We’re not Moving to Mumbai

Another early day as we get ready to fly back to meet the Voyager.  Our group is again on a private charter 737, this time from Agra to Mumbai, India.  We had our bag outside the room at 8:30 AM and headed to our buffet breakfast in the restaurant near the lobby.  After Dale put steak sauce in his coffee, thinking it was milk, we ate a nice breakfast and boarded the bus for Agra’s military airport.

Click here for the detailed Mumbai Photo Gallery.

At the airport we went through the typical drill with security and, after a short wait in the terminal area we were ready for boarding.  While waiting, one of our fellow guests grabbed a bullwhip from the souvenir store, took it over to one corner of the room and let it rip!  The first time was OK, but the next one snapped the dust off the whip in a puff as it sounded loudly, waking all of us up.  Clearly, he had done this before…we joked with him later back on the ship and learned he’d used one as a boy.

The bus ride was uneventful now that we are used to the crazy scenes we’ve been seeing regularly in India.  The charter flight was good and we landed in Mumbai just after 1:00 pm.

It was hot (104 F) as we boarded the buses to take us to the main terminal but the process was smooth. The terminal was nicer than we expected and before we knew it we were waiting for our tour buses in the sweltering heat.  You’d think we would be getting used to the heat, but somehow you never do.  You do, however, get used to being covered in sweat.

Mumbai, the capital city of the Maharashtra Indian state is a very crowded and expensive cosmopolitan city located on the Arabian Sea.  It has 17 million documented people but the true number is said to be over 20 million.  It was originally seven islands but most of them have been joined together through landfill projects and all of them are connected by bridges.

The city was formerly called Bombay, having been given that name by the Portuguese after the area was settled as a fishing village over 500 years ago.  Following Independence from Britain in 1947, the name was changed to Mumbai after Mumba Devi, a goddess of the founding Koli Fisher Folks.

Like much of India, Mumbai is a combination of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. While it is the location of Bollywood, which makes 100’s of movies a year, it is also the site of the largest slums in the world. There were the typical village-type retail “outlets”, “restaurants” and people sleeping in gutters.  But, there were also high-rise apartments and office buildings as well a mile-long road along the ocean with very expensive Art Deco-style apartment/condos.  The strange thing about the apartment buildings was that, although they seemed like nice buildings, the outside surfaces were in an extreme state of disrepair.  It seems that no one paints or re-stuccos buildings here, they just don’t seem to care.

There is a large Shanty town population in Mumbai.  A Shanty town (also called a squatter settlement) is a slum settlement that is typically illegal or unauthorized populated by impoverished people.  They live in improvised dwellings made from scrap materials like plywood, corrugated metal and sheets of plastic.  Shanty towns, often don’t have proper sanitation, electricity or telephone services.

The bus that picked us up at the airport gave us a quick tour of the area including a drive by of the most expensive residence on earth.  Mukesh Ambani, Chairman of Reliance and India’s richest resident, built the world’s most expensive home here in Mumbai.  It is a 27-floor skyscraper home estimated to cost more than 2 billion US dollars.

We also stopped at one of the cities most popular photo stops, the open-air laundry.  It was shown in scenes from Slumdog Millionaire.  This is where hotels, restaurants and hospitals send their linens and towels to be washed and then air-dried.  Unlike in Agra, where they washed their things in the river, in Mumbai they have water piped in for this purpose.

While we could only look at it from the sidewalk above, our friend Paul, on his own private tour, managed to talk his way in and discovered that 5,000 people work here.  It turns out that only men are allowed to wash the 100,000 garments each day.  The men rent concrete wash stalls that include running water and a flogging stone.  They collect dirty laundry and beat it on the cement using water and soap.  Drying takes place on long, brightly colored lines and heavy wood-burning irons are used for pressing.  Paul’s on-site research also showed that they are starting to use regular irons and electric dryers.  However, with the low prices they must judiciously avoid anything that raises their expenses.  It must work because this is the main way you have laundry done in Mumbai.

A significant feature of the city is the amount of smog.  We were driving over an expansive bridge and our guide was talking about the striking city skyline.  It was hard to make it out through the haze, but as we drew closer it was clear that there are many skyscrapers and high rise apartment buildings in Mumbai.

We then drove by the Taj Hotel that was one of the locations bombed by terrorists in 2008.  This attack was part of a coordinated shooting and bombing assault on 11 sites across Mumbai.  Another location bombed was Mumbai’s port area…that is where we were dropped off to re-board the Voyager.

Needless to say we were happy to be safely back on board our home away from home with another bucket item checked off the list having paid homage to the glorious Taj Mahal.

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