Hello :)
We have now arrived in Mumbai (Bombay) we were expecting to be greeted with the same sort of begging kids and chaos as Agra but surprisingly it was fine. We found our taxi and wondered how 4 of us with 4 big bags were going to fit into the smallest car we have ever seen.....Jonny couldn't even sit upright in the front seat but somehow the guy managed to put all our bags in the boot and secure it with a bit of string haha. The 4 of us squeezed into the tiny non-air-conditioned car and we hoped it wouldn't be a long journey......1 and half hours later we arrived at our hotel, very hot, tired and dying for a shower. Not our best taxi journey so far.
After we freshened up we had some lunch at the hotel and went for a walk in the streets of Mumbai, it's not what we expected at all, there are so many sky scrapers, billboards and designer shops....nothing like any of the other cities we have been in. But then you seen lots of slums and homeless at the side of the road, it's really strange to see very rich looking buildings and cars driving about then poor homeless and slums in the same area. The traffic here is still crazy but not as bad as some other places, so many traffic lights so it slows down the maniac drivers, first road rules we have seen I think haha.
We walked all the way to the gateway of India, it was impressive to see, loads of ships in the distance we walked around and got lots of nice photos, could maybe print some off and show Granda see if he remembers it. We seen the Taj Hotel which was the one that had the terrorist attack a few years ago, the security in this area was pretty tight, you had your bags searched and went through the metal detectors. It is so much hotter in Mumbai, very humid as well, this is what we expected the whole of India to be like, think Goa is going to be even hotter.
After our walk we headed back to the hotel so Jonny could wash some of his clothes for the first time :) he will be a domestic god by the time we get back haha!! We went out for a meal with the group at night to a nice decent priced Indian Restaurant (still not eating meat) we both basically live off Dum Aloo (potato curry) the drinks were flowing nicely since they were pretty cheap so we both decided that we fancied seeing some Mumbai nightlife, Claudio the Italian guy from our group joined us. Binu our group leader showed us a nice sports bar where we had maybe one too many drinks and played pool, we met a guy called Alex from Saudi Arabia and some of the Indian locals and got a taxi home when we got kicked out at closing time haha......turned out to be a really good night.
Mumbai has been really good, not sure what we expected but we have both enjoyed it here and it's a lot cleaner than what we imagined, we would have liked to stay here for another day or two to see some more sights, but we need to move onto Goa which we are both extremely excited about since its now been 14 days with no meat (for Shay) and we have been told that Goa serve steak and that the other meats are a lot safer to eat.....cannot wait, fair to say we both already know what we will be ordering for tea tomorrow night :)
J+B