Let me recount to you the days of Mumbai (also known as Bombay). We arrived one morning. I

was EXHAUSTED from having spent a full (but pleasant) day in London and 2 sleepless nights on planes. The problem is that I get cranky and mean and sickish and can’t think straight and turn into a completely useless person when I don’t get enough sleep.

So we went straight to our hotel near the airport and I took a 4 hour nap while Tim read and enjoyed wifi in his room.

Afterwards we walked around our suburb area and found a place to have a meal. Pretty uneventful except for feeling like we must be the only white people in this part of town.

The next morning we got up early and took a local train into the city in order to make it in time to join a city bike tour. Well long story short lets just say there were no bikes waiting…

So we wandered around the city until places started opening for breakfast. By ten we had already seen the Gateway to India and the beautiful Victoria Terminus.

As we walked on, we came across a church service. It had just started, so we walked in and joined. It was a small congregation of around 20. But it was really cool. We had been wanting to spend at least part of our Sunday with other believers but weren’t sure if or where we’d find that.

Afterwards, we visited the museum and headed to the train station to meet a group to join a tour of the slums.

We had chosen this particular tour group because they focus on showing the improvements and developments and opportunities that are arising within some of the poorest places rather than focus on the poverty itself. But like the bike tour, the slum tour was a no show. They must not run on Sundays. Either that or you have to book ahead…

So we gave up on making huge plans and sat along the sea wall on Marine Drive for an hour or so. Apparently it’s where all the couples go for a relaxing date. Apparently we were cliche other than the fact we were white. (we had seen no white people). Tim was much more surprised than I was but our general agreement was that most westerners probably come with or join your groups.

After basking on the sea wall and having our picture “discreetly” taken by passers-by (by discreetly I mean pretend to take a picture if something in our vicinity but then obviously turn the camera to catch a shot of us), we headed to the Gandhi museum. It was really cool — set up at his old house…

Cool fact: Did you know…? Gandhi wrote a few letters to Tolstoy and more importantly to Hitler. He wrote one basically advising/requesting Hitler to reconsider his plan to exterminate the Jews. That’s kind of a big deal.

After that we headed out of the city, ordered room service for a cheap price to Tim’s room, and went to bed early.

(I forgot to mention that this was when a random guy who had just finished playing cricket helped us get a good rate in an auto back to our hotel. The only problem was that the driver only had one eye, we nearly killed several people while driving, and he apparently didn’t know the way there so we ended up getting home slightly later than expected).

The next day we went to Sanjia Gandhi National Park where we visited a Jain Temple and some 2000 year old Buddhist caves built into the rock (similar idea to Petra I’d guess). Tim loved the caves and their antiquity. I loved the monkeys roaming around.

After the park, we drove to the airport to catch our flight to Bangalore. On the way, we both realized there had been a DEET chemical breakdown/corrosion/reaction of some kind in both our bags. We kind of almost had a meltdown…