Mumbai 12 | bellsandtrance's Blog

Subject: Mumbai!12

We leave for the airport and say goodbye to beautiful lake city Udaipur and our trusty driver Milap. Stella gave her first tooth to the Indian tooth fairy...we made sure to put some curry on it as we heard Indian tooth fairies love curry, well it's seems to have worked as Stella received a whole 100 Rupees from him. Well done Stella!

Udaipur's airport is wonderfully quiet and we check in without a hitch...security is very tight though. We arrive in Mumbai an hour later. Mumbai is huge, it's the fourth biggest city in the world with a population of over 20 million. After getting a flat tyre that was promptly fixed in the middle of the road - no worries about the on coming traffic at all, we finally booked into our hotel.

It's a very cosmopolitan place and in the dining hall I felt as if I was sitting in a big European city. Western food, ACDC blasting on the speakers and all the locals dressed in western clothes, it feels really hip and young. We stagger off to bed by eleven and we are all totally exhausted.

The next morning we are up at 5 to leave by 8 for our ferry to the Elephanta caves located about an hours boat ride from Mumbai. They were called the Elephanta caves by the Portuguese who sailed past the island in the 18 Th. century and saw two huge carved elephants on the shore. You have to climb over a hundred steps to reach the top to the entrance of the caves, but luckily for Ma and Pa there are porters who carry them up on a chair. There are 4 Hindu caves carved out from solid rock, they have sadly been damaged by people over the years, but are still something to see, we are told the Ellora caves in Aurangabad are better preserved.

It's very hot and we are walk back to the ferry, the people are starting to crowd and it's getting really annoying as people just push and walk here, they must be used to crowding, the Indian men will sit and watch you struggling with Cate's pram and few will offer to help.....gotta give good old South African men some credit in this department. Some youngster stands behind me on the bridge towards the ferry and keeps saying excuse me excuse me, I'm like excuse me where must I go, I can't move forward or back stop pushing me now, I say this at the top of my voice, he looks totally shocked and says sorry madam. Oh dear.
A wonderful ferry ride later we are back in the crowds and heat and it is to be honest quite exhausting,as you can imagine.

We drive through Mumbai on our way to the airport and we see skyscraper upon skyscraper. We drive past slums, even the one where the movie Slumdog millionaire was filmed. The sea on our left is calm but polluted, people everywhere.
The airport is quite small. There is some hectic security checks going on, as the Pakistani cricket team arrives in India for a huge match on Christmas Day, the Taliban have said they are not happy with this and that they will bomb India! ( This is due to the conflict over territory in Kashmir) Our flight is delayed by an hour and we sit around waiting we are all exhausted and everyone is starting to get a bit frazzled. As we board the bus we discover that the kids have removed one of the security tags on Garth's rucksack...he has to go back to security now and pack his entire bag out again to get a new tag. Ooh he is fuming and so am I. In this process my beautiful gemstones that my supplier gave me as a gift are lost forever! One Australian Opal and one citrine. The airport officials were just doing their jobs, but I think we were just tired hot and sweaty!

The flight is only an hour thank Kali! We arrive in Aurangabad and out checkout is as smooth as a babies bottom( think I hate Mumbai) Our rooms are beautiful with a balcony overlooking a large swimming pool, we even get upgraded rooms free of charge, we must have looked like the exhausted bunch we were. We fall into bed and sleep...yay it so wonderfully quiet after our mad day!

Ps Ma is getting a little better as her flue is subsiding, she still has to watch what she eats and not do too much physically.
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