Our train arrived in Mumbai thirty minutes early! After the shock had passed we made our way out of the station to the rickshaw area for the short hop to Bandra’s local train station, where we could get a train the extra few kilometres to Colaba in South Mumbai. We were told of the dangers of trying to get the train; tourists squashed to within an inch of their lives when they should have just got a rickshaw the whole way to Colaba as it was much safer. These stories unsurprisingly were from the rickshaw drivers.
The carriage of the local train we climbed in to was almost empty, we grabbed a seat and journeyed south, stopping at the end of the line, Churchgate. As it was a Sunday the Tourist Information Office at Churchgate Station was closed, so we only had the Lonely Planet list of accommodation, and a card for Delight Guest House that we got from someone we met in Udaipur. We jumped in a taxi, all of which have meters to record an honest fare, and drove past the Oval Maidan and down toward Mumbai Harbour. We passed the staggering Gateway of India arch and the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, a huge hotel with its own shopping mall inside and rooms starting at $500 a night. Arriving outside the Delight Guest House the driver tried to charge us three times the fare due to our big rucksacks. He spoke no English but eventually understood that he was getting nowhere near that amount.
Five floors up in a lift we found a dark and miserable looking guesthouse that was charging ten percent over its written room rates for no apparent reason. On seeing the room we decided we should at least look elsewhere before conceding to something this bad for two nights.
Walking twenty metres around the corner we climbed the stairs to the India Guest House (which you will know of if you have read the book Shantaram). They at least had working lights although the rooms were actually just wooden boxes built in one big open floor-space, where the individual room walls didn’t reach the ceiling. There were shared toilets and showers which had just been renewed, and the price was much more reasonable, although it was still more expensive than our plush accommodation we enjoyed so much in Udaipur. The cost of living in the city I guess. We took the room for two nights and after sorting out the necessary paperwork, went for a wander. With only one-and-a-half days in Mumbai we planned to cram in as much as possible.
We walked back to the Gateway of India along the seawall of Mumbai Harbour. There were hundreds of boats milling around, most available to sail to Elephanta Island to see the huge three-headed statue of Shiva. We stopped at the arch and people watched for a while. There were men selling giant balloons and others offering to take pictures of you in front of the gateway. We got dragged in to a few pictures with the locals before making our way out to another favourite of Shantaram’s, Leopold’s Café. The food prices reflected the star status the café now holds and we just ordered a coke each before continuing our walking tour of Colaba and Churchgate. We walked up Mahatma Ghandi Road and checked out the Colonial and Art Deco styled buildings, before finding St Thomas’ Cathedral, looking a little out of place it could be said. The wide tarmac road in front of the cathedral had become an improvised cricket pitch and we watched some guys playing between the occasional car or truck that passed by. From there we headed back toward Churchgate Station and walked along the edge of the Oval Maidan, a giant patch of grass in the otherwise concrete sprawl of South Mumbai. There were literally thirty or forty games of cricket taking place within the grounds, and on reading the rules at the gated entrance, we learned that cricket was the only organised sport allowed. We did see the odd football bouncing around inside, and we could only assume that the police would soon arrive and arrest those involved.
That evening we headed to Tulloch Road in Colaba, where hordes of people queue up outside the street-stalls of Bade Miya, one veg one non-veg, for the chance to sample some of the best food in Mumbai. We soon realised we would be waiting a long time for food; people were ordering food and eating it in their cars to avoid the queues for street-side tables. After about thirty minutes and no sign of anyone leaving their tables we decided to go to for a roti/wrap at a place on the opposite side of the street. The food was delicious and we wandered back to our guesthouse planning on an early start for a guided tour of the biggest slum in Mumbai, Dharavi (as featured on a series of Channel 4 programmes with Kevin McCloud last year).
The next morning Nat was feeling really ill and looking very pale. Maybe the previous night’s food wasn’t so good after all. Soldiering on we got to the train station to meet our guide ten minutes late but he was nowhere to be seen. We met two other couples who were booked on the tour and one of them called the guide to find he was stuck waiting for a delayed train and would be with us as soon as possible. This gave me chance to grab a chai and some food, while Nat was just happy to be keeping what little was left inside her stomach, inside her stomach. One of the guys on the tour had been awake all night and feeling ill also. About ten minutes before our guide arrived he dived in to a taxi and headed back to his hotel.
Santosh helped us buy our train tickets and on the way to Mahim Station we chatted to the others about where they had been on their travels and what they had planned. It wasn’t long before we were off the train and crossing the bridge in to Dharavi. The slum is wedge shaped, caught between a western and central railway line meeting at Dadar, and topped by a busy main road; housing fifty-five percent of Mumbai’s population in less than two square kilometres. A few small children surrounded us and begged for food or drink on the way in, but once we were within the alleyways of the slum itself, everyone appeared happy and smiling and busy at work. Santosh explained that they had been running guides through the slum for over three years; the tour company had started an NGO within the slum and had built offices and a kindergarten as well as sponsoring an existing primary school facility. The people within the slum were initially concerned at the purpose of the tours, but had since warmed to the idea as the tours promoted the successes of the slum and clearly re-invested money towards supporting those living there.
We were shown some of the industry within Dharavi, one of the most interesting being the recycling of plastics. Every different type of plastic is separated and sorted, before being ground in to small pieces. It is then hand-washed in huge barrels of soapy water to remove the dirt and dust from the grinding, before being spread out on large sheets on the roofs of the slum buildings. Once clean and dry it is melted down and formed in to long spaghetti like strips before being chopped in to plastic pellets; this is then exported to be used in recycled plastic products by global companies. Most of the work we saw within the slum was dangerous in one way or another. Men operated deadly machinery without any safety equipment, or burned paint or chemical residue from metal drums before they were recycled. In another area the Gujarati community of Dharavi, kiln-baked their traditional clay pots by burning sheep’s wool, causing thick, smothering clouds of smoke to clog the air. With all this going on we were amazed that almost every person we saw gave us a smile and said hello. The children were like a ray of sunshine in the slum, running around playing and waving at us as we passed through the narrow gaps between houses.
My overwhelming feeling at the end of the tour was, the slum sort of worked. There could be no doubt that the people living there were incredibly impoverished, living in a world we could barely comprehend before seeing it with our own eyes; but they were making the best of it that they could, and smiling through most of it at the same time. The government was fifteen years in to a plan to pull down the slums due to the incredible land value underneath them. Surrounding Dharavi were dirty, soulless, high-rise towers that had been built to house relocated residents. Each family that could prove they were living in the slum before the election in the year two-thousand was entitled to a two-hundred-and-twenty-five foot square room to live in. Anyone that had moved there after then was not entitled to anything.
Leaving Dharavi I didn’t pity those living there, or feel ashamed to have walked through it; the overwhelming sense I felt was admiration for those working and living there. They had been given nothing, and had created residential and industrial districts, shopping areas, businesses and schools. The slum actually had three police stations within it, if that is any indication of a developed and organised community. Without unimaginable investment from the government, I could see no better way of housing more than one million people in less than two square kilometres, than the people of the slum themselves had managed with no help whatsoever.
We left the rest of the group who were heading back to Colaba after the tour, and caught the train to see Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat. Right next to the railway, hundreds of people beat the dirt out of thousands of kilograms of clothing in one-thousand-and-twenty-six open-air troughs; Mumbai’s oldest and biggest human-powered washing machine. The bridge overlooking the area was crowded with people and we thought something must be happening down below. It turned out there was a Bollywood movie being made and we squeezed our way in to the crowd to get a glimpse of someone dancing down some steps whilst crazy Indian music blared from nearby speakers. While we were there they had four takes and each time a mistake was made and the action cut.
From Mahalaxmi, we walked west toward Haji Ali’s Mosque, favouring the footpath over a taxi in the perpetual Mumbai traffic. Floating in the Arabian Sea and accessed by a long concrete causeway the mosque could be seen long before we got to it. From the sea wall we took some pictures and decided not to walk the gauntlet of vendors and beggars lining the concrete path to get a closer look. Instead we jumped in a taxi and headed for Mani Bhavan, the building Mahatma Ghandi stayed in when visiting Mumbai. Now a museum, the three floors within documented his life and world-changing achievements before his murder in the nineteen-forties. It was really interesting to learn more of his story and read the letters he wrote to the likes of Adolf Hitler and Franklin D Roosevelt. The museum was free to enter but a donation encouraged, and after spending more than an hour learning more about the great Mahatma Ghandi, we left a small donation on the way out.
Just south of the museum was Chowpatty Beach, where we kicked off our shoes to walk along the sand and dip our toes in the (murky) seawater. It was a bit weird seeing the locals at the beach - women in their decorative sari’s and men swimming in t-shirts and shorts - but it still had that holiday feel that a beach can create. We grabbed an ice-cream before leaving the beach and walking along the seawall toward the next train station to head back to the guesthouse. That evening we snacked on simpler street-food, corn-on-the-cob smothered in lime juice and chilli-salt.
Our one-and-a-half days in Mumbai were over and the next morning we packed our bags and headed to the imposing Victoria Terminus Railway Station. Completed in eighteen-eighty-seven, it is now the busiest railway station in Asia and has (since Indian independence) been renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (or CST for short). We were cutting our timings a little fine as we had to catch a local train from CST to Kurla Station further north where we would get our long distance train to Goa. Arriving at the wrong part of the huge Gothic terminal we asked the wrong member of staff how to get to Kurla, to which he replied there were no trains leaving in time. Not knowing then that if we walked around the corner to the local train ticket booths, there would be trains leaving every few minutes, panic set in and we were soon surrounded by taxi drivers looking to make some cash. We were told we could be rushed to Panvel Station further along the line to meet our long distance train there, and it would only cost nine-hundred rupees; just over £10 but also almost one whole days budget on our shoe-string tour of India. We wasted time talking to too many people trying to help us and at the same time secure a little cash themselves. At the last minute one of them must have decided to gain some good karma and showed us the local ticket stand and explained we could get a train ticket to Panvel for just fifteen rupees, and if we left at once might beat our Goa-bound train there.
We had one hour to make it to Panvel and the ticket clerk told us the train took just that amount of time. We bundled aboard a local train, this time squeezing in amongst sweaty bodies all squashed together for the journey out of the city centre. We watched the time tick by as we neared Panvel, and the realisation slowly sunk in that there was no way we would be there within the hour. Arriving at the station almost thirty minutes after our long distance train was scheduled to pass through, we wandered out of the local line station and grabbed a bottle of water and some Bourbons. Behind a long freight train I glimpsed a blue carriage that looked just like those we had been travelling around the rest of India on. Running up and over the foot-bridge above the long distance lines I started to think we may have just got incredibly lucky. Approaching the sleeper carriage I could see the train numbering plate - 6345 - slotted in to place. Our train was waiting for us, delayed at Panvel for a reason unknown to us, we jumped aboard through the nearest door, not risking running along the platform in case it pulled away. We bumped straight in to the ticket officer who confirmed we were on the right train but the wrong carriage, and that we had time to climb off and walk along the platform as it would be quicker to find our seats. We couldn’t believe our luck after the stress of the last two hours, dealing with unhelpful staff and taxi drivers trying to sting us for considerable sums of money.
This was one of our few day trains through India, and it was amazing to watch the city greyness melt away and the greens of fields and trees and huge valleys appear as we journeyed south. We met a group of about fifteen engineering students from Nagpur on their way to Goa with their teachers and spent most of the time chatting to them, improving our Hindi and them improving their English. It was good fun and we kept ourselves supplied with drinks and snacks as the chai-wallahs and snack-wallahs walked through the train. Although our train was running a little late we decided to hop off two stops earlier at Thivim in North Goa, rather than the south, meaning we would arrive (hopefully) in time to find an open guesthouse.
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