Mumbai

February 16, 2020

First step of our Indian adventures: Mumbai!

I'm gonna be honnest here, Mumbai is probably not the best introduction to India. The heat is almost unbearable due to the humidity, the bipping of cars is constant making it hard to sleep without hear-plugs and the size of the city is really overwhelming.

But once acclimated to those things, Mumbai has got many architectural treasures, a great food scene, and definitely a quite modern vibe in this conservative India.

We spent the first day walking around the historical centre, everything went smoothly until we reached the Gateway of India (picture just below) where we've been asked for a least a dozen selfies by random people. Pretty weird request and it was difficult to say no looking at their sad and disappointed faces.

So maybe, we now have our picture hung in some strangers house :)

Gateway of India

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus

University of Mumbai

Run down but beautiful buiding


Busy Mumbai's street

The second day we reached Elephanta Island, where we visited the Elephanta Caves which is a UNESCO world heritage site.

Those impressive caves were carved directly into the rock with plenty of sculpture of dieties.

The island was also full of monkeys, which were exceedlingly cheeky. One of them stole of water bottle from the outside pocket of our backpack, and we saw one other stealing the Sprite bottle from the someone's hand, twisted it open and drank it straight down! (picture below!!! )

Sculpture carved inside one of the caves

Cheeky thief monkey downing his Sprite

View over Mumbai from the boat on our way back

The third day we started by visiting the Crawford Market, where surprisingly we were not allowed as foreigner to go on our own, we had to hire a guide...
We then walked around the city to reach Khotachiwadi, an heritage village known for its old portugese style houses.

Birds in the crawford market and fruit and veggie stalls just outside the Crawford market

Khotachiwadi village

Marigold Garlands

We then headed to the Banganga water tank, which according to the legend, was created by Rama throwing an arrow to the ground.
This sacred water tank is surrounded by many hundreds year's old temples devoted to Shiva and Krishna, and also a open air laundry where Dhobis (washermen) are still washing people's clothe by hand.