Bangkok to Mumbai

We flew from Bangkok directly to Mumbai to spend our first few days in India! We’re planning on being in India for 7 weeks. We’re going to spend the first 4 in Mumbai and Southern India, and the last portion in Northern India before heading up to Nepal.

We often walk to things when we’re traveling and don’t use taxis or tuk-tuks if possible. In our opinion, the best way to immerse ourselves and find new things is to experience life at ground level. Side benefits include exercise, lower spending, and not having to haggle with taxi drivers as often. Also, tourist sites are often a bit underwhelming to us and we’d feel let down just shuttling from one to the next.

Mumbai is a huge city, but the area we stayed in is easy to get around on foot so we spent a lot of time walking and observing the streets of South Mumbai. It’s mind-boggling to think that there are over 18 million people living in Mumbai. It’s a pretty crowded place, but they’re still able to play cricket in just about every open space we passed.

Man o’ man, look at that zebu (Indian cattle)!

We stayed in Colaba, which is close to tourist sites like the Gateway to India and the Taj Mahal Hotel. Colaba is over an hour drive from the airport, which gave us a chance to start getting used to the constant honking (we still haven’t).

After a hot, long morning, we just beat the lunch rush to this vegetarian place. Almost all Indian eating establishments advertise veg or non-veg. We both had an enormous amount of Thali, which consists of multiple curries and a center staple of rice (in the south) or bread (in the north). Thali is often finished with a cooling yogurt/curd curry. Like almost all food here, it’s to be eaten with your (right) hand but they keep giving us utensils and we keep using them.

Stumbled upon this street side book stall, with an impressive amount of inventory. It wrapped around the whole corner.

Probably our favorite thing about Mumbai (other than food everywhere!) is Marine Drive, which has a huge pedestrian walkway next to the water. We went there multiple times to walk up to Chowpatty beach and the Hanging Gardens. Unfortunately, Mumbai is one of the most polluted cities in the world and the skyline was in a constant heavy haze.

The Hanging Gardens were a welcome break, so we took our time. There were a ton of birds of prey at the gardens, soaring above the park and trying to snag smaller birds and parrots as they flew by. Also spotted some HUGE bats hanging in a tree in the middle of the day.
You can see the most expensive private home in the world from the Hanging Gardens. It’s a thought-provoking image to see a single private home that cost over 1 Billion USD to build (it’s the entire skyscraper) overlooking one of the most extensive slums in the world. It’s the second tallest skyscrapper in the picture below.

We keep getting late morning starts, and find ourselves far from our hotel during the hottest part of the day. So we sat down for a bit in the shade at a park. A family, of approximately 15, wasted no time in coming over to take about 50 selfies with us and chat.

Highlights of Mumbai:

• Walking along Marine Drive to Chowpatty beach
• Veg Thali Lunch! We’re looking forward to more of this in India
• The friendliness of Indian people. We’ve had a lot of positive experiences so far

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