The Beginning!

Hi Everyone! 

So, I’ve been in India for almost a month now and I know my blog has been guiltily sitting here empty and you are all wondering how my travels are going, well, I’m officially going to get this thing started…

The adventure began in Mumbai in mid January when Anneke met me at the airport fresh from Arambol, Goa, where she had been for the past two weeks doing yoga and an ayurveda course. As you may remember, there was a certain ill-fated accident at Burning Man that pretty much screwed up our last overseas venture so it was so super exciting to finally get to travel together again.Yay. As I write this Anneke is on the first leg of a 4 day trip back home and I am chilling out at Varkala beach in Kerala missing my partner in crime already! But anyway, back to Mumbai in January… Anneke looked like  the perfect picture of ‘chilled out hippy traveler’, complete with anklets, floaty top, beads, bracelets and even a bindi! Wow. However, as we walked down the street to the taxi that would take us back to the dodgy room we had booked in Colaba we discovered fast that Mumbai is anything but chilled out. 

The lack of footpaths was an initial worry for me as we seemed to be mostly sharing the road with trucks, cars, motorbikes, bicycles, hand drawn carts, horses and other miscellaneous vehicles- All of which were ruthless in getting to their destination as fast as possible. There seemed to be no particular road rules, or even a centre line. Signs such as the green man, or even traffic lights, seemed to exist simply as a pretense that something was being done about the chaos. The only thing that appeared to prevent accidents was a complex horn beeping system. This proved difficult to understand, although we tried. First we thought a beep meant ‘coming through’ but then we noticed a variety of horn techniques: short light beeps in quick succession, loud medium length beeps , a simple tap on the horn and the traditional Sydney ‘the light is GREEN’ long loud beep. Each beep seemed to have a corresponding interpretation such as, ‘I’m overtaking you’ or ‘don’t overtake me’ or ‘you can’t come through’ or just simply ‘nobody else is beeping and it’s too quiet’. In conclusion, a very noisy way of doing things but it does seem to work somehow, even if Anneke kept having a heart attack whenever we got the considerate ‘loud medium length’ (interpretation: I’m behind you so don’t walk out further onto the road).

Due to our excitement and rambling about this trip at home In Australia we received many warnings and horror stories along the lines of the men being sleazy, the cities disgusting, beggars intolerable and crime ridiculously high. Many people said they actually hated India entirely so we were seriously expecting the worst, and after a decent amount of travel between us that was quite extreme. So we were both surprised at how AWESOME Mumbai was. An Indian taxi driver in Sydney once said (insert accent) ‘If you go to India you will not need to go to Mars’. I can definitely see where he was coming from with that statement when examining the crazy streets of Mumbai and it is a very good thing, I mean, I do also want to go to Mars but India is definitely satisfying me at the moment.

As we explored the streets we discovered that, much like any city, people were going about their daily business as usual. Although, in Mumbai, daily business included things like: A man driving his Mercedes up to a dodgy alleyway street stall just making it over the piles of rubbish and rubble that seem to be everywhere – then being served 20c meals in his front seat, (tightass maybe, but I like to think he just liked the food better – we ate there too). The constant chewing and hoiking of various unusual looking substances on the street is another interesting routine, ditto the men making and selling the unusual looking substances out of leaves and brightly coloured smelly pastes. I found ‘typewriter alley’ the most fascinating… a whole street of men dressed in suits, sitting on the curb in the searing heat, typing away on antique machines with all the pride and seriousness of company directors. Funny.   

As the evening progressed we decided to take a sunset walk to Haji Ali mosque which is on a little island off the coast that can be crossed to at low tide. The area was popular with locals and provided us with a total cross section of Mumbai life: street stalls selling delicious food, piles of rubbish, goats picking through the rubbish, disabled beggars, well dressed families, young teens listening to music on mobile phones, women in saris, women in hijabs, women in jeans and t-shirts. Basically a total mismatch. The most fascinating thing about the city is of course that while we marveled at these things, and so, so many more, the locals were unfazed, completely used to this way of life.

 

As the sun was setting we sat down to take some photos. While Anneke was fiddling with the settings on her camera I happened to look around and discovered that as we were absorbed in taking photos of the sunset  there was a group of young teens absorbed in taking photos of us with their phones! We stood up surprised and as the curious group kept staring, both Anneke and I burst out laughing. There was a strange kind of stand off, then one guy got up the courage to say ‘hello’ and when we responded they all wanted to chat and have more photos. Considering the hundreds of photos we had snapped on the streets that day it seemed rude to refuse so we posed, and posed and posed… it was hilarious. We did decide to call it a night though when a woman came over and thrust her baby into my arms for a photo, seriously strange. If you are considering becoming a celebrity I would definitely recommend coming over here first to get a taste of the paparazzi experience, it is an odd mixture of flattery, sleaze and bewilderment. Yesterday a woman sitting next to me on the train blatantly stuck her phone in my face took a close up photo, smiled, then put her phone away. I suppose while we are wondering why they want a photo of us they are probably wondering what we find so interesting about a cow eating out of a rubbish bin.

The next evening, after spending the day away from the craziness, checking out ancient monkey infested ruins at Elephant Island, we decided to have a night out on the town. On arriving at the Blue Frog bar where a cool Indian band was supposedly playing we found the place was decked out like super flash 70s restaurant, with circular booths sunk into a silver amphitheatre facing the stage and disco lights projected onto everything. It was bizarre. The band came on and all their songs were in broken English with humorous forced rhyming . I have to say I was a little disappointed having expected Hindi, but they were grungy and interesting and their fans in the crowd seemed to know all the lyrics, even headbanging along to the slower songs. It was a fun night but we were quite tired when the place closed and we went to get a taxi home which was hands down the scariest ride of both our lives, ever. The driver was quite possibly drunk as he drove as if in some sort of computer game speeding between non-existent gaps in traffic and waaay too fast. Luckily the beeping system warned others of his antics and everyone moved aside for us. When we asked him to slow down, he sped up with a chuckle, taking delight in scaring us. We both opted to hug the seats in front of us considering there were no seatbelts , it was indescribable. And to top it off he tried to charge us double the agreed fare when we arrived! By then our tiredness had subsided completely  and we refused to pay the extra and had to go and drink beer for hours to recover from the journey.

SO, that was Mumbai, next stop... Goa!

Despite my lame photography skills I somehow managed to take this amazing photo of crows at sunset.

My favourite man working from typewriter alley

Unusual looking substance vendor