Slumdog Millionaire

Another train journey with general tickets...another stress over seats. This time we went straight for the 'Second Class' carriage, created for those with General Tickets, but which tourists are often warned away from for being notoriously dirty, with common bag theft and with very few women ever being in the carriage. However, we decided it couldn't be any worse than other general train journeys we had done, or battling cockroaches, so stormed into a couple of seats on the carriage. Of course, this train was 4 hours late in leaving, not what we needed with Sophie still feeling pretty ropey and Trevor getting pooed on by either a pigeon or a rat whilst sitting in the train station! The journey from 10pm-10am was hellish, in dead upright, hard seats, making sleep near-impossible. Trevor didn't tell Sophie at the time, but he even saw cockroaches in the train carriage...there was no escape!

When we finally made it to Mumbai in a traumatised, tired state we headed to the nearby McDonalds for breakfast then made our way to 'Travellers Inn' where we crashed out for a few hours sleep. This was followed by more fast food at Pizza Hut and then back to bed...all in an attempt to prevent our imminent mental breakdown from the past week in India!

The next day we had a guided tour around the Dhavari slum (where some of Slumdog Millionaire was filmed) with our tour guide Ganesh, who used to live in the slum himself. To get there we were taken on the local inter-city trains which were packed with people hanging out of the doors, and which apparently have people sitting on the roves in rush hour - 11 people die a day doing this kind of thing according to statistics! During the slum tour we were taken to see a variety of recycling centres; old plastics and metals are brought to the slum from other parts of the city, where workers do all sort it all out, melt and remould it to sell the back to large companies for very little money, all damaging their health significantly in the process. We were also taken to see the rubbish dump in the slum; the slum produces more rubbish each day than can be collected so they often resort to burning it periodically, not that it looked like that had been done in a while! Walking through the residential lanes of the slum, the light of the sky could hardly penetrate through the overhanging signs, bare electricity wires, and other random material, and overall there was an extremely claustrophobic feel to the area. Peering inside some of the tiny houses consisting of one room however, they were spotlessly clean, obviously owned with pride. Since 1995, with Government support to develop the ever-sprawling slum rather than try and demolish it, the slum has massively developed; most buildings are now made of solid concrete walls rather than tin shacks, and an initiative to try and get every child a place at the local school has begun. Our guide put a very positive spin on the slum overall, eager to convince us that it was no longer the place of such poverty and squalor that us Westerners believe it to be. We are sure however, outside of the 500m squared area that we saw there are still issues, inequality, and apparently gangs making the rules. After failing to brave it onto two trains home due to them being so packed we finally jumped onto one back to our hotel - the train didn't seem much more crowded than the London Underground at rush hour, but with the doors wide open onto the track, the idea of being pushed towards them is much more terrifying!

That evening we headed down to the Causeway, a large street packed with touristy bars and restaurants which leads down to the infamous Taj Mahal Hotel. We visited Leopolds Bar, which has been mentioned throughout the 'Shantaram' book that Sophie has been reading whilst in India, the reality of which didn't live up to the image in her head unfortunately. Both the bar and the Taj Hotel were targeted in the 2008 terrorist Mumbai attacks, and the bullet holes in Leopolds Bar were still visible. The Taj Hotel meanwhile looked extremely grand, overlooking the Gateway of India on the shoreline. Just round the corner from the hotel was a Pizza Express as well...bonus!

On our last day in Mumbai we went down to Marine Drive, sampled a few food stalls and walked along a small beach, the sea next to which you are strongly advised not to swim in...lots of local sewage gets dumped far too close to shore. Whilst here we tried 'Kulfi', an Indian type of ice-cream with a rich fudgy clotted cream flavour - delicious! After wiling away a few more hours around the main centre of Mumbai, where extreme wealth and poverty seem to exist side-by-side, we took a taxi to Mumbai Airport for our flight to Jakarta via Singapore. The Airport was pretty spectacular, with some intricate architecture and lighting inside - probably the cleanest place in the whole of India! Here we bumped into Tony and Lynn again, who like us, were trying to find something cheap enough in the extortionately over-priced airport to spend the last of their Indian Rupees on. After saying our goodbyes we made our way down to the boarding gate to get the hell out of India!

Perhaps many of our blogs about India sound like we had a pretty difficult time…this was true, it is definitely the toughest country either of us have tried to travel around. It was however such an interesting experience everywhere we went - a lot of which we'd rather not repeat but some of which we would never have seen anywhere else. You can go from loving India to hating it within 5 minutes, and no matter how much you think you have learnt there will always be something else round the corner to knock you back down! As our friend Louis said from the start...'You may have a plan for India but India may have a plan for you'!