2 months in india: Mumbai

Mumbai. City of dreams and overwhelming rubbish dumps. We arrived grumpy and sleep-deprived but were treated to a taxi ride to the south at a time when no other cars were on the road. Something we quickly came to appreciate. Driving through the steets you soon notice just how many people live in this city and how many of them literally live on the streets. Lumps of blanket are strewn all over the roadside and it is not until closer inspection that you realise these lumps contain sleeping bodies.

We arrived at our hotel so late that we were told at check-in attempt that it was time to check-out. That made for a pair of happy campers and off we went to find somewhere else to stay. After much searching and inspection of grotty window-less rooms, we settled for a grotty window-less room. It did however come with a complimentary family of cockroaches to keep us company on our first night in a strange city. Lovely.

We spent a grand total of one night lying awake listening to their little exo-skeletons clacking against the tiled floor before making the executive decision to upgrade. Our new home was a vast improvement and overlooked the main street and bus station in Colaba. Instead of the click-clacking, we were lulled to sleep each night by the incessant peeping, honking and screeching of all the various forms of transport hogging the roads of Mumbai.

We found some amazing food (deep-fried of course) and explored the city on foot, in bartered down yellow cabs and even tried to catch a bus - unsucessfully. Numbers in the Hindi script proved beyond our abilities. And it didnt help that they never actually stopped where we guessed they were going to. We began to suspect there was some kind of deal between the taxi and bus drivers.

On our last day we took a sweaty hike to the heady hights of Malabar Hill - Mumbai's answer

to 90210. Hidden away on the edge of the peninsula we discovered an area with no cars (?!) and a giant duck-pond/roman baths/building site. This was Banganga tank, an apparently religious momument involving what looked like a telegraph pole sticking out the middle of the pool. We were welcomed/accosted by the local kids who delighted in showing off their many diving moves.

More to come soon, we are good, hope you are too!

Bademiya, The best Paneer Bhurjee we have tasted yet. This 'restaurant' is unofficially set up on the side of a back road Colaba (South Mumbai) a road of jumbled concrete blocks and hardly any street lights. The food is outstanding and we met an OAP from Delhi who said he used to frequent it when he was a lad. As you can see here it's a popular spot so it's a case of barge for a table and if you can't find one any surface will do...

The view south from Mumbai's beach: Chowpatty. This is the spot where young couples court and watch the sunsets. Pretty romantic if you ignore the smog, horns and giant concrete jumping jacks.

On the other side of the road from the sea and on virtually every side street someone seemed to be getting married. Small, intimate affairs seem to be the way in Mumbai with only half the 16 million population attending each one.

Nice scaffolding work too.

Valentines day means the horses are brought out to do battle with the Mumbai traffic madness. We reckon they use a special breed of superhorse because they don't flinch at anything.