Wednesday 13 January 2010

Time to leave Mumbai



So I think you can guess that Mumbai is not my favourite place. There are some nice places it is true, but generally we find it too busy. The traffic is mental and trying to cross the road is a joke. Pedestrians have no rights on the road at all it appears. The law of the road seems to be the biggest things wins and pedestrians are the smallest and lose every time. There are also too many people and too many sellers and beggars for our liking. I must warn some of you know that when I return to the UK and you should happen to say "hello" or "hello friend" to me and I ignore you, I apologise. To us at the moment those 2 words usually mean: 1) I want some money, or 2) I want to sell you something..We have both now become oblivious of those words which is a shame really as some of these people may well just want to talk, but because of our experiences so far we are choosing not to get involved. The beggars are the worst as the minute they see us walking along, the kids are sent out on a mission to say "hello", tap us and walk along with us until we give up some money or they see that it just isn't going to happen. There is some major poverty in this country and Mumbai probably shows that more than anywhere we have seen so far. There are shops selling top notch goods with guards on the door on one side of the street and a homes made of corrugated metal are on the other side of the street.

We both decided before we arrived that we were not going to give any money out as where would you stop? You could go along all the time giving out your money. We are both giving extra anyway...Everything we buy we pay more for. I have now noticed that a lot of things like water and snacks have prices printed on them. Lets take yesterday for instance when I popped out across the road to buy a 1 litre bottle of water. The printed price on the bottle was 14 Rupees. The shop owner gave me change for 16 Rupees. I asked him why he charged me 16 Rupees when the price was 14 Rupees.. Do you know the answer I got?????
THE CHILLING FEE lol...14 Rupees was the price for room temperature water. 16 Rupees was the price for chilled water..I had to laugh. Now 2 Rupees if nothing to me, but it is getting silly that mostly everyone tries to charge more because I come from abroad. I've noticed it happening more and more. Just another one of those things I suppose.

So tonight we leave on an overnight train for Aurangabad. We arrive at 4am in the morning (another great time lol) and will hopefully only be here for a few days whilst we take in the Ellora caves before moving on into Rajasthan. Once again this is all dependant on onward travel availability. This time we are hoping to try an overnight coach out.

The sun tan is coming along fine and I'm now totally comfortable in walking along in flip flops, but my clothes are now in need of a serious wash. Hopefully that is something that I will be able to do at our next location. We are also hoping that the weather is going to warm up in Delhi as they have had deaths due to the cold and it has apparently been very foggy at times. I didn't come to India for cold and fog lol.

2 comments:

Manoj said...

Welcome to my city and have a nice stay in Aurangabad. I am a blogger in Aurangabad. By the way we 'locals' too pay a CHILL FEE for a bottle of water :)

Eri said...

Hi Manoj,
thanks for visiting our blog. We like Arungabad, its a nice city with lots of places worth visiting and the people are very friendly.