India Flying solo, at one with the chaos - India Part 4

On my first morning alone in Udaipur I went for a bit of an aimless wander around, and ended up at the zoo, which with my typical travel luck, was closed that day. I had a bit of a walk around the gardens surrounding it which were very nice, and sat in the shade reading a book for a few hours.

I took a very round about walk back into town and stumbled across quite a long street market which was full of colour and activity, so I spent quite a while taking photos.

I organised a taxi up to see the monsoon palace for sunset, right up on top of the hill overlooking Udaipur. The views of the city were fantastic, but the gloomy overcast afternoon made the sunset into a non-event.

The next day I went back to see the zoo on a day that it is open, and instantly regretted coming. The few animals they had were in painfully small cages, which wreaked of shit; atrocious conditions that made me feel very sorry for the animals.

That afternoon/evening I got my flight to Mumbai on Air India. I've already ranted about how horribly over-the-top bureaucratic the whole thing was here, but one thing of note that I didn't look into until after I landed safety was Air India's safety record. I found this article claiming they are the 3rd least safe airline in the world, ignoring the ones so unsafe they don't count. Who needs bungee jumping when you've got dangerous airlines to travel with.

I got a taxi from the airport to a hotel recommended in the lonely planet (I had nothing planned when my flight took off, so the lonely planet was my only real option), and it was this cute little old school style taxi, just like in old movies, with a bench seat across the front and a roof so low my head nearly touched the roof.

When I arrived I found out that that hotel was full, but a helpful guy looking for a tip helped me find a place around the corner that was nice and cheap, that was just a floor full of tiny shoebox private rooms, probably 1.5 metres by 2 metres. Good enough lodgings to spend a night, but the bathrooms were so horrible I didn't wasn't to stay more than the one night.

I was hungry for some dinner so I went for a walk to find that just about everything around seemed to be closed already at 11pm, but after walking past hundreds of shut shops, I found Leopold Cafe; from the book "Shantaram", which saved me from having to stoop to visiting the golden arches I could see in the distance. The place for much larger and far busier than I had imagined it to be, with a whole team of waiters decked out wearing "Leopold" uniforms. I had a pretty nice curry there, then headed back to my shoebox to sleep for the evening.

I spent the next morning searching for a nicer hotel that I could afford and found a place that had a bit of an old mansion feel to it. I had a look at the room, it looked pretty nice and had an air conditioner so I agreed to stay, but later when I went to turn on the AC I was disappointed to find there was no power to it. I asked at reception about it and they told me it was an option extra which I wasn't very happy with, especially since there was no fly screens on the windows. I ended up deciding that I didn't really need the AC, and lucky for me there didn't seem to be any mosquitoes in Mumbai.

After sorting out my room, I went and looked into booking a tour of the slums with a company that had been strongly recommended that used the money raised to run a school in the slums to educate the kids there. I was lucky and there was a tour leaving that day in about an hour, so I booked in and went home to change from my flip-flops into closed shoes.

It was a very interesting tour, showing how much industry goes on there from plastic recycling, where they sort the plastic by quality and colour and melt it down to make long strands which are cut into pellets to be shipped off to other countries to be made into all sort of stuff, to fabric recycling where old fabric is shredded and the fibres are spun into a thread which is then turned back into fabric, to burning off the paint from old oil drums and banging them back into shape to be repainted, refilled and reused. Apparently there are a few people making a ton of money from the slums, while the people who work and live there are in extreme poverty. A lot of the people actually sleep at night in the same factory that they work in during the day.

We were taken down a "lane way" that would have been only about the width of my shoulders and required us to bend down not because of a low roof, but because of low power lines, along which there were hundreds of tiny rooms each inhabited by a family. At one point we went past an area our guide had described as an open field used by the locals as a toilet. What it looked like, however, was a huge mound of garbage with some kids playing cricket on it not 10 metres away from another kid squatted down taking a dump. Lovely!

The next day I took a boat to Elephanta Island, to see the cave temples carved out of the side of the hill. The boat ride there was pretty choppy on account of the extremely high tides. I had a sea sickness table beforehand so I was fine, but there were a lot of Indian women throwing up onto the side of the boat. That's not a typo, they weren't managing to get it over the edge in the slightest.

The steps up to the cave were lined on either side by stalls selling the generic tacky souvenirs available everywhere in India, and roofed with blue tarps that did little more than stop any change of a breeze to ease the humidity. I don't know how many people come all the way to Elephanta Island to buy their tacky jewelled elephant, or how they would pick any of those hundred basically identical stalls over another, but the shopkeepers obviously think it's worthwhile.

The first cave was quite impressive, with huge chambers carved from the mountain with lots of statues carved into the walls, but the other unfinished caves were less impressive, and finding a part where the "stone" had fallen away to reveal steel concrete reinforcing made me wonder just how authentic the whole place was.

The boat back seemed to take a lot longer than the boat there, with a few burst of monsoon rain, so I didn't end up getting back until late in the afternoon and didn't do much else that day.

My final day in Mumbai, and in India, was pretty packed full of stuff. I had a look through the museum in the morning before heading out to Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat, a huge open air laundry, full of little troughs of water where people bash clothes clean, roofs covered in clothes lines and sheds where they boil water for the washing. It was an interesting place to visit, and explained why hotel laundry in Mumbai needed to be dropped off so early in the day.

After the Laundry, I walked down towards the Haji Ali Mosque, which is out on an island connected to the mainland by a long concrete walkway, with toxic Bombay water full of garbage on either side. I should have turned back when I noticed everyone coming back from the mosque was soaked from head to toe, but instead I took my chances and decided to try and time it right so I could get out to the mosque dry, timing my movement between waves. That was foolish and about half way out I got stuck in a crowd when a large wave hit the concrete wall, splashing up and soaking everything I was wearing with filthy water. It's a damn good thing I had my phone and camera in my dry bag at the time!

I turned back without even getting to the mosque, and as I was leaving some heavy rain started to fall. While people ran for cover, I tried to find somewhere completely uncovered and took my hat off to try and get a bit rinsed off by the rain.

Next I headed to the Gandhi museum, which in typical fashion was closed that day for pest spraying, so I headed down to nearby Chowpatty beach instead. There was a roped off area along the shore that I asked a local about, and was told it was there to stop people getting sprayed with the toxic seawater from waves... So it sounds like the water pollution issue isn't over-exaggerated at all.

I saw some kids jumping of a higher bit of sand doing flips and stuff, that I watched for a while before they dragged me over to sit with them and asked me questions and wanted me to take photos of them so they could see themselves.

On my long walk along the coastline, back to where I was staying, I was hit by some more dark clouds and heavy rain that I welcomed with open arms. It's amazing how getting covered in filthy toxic seawater can change you opinion of how annoying monsoon rain is. I just walked along with a grin on my face, watching people run for cover when there was absolutely no cover to run towards.

I decided I needed a shower before I headed to the airport; I asked at my hotel but they told me there was no shower that I could use, so I went to a hostel around the corner and asked them how much it would cost just to use a shower. They ended up only charging 100 rupees, and I was happy to get cleaned up and changed into some clean clothes.

My taxi driver for the drive to the airport had Bollywood tunes that I could actually recognise playing on the radio, a fitting way to finish up my time in India.

I feel I will definitely be coming back at some point, probably in winter, well away from the monsoon. I can completely understand why the place is so love/hate with people. There's a bunch of things about the place that frustrate and confuse me, but the colourful nature of the place, the amazing food and the friendly people (who aren't trying to sell you shit) have won me over.