores it and does its own thing, and then has the cheek to be annoyed at people for not doing it their way, even though there was not a single sign anywhere at all which said you needed to keep your passport and boarding card with you.

When we finally got through and onto the plane, the second anyone sat down they all reclined their seats, they all had to be individually told to put them up for take-off even though they said it over the tannoy, some ignored them and put them back again when the stewards sat down, not caring about other peoples safety or comfort.