Back to Mumbai - Elephanta Island

  Mumbai, India
Monday, March 19, 2007

 Back to Mumbai again! Quite a relief to leave Goa as five weeks was more than ample for beach bumming.

We had a long hot journey up in the middle of the day as we couldn't get AC class and arrived late at around 11pm, hoping like crazy that our rooms hadn't been given away as we didn't want a repeat of when we arrived here at the start of the trip. We got another mad room on the seafront at the crazy Hotel Prosser's and headed out to find some grub. It was amazing, as soon as Tim put up the challenge of 'Who can spot the first rat' they seemed to come at us from every direction - out of drains, from under cars etc. One was a particularly evil looking bastard and we scampered down the street to Leopold's hoping like hell that none were so hungry that our fat toes would look appetising!

We had to organise some train tickets the next day so again entered the complex vortex of ticket buying at Victoria Terminus. Whilst bumbling around trying to find the correct counter we came across an Indian woman who offered to help. "Fucking crazy place India," she said "Where else in the world do they make it so hard to buy a fucking train ticket". It turns out she grew up in Birmingham and once met Prince Charles. She reckons he asked her where she was from and when she responded with "Birmingham" he replied "Oh, I didn't know you had one in India as well"... She praised the UK for being 'organised', which i guess is true compared to the usual chaos here, but that's the charm of this place... However, it's pretty wearing when you're running up and down stairs, filling out forms, flicking through timetables that you need a PHD to decipher etc. After all this, a couple of days later we noticed that our ticket was for ten past midnight on the day before we actually wanted to leave!! Oooooooooopppppppps!! Tim and Simon had to do a taxi run to the station and negotiate special refund counters to get the ticket amended. Once we got the hang of the system we managed to book another couple of tickets in advance without any cock ups...

Towards Gateway from bay

We did a bit more sight seeing in Mumbai, and took in plenty more smells unavoidable in this olfactory onslaught. We took the boat over the back bay to Elephanta Island... You've never seen more revolting brown, oily, stinky water in your life!

Elephanta Island caves

Elephanta Island Caves

Boats

After we run we run the gauntlet past all the stalls we discover there's only really one main cave here. The carvings, mainly of Shiva are very interesting though - especially the big 3 sided face.

One of the highlights was one of the many taxi rides we took. The driver couldn't start his car once he got us in and quickly discovered that his mates had switched off his fuel in the boot. This guy turned out to be a real character, singing us a Hindi song to us then asking for an English song in return. I suggested 'Row Your Boat' and Simon soon bravely launched into a rendition for him, which he responded to with 'Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star' - sung with him continuously slamming his door because it kept swinging open!