The Journey
Bus, plane, plane, plane, bus, train.
A long journey via Gatwick, Venice and Riyadh (Saudi Arabia)...
Thankfully, we persevered with the Saudi Arabia visa, even though our experience was painful. Many didn't and found out the hard way with the 9 hour stopover costing them an extra £100 for a visa on arrival.
On the flight from Venice we were sitting alongside a young lady who was also continuing on to Mumbai. She was rather nervous, travelling on her own for the first time, so we agreed we would all stick together when we arrived in Saudi.
The night spent at King Kahlid airport went relatively quickly, partly because getting through passport control took soooo long. Although we had purchased our visa waiver in advance, we still had to join the queue of the masses who had not. Darryl went through first and all seemed ok. Christine followed and was photographed and finger printed, although Darryl was not. On enquiring as to why, it appeared there was a fault with the system and Darryl had to go through again!
2 days later and we have arrived in Mumbai, India and it is 33 degrees!
Getting money from the ATM took longer than expected but Baroda Bank came to the rescue.
We asked the whereabouts of the 312 bus but no one really knew. However they pointed us in the right direction and we eventually caught bus 321. We were heading to the Ville Parle train station.
We drank our first 10 rupee chai and chatted to a local. A very nice stallholder treated us to a Mumbai specialty called vada pav - a spicy potato dumpling in a bun with fried garlic - very tasty
We purchased a train ticket, bumped into our friendly 'chai local' and headed to Churchgate (this was the stop for Colaba). The man very kindly offered his number should we need any help.
We had carried a small luggage trolley all the way from the UK. The aim was to reduce our bag size to super small and have the trolley for long walks. Once we had finished public transporting, the trolley helped with our walk to the hotel.
Along the way we saw the University of Mumbai and the Law Courts which rather resembled Big Ben. We saw various other, beautiful colonial buildings. Eventually we arrived at the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. However, this was not our hotel for the night, we are around the corner at the Salvation Army Tourist Hostel, the first Salvation Army building ever built in India, again housed in a lovely old colonial building.
After checking in and showering we headed out to explore. Unfortunately it had started to rain but was still warm. We saw the Taj Hotel and the Gateway of India all lit up. Next to the Gateway there were various food stalls, one of which was really busy so we decided this would be a good place to eat. We ordered some paneer fried momos (dumplings) and a pav bhaji (curry with butter served with bread and chutney). Both were really good, if a little spicy!
We wandered through the town and night market, stopping off for an Irani tea (similar to chai but not so sweet).
The rain stopped as we headed back to our accommodation for a good night's sleep after our 48 hours of traveling.
