A full day in Mumbai - and some photos

Having typed the previous few entries on the laptop and not being able to find any wi-fi access, we are now faced with the decision of either uploading all three entries at once when we finally get said access again, retype the lot of it or buy a USB stick so we can take it to an internet café. So much for wi-fi on every corner.

We’re currently having a bit of downtime in the hotel after a day of walking. Some of the sights we saw:

The Gateway of India -

The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel -

Cinemas showing the latest Bollywood hits -

After Leopold’s we found an internet café to look up the number of the friend of the owner of the property where I keep my horse (convoluted?). This done (without typing previous entries), we went back to the hotel and I called the guy before we re-emerged and walked up the Colaba Causeway to find the Colaba markets.

After a very long walk which took us to the docks (at which time we realised we had obviously come too far), we turned back and discovered the markets were quite close to where our hotel is (duh). We wandered the alleys of the market for a while and ended up on the border of what I think was one of Colaba’s slums. It was quite smelly and dilapidated and, feeling like we were intruding on people’s private lives, we gratefully found the streets again and headed back to the more established trails.

After this we headed to one of the Lonely Planet’s recommended restaurants for masala dosas -

- which were simply awesome and everything we’d expected. For me, it was great to go into a restaurant where I knew that everything on the menu was vegetarian. The dosa was enormous with a very tasty and spicy filling of potatoes, onions and lentils. We had a refreshing lime juice and soda to accompany it followed by chai, all for the princely sum of less than four Australian dollars.

After this we went to Mumbai’s gallery of modern art, which was relatively boring but in quite a cool dome-shaped building (and with the added bonus of a toilet, considering I was busting and the places we’d been didn’t seem to have any).

We then went for a wander through the Fort area, which is resplendent with Victorian-style buildings, particularly the University of Mumbai, a stunning complex with towering buildings reminiscent of cathedrals.

This turned out to be quite enough walking for one day, so we wandered back to Colaba to yet another tourist-dominated bar to down four 750ml bottles of Kingfisher.

We’re now back at the hotel resting up before we go to meet the friend of a friend, who just happens to be the president of the Royal Bombay Yacht Club. We feel very privileged to be able to see this place at all, which is open only to members, let alone to be taken to dinner there by someone we don’t even know, so we’re going to glam up appropriately for the evening. No doubt Mumbai’s richest will also be there.

Luckily for us the Yacht Club is just around the corner from our hotel, so we won’t have far to go, or to get back afterwards…since I’m sure we’ll be quite tired after being awake for 24 hours yesterday. We’re watching the latest Indian pop music on Channel V on the TV, which it turns out is identical to (and every bit as crap as) Australian/American/English pop music, but with a Bollywood accent.

No doubt we’ll be checking in again tomorrow, and apparently our next hotel (the original one we booked, that is) has free internet in the lobby, so it’ll probably be four entries at once!