Let’s go cycling

Or Bombay…as it is referred to by every local we’ve chatted with…

No cycling for a few days, a bit of time to explore a few of the sights, sounds and smells of this vast city and to recover our slightly wary tummies.

Found a cheap (for here!) and cheerful hotel, nothing flash but the staff are great and what we saved on the room cost we spent on posh breakfasts and dinners around the street 🙂 We ended up staying four nights here, perfect time to relax and to regroup…and decide what’s next.

We arrived in Mumbai just in time for a somewhat massive deluge- around 300mm of rain within the space of a couple of hours. We did hear later that a few souls were lost to flooding, and schools and transport were closed for the next day. We managed to get soaked in the short walk from dinner to our hotel but otherwise…we were happily warm and dry in the safety of our hotel while the rain continued to pelt down.

Just round the corner the next morning we found “Happy Cycles” whose cheery operators replaced our along brake pads and gave the bikes a once over…and a wash!

Our hotel doorman Sunil was a very happy chappy, greeting us with a super warm smile every time he saw us. And he did a marvellous job of looking after our (clean!) bikes for us.

A walk around the Colaba area gave us a fascinating insight into the contradictions in this city. The Gateway precinct features impressive buildings, including the magnificent Taj Palace Hotel…while just a few hundred metres away we found ourselves somehow inside one of Mumbai’s slums with dark alleyways less than a metre wide, multifloor yet tiny buildings.

And rats. Big enough to eat a cat I reckon. Boy oh boy…they are just everywhere and they certainly aren’t shy. Ergghhhhh

Day two in Mumbai, we booked a tour through a local NGO Reality Gives, and had a fascinating walk through the Dharavi slums. Our guide, Javed, grew up and still lives in the slum and he gave us a truly inspiring insight into life in the area. More dark narrow pathways, water for two hours a day (if they’re lucky), around 700 toilets for 1.5 million people, electricity intermittently (and not when it’s raining…), and plenty more rats.
But also, a great sense of community, thriving industries, markets, happy kids, schools and learning centres. There is clearly some dissention re the government plans to relocate long term residents to new highrise apartment buildings, but we found Dharavi to be quite a happy place, somewhere the residents choose to live and to a large extent, more space and amenities than in several other areas of Mumbai.

It wasn’t appropriate to take photos inside the residential areas but they were happy for us to take a few happy snaps of the industry…and the playground…our little ‘uns should think themselves just a bit fortunate!

Beggars are something else in Mumbai. It took us a little while to work out the systems…but we reckon we have it sussed now. Our slum guide Javed was also a great source of intel on the ins and outs of the beggar industry…which it is. We were initially persuaded by a young “mum” with three cute but whimpering kids to buy her some rice. No money…just rice. She led us to a nearby store but then the stakes went up- she picks up a 5kg sack of rice for Neil to purchase. Then when that ploy failed she went for a smaller prepack. But we bought her a kg of the loose rice…and quickly realised that her intent was to resell the rice. A few more of these encounters and we began to see that these “mums” were all relatively well dressed, and that the kids probably didn’t even belong to them. They were also very insistent (we’ve learnt to be firm now…).

Whereas…we also come across disfigured (often intentionally according to Javed), aged, hunched souls just sitting on the sidewalk without any obvious begging request but in obvious need. We think we have the priorities in a bit better order now…