India Part 4: Mumbai

India Part 4: Mumbai

India Part 4: Mumbai

Getting around in India has been more of a pain than I had expected so I decided to take a flight from Udaipur to Mumbai. The price wasn't too bad and the flight was an hour and a half compared to ten or more hours on a bus/train. This meant that when I arrived in Mumbai I had a full day ahead of me and I was quite rested.

Accommodations in Mumbai were much more expensive than the other places I had been to so far so I opted for a budget room found through Airbnb. I stayed with a couple of sisters, and their two cats, in the Bandra area. Bandra isn't one of the main attractions of Mumbai but it was pretty cool walking around and seeing daily life in the outskirts of Mumbai. There was also amazing food in Bandra.

Some of the highlights of Mumbai were the docks, the Gateway of India and the beaches. Another sort of silly highlight for me was seeing some giant bats in the trees outside of the place I was staying. These bats were the size of house cats, not something I had seen before in my life.

The docks were a place I just wandered into sort of by accident. There were no other tourists in there so I later looked it up and saw that it was in fact a destination that tourists can and do visit. It was mostly working fishermen doing all the things you'd expect to see working fishermen doing. People were fixing nets, sorting fish, de-shelling shrimp, fueling up boats and eating lunch.

The beaches that I was saw were not your typical vacation beaches (but I do hear there are some nice beaches to hang out in Mumbai), rather it was just a beach on the edge of a very large and busy city. It was cool to see the bridges and the locals who hang out on and around the beaches.

Mumbai is known for having its extremely apparent wealth gaps and that was something that I did notice despite not going out of my way to see the infamous slums.