Mumbai (Bombay) - 3 nights

So.....I am more than I month behind with absolutely no hope of catching up. What to do? I suppose I could wait until I come home in order to give a full account of each place, whenever that may be, try and abreviate each entry, which I have tried and failed to do previously, or just carry on and update what I can. I choose option 3 and apologise that the blog will never quite tell you where I am, but it should at least give you something worth reading.

I will begin where I ended. The 16 hour bus journey from Udaipur to Bombay in a seat, not a bunk. The bus was fully booked. No spare seats. Not a problem in iteself, but a few other people managed to get on (via a backhander to the driver perhaps) and occupied a spot in the aisle. The seat was not uncomfortable....well at least not to begin with, but it did not recline and I was restless after a few hours. Others seemed to be suffering from the same problem and before long many people took to the aisle to lie down. I shifted my position a few times and settled on one with my feet suspended on a ladder to one of the bunks above my head. I slept for an hour of so and then decided to change position again, only now there were some legs where mine should go! A rather chunky old man was now sleeping half in the aisle and half under my seat! Managing to squeeze my feet into a small empty space I tried again to sleep. Something brushed my head. The person behind me was somehow sleeping in a position where their hand was sitting upon my head! I removed it and tried again to rest. The bus stopped and all the lights came on. The second of three toilet stops. I did not get much sleep that night.

I arrived and found my way to Colaba. Mumbai is comprised of a number of islands where the land in between has been reclaimed from the sea. The city extends into the ocean in a hand shaped peninsular. Colaba is a wealthy area toward the south of the hand. It is where most travellers stay and many of them, including yours truly, in the Salvation Army hostel. The hostel has several dormitories, which are the cheapest place to stay. When I say cheap, I mean cheap for Mumbai. The dorm was grotty, little cleaned; the one toilet between 16 didnt flush and was regularly blocked and contained the only shower, and it cost me more than most of the private, clean rooms I had had previously. It was the worst place I have stayed in my entire trip and to top it off I got the old Delhi belly again!

Trying to carry on regardless, I managed to explore the nearby area a little and met up with Faalix with whom I had spent some time in Bundi. We visited the gateway to India (a colonial relic on the sea front), ate at the famous Leopold's cafe (which still has bullet holes in the walls from the terrorist attacks of 2008), and sampled some of the treats from the continental style coffee shops. When Faalix left I took a tour of the Dharavi slum. The largest slum in Bombay, it comprises some 1.7km square and over 1 million residents! We were shown examples of the thriving businesses, which include plastic recycling, pottery and leather production, with an estimated turnover of $650 million per year. No that wasnt a typo!!

I began to feel better, but then it was time to leave. I already had a train booked to take me to Aurangabad.