We arrived at the international airport in Mumbai late on Tuesday 28 August. We knew India was going to be a bit rough, but we weren't quite ready for what hit us. People. Just people everywhere! All jostling and pushing their way to somewhere. It didn't get any calmer outside the airport either - we were immediately greeted by a swarm of touts punting their taxi's and hotels. A bit dazed and overwhelmed (the picture for this post is us outside the airport), we waded our way through and eventually managed to have someone phone our accomodation for us. Shortly afterwards our pickup arrived and we were relieved to find that we had been dropped at the correct place. We checked in, had a quick shower and then crashed into bed.

Wednesday we woke after a good nights sleep, but still very tired. We had breakfast while pouring over the guide book and computers trying to get a bit of a plan together. We decided not to stay in Mumbai, so caught an auto rickshaw to the nearest local train station where we got on a train to Mumbai Central Station (tickets are crazy cheap! like 2 rupees each - about 30 ZA cents) where a man kindly showed us where to get tickets. We were still quite overwhelmed by all the people - there are literally crowds of people everywhere you look. It's like nothing you've ever experienced. After lots of waiting around and filling out forms and queing (it seems Indians love their bureaucracy) we managed to secure some tickets up to Delhi on an overnight train. With a few hours to kill, we headed accross the road to a local restaurant and ordered a bunch of food that neither of us had any clue what it was. It turned out to be delicious - I never knew vegetarian food could be that good!

Turns out you can't really hang around in a restaurant here, so we dragged our bags down the road to a shopping center where we left them at a baggage counter and walked around for a while. We got a few snacks for the train and then made our way back to the station. After some more waiting around, we eventually boarded our train where we met a pretty cool Indian family who we got chatting to. The trains are pretty good - aircon and lights all working, bedding clean and they come around regularly to sweep and mop the floors. We managed to jiggle our seats around so that we could sit together (because we had bought tickets at the last minute, they were apart) and then settled down for the night.