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Other entries in Mumbai

Bangin' Bollywood Beats

Aldous Huxley was not a big fan of Mumbai (then known as Bombay), apparently describing it as "the most appalling city of either hemisphere." I guess things have changed a lot over the years...

Our train pulled into the famous Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) quite late in the evening. It took us five or ten minutes to actually find our way out of the station - it's huge. In fact, the train station itself is one of Mumbai's 'things to see'. Built by the British, it was recently awarded World Heritage Site status. We managed to get our bearings and made our way outside...

The first thing i noticed was hordes of people sat on the pavement. Not just the odd person lying on the floor, it was absolutely covered with people sitting, lying, sleeping, selling things. There's over sixteen million people living in this sprawling megalopolis, around a third of which are thought to live on the streets. Crazy or what? Having read so much about how Mumbai is the hardest city for tourists to walk around in terms of being constantly harassed, we braced ourselves...and it was fine, no problems!

There are no autorickshaws in the centre of Mumbai. It's taxis only - a cross between English black cabs and New York-style yellow cabs, lending it a sense of modernity. Our taxi driver couldn't speak much/any English, and it required a stop at a grocery stall with someone to translate for us, but we got to our hotel in the end. We were staying in Colaba just off Colaba Causeway, the main tourist area and very close to The Gateway Of India. After living cheaply in Goa for ten days, the prices in Mumbai seemed incredibly steep; we resigned ourselves to the idea of an expensive few days. My camera had given up the ghost once and for all, so our first port of call was Crossroads, the largest shopping centre in India. It was...shut. No matter, there's plenty of other shopping centres! Camera-ed up and ready to roll, we headed back to Colaba for some sightseeing... The Gateway Of India is pretty impressive, much bigger than i expected. Right next to it is the Taj Hotel - a hotel that is so impressive, there are just as many people taking pictures of it as there are taking pictures of The Gateway! There's also a lovely little park that's really well kept, nice and green with people sitting around chilling out.

Mumbai is the centrepoint of Bollywood in India, with the number of cinemas in the city being somewhere in the hundreds. We'd already seen a Hindi film in Bangalore (Guru), but we decided to go and watch another one - after all, going to Mumbai and not watching a Bollywood film felt a bit...wrong. So of we went, to one of the large multi-screens a short drive down the road from Colaba. We watched a film called 1971, which is basically about Indian prisoners of war that are being kept illegally in Pakistan after the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 (hence the title). It's supposed to be based on true events - a number of Indians are still thought to be held against their will somewhere in Pakistan, having been last seen alive in the late 1980s. It was much easyier to follow what was happening in this film than in Guru, because even though we couldn't understand the language, the storyline was relatively straight forward.

We discovered a Sports Bar just a few hundred yards from our hotel, which was fully air-conditioned (ahhhh!), served good food and drink, had a pool table, and most of all, had loads of TVs, each showing different sports. I think we must've watched at least four football matches in there, in the company of various young/slick Indians, not to mention a host of foreigners. We watched Spurs throw away a fantastic change to knock Chelsea out of the F.A. Cup with an Italian guy who supports Roma, who had just been drawn against Manchester United in the Champions League...another Italian guy decided to do what that bloke had done in Chennai - sit and drink with us all night, and then insist on putting our entire bill on his company account. They've got style, these Italians!

The next day we hopped on a boat to take us from The Gateway Of India across to Elephanta island, about 10km away. The island is home to some ancient caves, featuring some rather impressive stone-carving work. We spent several hours exploring the island and steering clear of the army of monkeys that seemed to follow us wherever we went. At one point there was an Indian family in front of us, with several small children holding lollipops and drinking coke cans...one particularly brave/audacious monkey leapt into their path - scaring the hell out of them - and actually knicked their lollipops and coke right out of their hands, before scampering off into the woods to enjoy his bounty, leaving the kid in tears!

In the evening we decided to sample Mumbai's nightlife. The city is strange in that you can clearly sense the immense poverty around you at all times, but on the other hand...some of India's richest people live here. The city's wealth seems to attract thousands of people from the surrounding areas each year, flocking to Mumbai in the hope of getting good jobs...only to find that it's not as easy as that, and more often than not, ending up living on the streets. But as i say, there's some very rich young boys and girls...

We headed to a club called Poison, outside the city centre and near to the airport. We'd been recommended this place by a number of people. When we got there (about 9pm) it was virtually empty. By 11pm it was rammed. All over India, we have had people approach us just so they could talk to two white guys, or take our picture, or just because they are curious. But in this club, nobody batted an eyelid at us. Not a single double-take from anyone. We just weren't a novelty for any of Mumbai's hipsters. Not being treated like a celebrity and/or saviour for the first time in nearly three months was weird, but good. As for the club iself, well...the music started off as typical dance fare, but after a while...the DJ announced it was time for "Bangin' Bollywood Beats!". For the next hour or so, they basically just played songs that must've been from film soundtracks or something. Everyone knew every word, dancing and singing along...extremely surreal! Some of them were actually pretty catchy :O) Sadly, when it comes to Western music, they're literally ten years behind...i got to the point where i thought i'd kill someone if i heard the Spice Girls again! Perhaps the weirdest thing about this night was the realisation that India's more...conservative tradition when it comes to boy-meets-girl scenarios was present even here, in an ultra-modern club. People dancing away, Bollywood-style, really close...but not for a minute looking like they are actually going to get it on, not in public anyway. Very, very different to clubs in England.

Having established ourselves as regulars in Sports Bar, we decided to try a few other places to eat. Leopold's and Mondegars are both recommended in The Books, and are full of tourist-types like ourselves who pop in, Lonely Planet in hand, sample the food and drink, and leave. How much money The Books must bring in to these places in tourism, i don't know...getting in The Books must be worth an absolute fortune to them.

We took a very brief look at the Oval Maiden, where several games of cricket are being held at any one time. With it being the day before the Cricket World Cup started, there were many people out enjoying a few overs. Sadly i didn't get the chance to get any photograps, which was really annoying...i would have liked to get a few shots of the lovely green parks populated with sparkling cricket whites...nevermind...

Speaking of cricket, it's unavoidable here, even for people like myself and Agent Dolac who don't particularly like it. The whole country was going mad over cricket. If you think "England expects" when it comes to sport, you ain't seen nothing...India doesn't just expect cricket success, it demands it. And so, it was somewhat inevitable that i'd cave in and head for a Nike shop where i bought an Indian cricket shirt :O)

Chowpatty Beach is one of Mumbai's hotspots, particularly as the sun goes down. Hundreds of people chill out on he sand watching the sunset over the skyline across the water, with various small fairground-style rides to keep the kids entertained, and a truckloud of food-stalls, not to mention persistent masseurs...it was really nice but we were knackered after walking round all day, and couldn't be bothered fighting off the touts. We watched the sunset, took a few snaps, and head back to Colaba to get some food.

After nearly three months in India, i needed a haircut. There was a barber's right over the road from out hotel, so we popped in...the guy working there was loving it! He gave Agent Dolac a rather close razor-blade-shave, before giving him a full-on head massage! I got my haircut and walked out looking like Adolf Hitler - nothing a bit of wax couldn't sort out - but not before i'd had my turn on the massage chair! Head massages seem to be pretty...brutal...but they leave you feeling refreshed. Plus you get coated in oils and peppermint stuff, hot/cold towels to open/clean your pores...all that kind of thing. Good stuff! Parts of it were really weird though. For example: At one point, the guy put on some kind of vibrating-glove-thing, and then moved his hand over my head as it was turned on...normal enough, you might think...but then he started sticking his fingers down my ear! Right down the hole, as far as it'd go, so that it created a vacuum and caused pain when he pulled it out! That's not normal in my book!

Mumbai basically felt like an Indian city that is desperate to be Western, but refuses to be. It's as close to London or New York as anything we've experienced so far, but we left unsure as to whether that's a good thing or a bad thing...

BELATED EDIT: I forgot to mention...on our first night, when we drove past the Taj Hotel en route to our guesthouse, who should drive past us but Richard Farleigh - the Australian chap from Dragon's Den. He wasn't actually driving himself, of course, he was in the back of a fancy black car (couldn't see exactly what it was), being chauffeured to the hotel. Legend!

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