Mumbai/Bombay, Goa, Hampi
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Mumbai,
India
Monday, April 26, 2004
... in which the intrepid traveller explores the London of the East, pays respect to a saint with one arm and nine toes, and relaxes under a monkey-infested mango tree.
MUMBAI
Take London with its many doubledecker buses, financial service companies, Victorian-age public buildings and hurrying commuters, add tropical temperatures, a stretch of beach and a couple of hundred transvestite prostitutes. Mix well and let to sudder for 100 years, shake up till independent, and you get Mumbai.
The former Bombay must have the best train station to arrive anywhere in India: Victoria Terminus, now logically renamed to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, or CST. If you know Pancras Station in London, you know what I'm talking about - a huge Victorian building with stained glass windows, statues of lions and tigers, gargoyles glaring down from the gutters and a huge dome crowning it all.
I arrived here after an interesting night of getting on the wrong train, getting off at a small station to wait for the next Mumbai connection and then finding all Mumbai-bound trains full to the rafters except for the one at 02:30, where I managed to get a bunk after bribing the conductor (50Rs, a bargain) who kicked a poor Indian off one of the bunks to make place for my weary rich body.
Mumbai is a huge city. 16 million people, they think. Nobody is sure, as the slums (the biggest in Asia) grow with hundreds of people every day. Mumbai is a harbour city, and its centre near the coast on a long peninsula, meaning that the city can only grow eastwards, resulting in very long commutes and traffic problems for the locals. It took the train an hour to reach CST from the outskirts. Kilometre after kilometre of shoddy houses and foul-smelling lakes passed, with the usual scenes of locals brushing teeth and opening their bowels along the tracks. It was a Sunday, so the local commuter trains that run from the suburbs into the city centre were 'only' full, instead of so crammed that people have to hang on outside.
Getting to the Lawrence Hotel was an adventure, as all taxi drivers in Mumbai seem to be permanently lost and braindamaged (later on I got a map and just shouted 'left' and 'right' at taxi drivers to make sure we got where I wanted to be). After finding it above the TGIF restaurant, I checked into my simple 400Rs room (bed, table, window with a view of the Victorian clock tower which does a convincing Big Ben every 15 minutes) and wandered off into town.
Otherwise than northern India, civilised Mumbai respects Sundays by shutting down completely - I found it impossible to find a stall selling drinks and had to go to restaurants: till now I always found plenty of roadside stalls willing to sell me cold drinks. Mumbai is different. Maybe it should be the capital city, as it alone produces *half* of the nation's national income and much of its industrial output. Also new to me: girls wearing jeans, women with haircuts (as opposed to just long hair combed backwards), people with printed T-shirts (pretty rare up north; shirts and kurtas still rule there),
and the charming Mumbai English accent.
The city is relatively low on 'real' sights, but is great for wandering. First off, I went to the Gate of India, a rather plump archway facing the sea, commemorating the landing of some British monarch. A bomb attack here killed quite a few people a few years ago (and a decade ago a huge blast in the financial district killed more than 200), so I quickly walked around it. It was too hot to linger in the noon sun anyway; the high humidity makes you sweat a lot if you get too active outside of the shade.
Passing the grand Taj hotel I was approached by a guy who said I have shampoo in my ear, and who started to reach for me with a little metal tool - this was one of India's infamous ear-cleaners, who poke metal things around in your ear for a few rupees. Not charmed by the idea of a dirty needle close to my eardrum, I told him to get those instruments away from me before I performed street brain surgery on him with my Swiss knife.
Further towards the end of Mumbai's peninsula are what remains of the Koli fishing village (once an island). Alongside a beach of pure trash, more shoddy houses stood crammed between the road and the docks where the boats unloaded fish every morning. In the slum, it was Sunday playtime; women were combing each other's hair outside their houses while drying fish on the street, children were playing hopscotch and only a few merchants had bothered to set up their vegetable stalls in the market.
Back in the city centre I wandered past the Maidan, the park in front of a row of impressive Victorian-age buildings. The Maidan was filled with boys playing cricket (a sign at the entrance read that 'all organised activities except cricket' were forbidden). When I say 'filled', I mean Indian-style filled. There was a wicket, batsman and bowler literally every three metres, and the fielders were spread out between the surrounding matches of cricket. So on any given patch of grass, there might have been 5 or 6 games being played simultaneousely.
Overlooking the Maidan is the university library and clock tower. The tower brought back memories of Utrecht in Holland - the top was an octagonal lantern shape, exactly like our good old medieval Dom tower. I wandered into the library and was allowed to peek in the reading room, a fabulous neo-gothic hall with wooden arches, ceiling fans suspended from the roof on long poles and plenty of pigeons escaping the heat outside.
The streets around - usually teeming with lawyers and peons from the courts next door, or the office workers from the financial district behind it - were deserted except for some booksellers. I headed for Colaba, the central district that has the most hotels, cafes and restaurants and therefore attracts the foreigners. The pavements were livelier here - plenty of T-shirt salesmen, beggars, drug dealers, and even a few heroin addicts doing the spoon-heating business.
Highlight of the Mumbai stay was the recently renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya Museum - it's no wonder the tickets still refer to the place as the "former Prince of Wales museum", just like we now refer to the popstar Prince as the former Prince, or to Macedonia as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, instead of just teling the people what it is *now*. It's easily the best museum I've seen in India, with a great collection covering everything from ancient Hiindu sculptures, jade jewels, Indian miniature painting, armour, and a mediocre selection of European paintings (but with 5 cute Dutch landscapes that I proudly pointed out to a curious Indian family).
The lowlight of the stay was definitely my attempt to see a Hindi film in this city of dreams also known as Bollywood. There was nothing that looked remotely interesting and I opted for nostalgia - a screening of Starsky & Hutch, which was at best a forgettable film. Interesting titbits:
- on the doors of the cinema, there is a list of important things to remember in case of a bomb attack. Best tip: 'Don't stand around'.
- before the feature, a low-quality image of a fluttering Indian flag is shown and a rather abruptly cut part of the anthem is played. I didn't stand up (as I despise automatic respect for useless things like nations), but when a girl kindly asked me to do so, I thought I better not offend the locals.
- the censors had roughly cut out 3-4 seconds of breasts, and whatever dialogue went with that.
- despite producing hundreds of films a year, in the whole of Mumbai there was only a choice of about ten Indian films, and three Western ones. Any village cinema in Holland has a better selection than that...
One last interesting thing about Mumbai is that it houses the Parsis (from 'Persian') or Zoroastrians. The followers of Zarathustra originate from Persia/Iran from where they fled under Muslim pressure in the 8th century. Their houses and businesses can be recognised by the use of a griffin (a lion with wings and a human face), which is often spotted in restaurants run by them. They're ranked high in Mumbai society for their sense for business and they play an important role in Mumbai's financial sector. They're very private about their religion, which involves only one God who is represented by fire in their temples.
But the most interesting sight in Mumbai must be the Parsi's eerily-named Towers of Silence, found near the centre of town but heavily guarded and off-limits to all but the workers involved in disposing of Parsi bodies. The Towers of Silence can be recognised by the birds flying overhead... Parsis believe that earth, fire, water and air are pure and not to be messed with, so they lay their dead on high towers, where vultures, hawks and crows eat the remains (I heard this also occurs in the Andes where there's no wood to cremate people, and too hard ground to bury them).
GOA
Travelling in low season is great - not only are hotel rooms readily available and subject to more bargaining than they would like, in high season (November to March) getting a bed on the overnight Mumbai-Goa express involves booking two weeks in advance. Now I could just wander up to the tourist booking counter at CST and get my ticket for the next evening. After stocking up on mango juice and cookies (the boy selling the juice asked me if I was a filmstar - a very fitting way to leave 'Bollywood') I found my seat and practiced my still-functional Polish on two young people from Szczecin.
The Konkan railway, tracing the coast from Mumbai southwards to the tip of India, was only built a decade ago, and has ended centuries of isolation of the coastal region. Before 1997, getting to Goa and beyond involved a two-day ferry trip or one of India's most gruelling bus rides. The scenery between Mumbai and Goa is supposed to be stupendous (the rough terrain explaining the late arrival of train transport), but as it was a nighttrain I missed it all. Still, we woke up to a fabulously tropical scenario of rice paddy fields, palmtrees and small villages. The rice harvest ended a while ago, and the pre-monsoon dryness means that the trees look a bit scruffy - I'm assured everything turns verdant again after June when an amazing amount of rain gets dumped on the coast.
I got off at Margao (also known as Madgaon, because Indians have an irritating habit of using more than one word for cities - and gods), roughly in the middle of the small state of Goa. Transport enthusiasts and rickshaw-haters will be happy to hear that they're building the 'world's first skybus' from Margao station to the beach resorts: a raised road on huge stilts that will carry some kind of fast bus (using magnetic levitation, a villager told me, but Indians can't even make gears for their bicycles so I'm betting it'll be a regular bus). If ever finished, this will put an end putting an end to bumpy busrides to the beaches, but also ending the relative isolation of thse fishing villages.
A 7 rupee busride brought me to the nearby fishing village of Benaulim (notice the Portuguese name?), 6km west. Rough Guide recommends it as a good base and says it's one of the least spoilt villages here (a short walk to the evil neighbouring resort of Colva - a quiet hippy retreat in the 1970s but ruined now - confirmed that). Benaulim is situated in the middle of a 25km long straight white-sand beach, backed by rice fields, and scattered colonial-looking houses between the palmtrees. I stayed at a guesthouse overlooking the beach, with a little restaurant and the cleanest rooms I've seen till now. There's nothing to do here except dip in the warm sea, read books and eat coconuts and drink lassi (a delicious sort of milkshake), so that's what I did.
The strong Dutch-force wind coming from the Arabian Sea is a constant, which is good because without it the hot stickiness would really be unbearable. The downside is that the waves were so violent that venturing out in the water was exhausting and any proper swimming was impossible - one wave knocked me off my feet and had me completely disorientated for a few seconds before it dumped me on the beach. The beachguards at Colva had the red flag raised, as most Indians are very bad swimmers and treacherous currents kill a few people every year. Still, it was beautiful, and reading my book with a lassi at hand, palmtrees swaying overhead and waves crashing 10m away was bliss.
I'm not a beachhead, so on the third day I got active and rented a scooter to see Goa's sights. I scootered through amazing paddy/palmtree landscapes north through the villages. Strangely, the landscape actually reminds me more of Holland than anything else. The rice paddies are completely flat, the roads are raised and function as dykes, and houses are surrounded by clumps of palm trees. Replace the palm trees by willows and subtract 20 degrees and you can wear clogs and light up a joint.
First stop was Old Goa, the former Portuguese capital of Goa, placed on a hill along a estuary. The Portuguese were in Goa for hundreds of years, and the colony was very profitable for them (Goa was invaded by India in the 1960s after the Portuguese dictator kept refusing to give it up). Old Goa used to be a city of 200,000 people, one of the larger cities of the 15th/16th centuries, but malaria and plague led the locals to abandon the place 200 years ago, and now all that remains now are the Portuguese churches, surrounded by palm trees and a few tea shacks.
I scootered between the 6 huge churches (all in European baroque style, but not decorated as refined as we're used to in Europe). The largest, the Se Cathedral, is bigger than any church in Portugal, which goes to show the importance of the colony. The cathedral houses the remains of St Xavier, a missionary who failed to convert the locals but made it to sainthood anyway. His arm is in Rome and one of his toes was bitten off by a fanatical Catholic a few decades ago, but otherwise the body is complete. It gets paraded around town every year when thousands of Indian Catholics travel to Goa to get a glimpse.
Unfortunately for the natives, the Portuguese were particularly zealous Catholics, and the vicious Inquisition had many 'heathens' tortured and killed in front of the Se church, where now a forgiving white statue of Jesus holds out his hands above a flower park. I may be wrong, but I think that the Dutch colonies were less a matter of converting natives, but more a commercial venture where it didn't matter who believed what, as long as they worked. (I'm conveniently forgetting the slave trade here).
I took the suicidal main road for a few kilometres to get to the heart of Goa, east of Old Goa, where I visited a Hindu temple that had been hidden here to avoid the Inquisition. Taking small lanes through fabulous paddy/palmtree/village landscapes, I ended up in a village with Goa's best colonial house. The ?? family had built the mansion 450 years ago, and I was given a tour by a kind lady who was the 15th generation. To give you an idea: it includes an original ballroom with marble floors from Italy, glass chandeliers from Belgium, and two chairs presented to the family by the king of Spain (for who they were a sort of consulate). The house chapel had bats on the ceiling and the toenail of St Xavier in a glass display. The best thing about the place was that it was still inhabited by the family - and the rooms had family photos, travel memorabilia and other assorted curiosa: Goa's first radio (a 1950s Philips) and an oil-operated fridge.
HAMPI
Three times a week, the 07:30 train from Margao creeps up the sides of the Western Ghat mountain range that traces the coast, and heads inland towards Chennai (the former Madras). The first two hours of the trip were spectacular - leaving the paddy fields behind, nature took over, and I sighted my first rainforest-type trees. The tracks hugged hills and passed through tunnels as we climbed up to the Deccan Plateau. Halfway up, we sighted the 100m-high Dudhsagar waterfall ('milk falls'). At a station called Castle Rock (full of slogans saying that the Muslim, Hindu and Christian gods are infact all the same and that we should all be friends) we levelled out and from there the landscape became flat and arid again. I dozed off and chatted with the other foreigners (all headed to Hampi) till we reached Hospet at 16:00.
Hampi, 15km north, is a main backpackers destination and meeting people is easy, even in low season when the place is relatively deserted (around Christmas thousands of foreigners are here - I estimate there were 30-40 when I visited, much to the desparation of the young postcard sellers). New friends include Eva from Spain (with who I'd travel for a few days), Bryce and Sarah from New Zealand, Julia from Argentina and Alex from Mexico. An unlikely mix of nations in an even more unlikely landscape...
Hampi is a small village with friendly locals, focused around a large (and heavily pelgrimmed) temple complex, and set in a mind-boggling landscape of hills of seemingly randomly dumped red boulders surrounded by green banana plantations and a beautiful river. To top it off, the place is teeming with the UNESCO-listed ruins of Vijayanagar, a powerful Hindu city that was effectively destroyed by Muslims in the 1600s.
Over the next lazy four days we rented bicycles to slowly get around the scattered ruins, visited the wonderful Vittala temple that had pillars that could be played like a xylophone. But mostly we sat for hours drinking juice at what must be the best cafe in the world - The Mango Tree (hidden in a banana plantation: terraced seats overlooking paddy fields, the river and more boulders, a swing, a resident kingfisher, all under a huge mango tree occasionally with monkeys in it that the owner scares off by shooting at them). I'll be back.
Next up: incense-city Mysore and the Coorg mountains.
**********
Weather: acceptable at 33°, but very sticky/sweaty on the coast (60% humidity) but low humidity inland in Hampi. Bright sunshine every day, naturally.
Health: excellent. Keep on meeting people with unnerving disaster stories though.
Sign of the day (the name of a Goan driving school, the first I see in India): "Survival"
