Sleepless in Mumbai (with no wi-fi)

We made it. It’s been a mission, but I’m currently tapping away in bed in our hotel in the Fort district of Mumbai. Regrettably we didn’t have WiFi for the first day, so this will be the first of several entries that we've written on the laptop .

The journey here was fairly standard; a few delays, a few irritations and some discomfort, somewhat salved by Singapore Airlines actually being as good as they are reputed.

Before I get to the flight itself, I just want to remark briefly on the stupidity of people. I’m the first one to say that the security systems now part and parcel of plane travel are just stupid (no-one has ever been able to prove the liquid bomb’ thing possible). But if you’re prepared, it’s not that damn hard. The sheer number of people who had their cosmetics just sprawled throughout 13 bloody bags with faces like slumbering sloths awoken to castigation by security and customs officials was staggering.

With that out of the way, the leg from Adelaide to Singapore was the longest but surprisingly bearable. I watched two films – Law Abiding Citizen, which was brutal but really good, and Wall-E which was touching, in a Disney kind of way (that’s not meant quite as it sounds). As is the plan for keeping the natives happy we were given plenty of food and booze. The food was excellent by airline standards, and the pre-mixed Singapore Slings were tasty, refreshing and potent all at once. For me the combination of food, drink and film made the journey fly by, and it was only complicated slightly by a teething child who cried almost constantly.

The stopover in Singapore was marked by our fascination with Singaporean efficiency and just how darn huge the airport was. We took a train from T3 where we landed to T2 where we booked a hotel room for the disgustingly-long lay over on our return trip and generally killed time with a combination of wandering and sitting around. The airport is truly gargantuan and, having some concern that we may have forgotten some crucial element of check-in, used the massive lengths of travelators to get to our boarding gates.

Needless to say, after a few Singapore Slings and Jim Beams on the first flight, I slept through the majority of the second. Bec braved a film, but also slept. As we approached Mumbai, however, I could swear I could smell the city. It was an almost sweet funk of people, food and industry, and I’m sure it’s the same smell that hit us as we made it out of the airport into the real world where we met our driver.

We have arranged a lot of our internal travel and a few of our activities with a group called Vini Travel, and they are so darn good that one of their senior people joined the driver to talk us through the various things they’ve planned for us, which was very reassuring. As we drove to our hotel, we got a late-night view of Mumbai at its sleepiest; the city is massive; the streets are lined with people working, sleeping on make-shift mattresses or entertaining themselves; dogs wander everywhere. The signs of the massive gap between rich and poor are unavoidable. The smells are overpowering. At one point we passed a swamp, the smell of which nearly had us choking. But soon after we rounded a corner to see the Queen’s Necklace; the local description of the lights bounding Chowpatty Beach and the bay out to the Arabian Sea. It was a stunning sight, reminiscent of San Sebastian at night.

Driving in Mumbai is much like driving in South East Asia – controlled suicide. You just have to keep faith in the system which, like physics, makes no sense but seems to work. We found out quickly that after midnight, red lights are literally just a recommendation. We flew through virtually all of them without slowing, and at one point our driver sounded his horn in the window of a police car he was passing, speeding past it as he crossed a red light. Bizarre. I felt like telling him that in Australia that behaviour would score you jail time.

We arrived at our purported hotel after driving through what appeared to be built-up slums then the Fort area which actually looks like it should be in London, only to be told that indeed we had a booking, but the rooms were full (it reminded me of a Seinfeld episode). The hotel moved us to a sister hotel five minutes’ drive away which is apparently nicer and closer to the Colaba markets. That’s of limited benefit since we move back tonight anyway, but at 1:00am local time and about 5am by our body clocks we were past caring.

The room is pleasant enough and I slept well, but my body clock is telling me it’s now 12:44pm. Bec is still sleeping but I am starvingly hungry and hoping for something like a dosa for breakfast. The alarm will go off in an hour or so, and I’ll try to get some sleep in the meantime.