Mumbai (Bombay), India

Mumbai, India
March 26, 2009 Thursday

Carol Anne’s extended Gallery of Photographs for each of our 40 World Cruise 2010 ports is HERE.

Mumbai is the fifth largest city in the world. Now approaching twenty million and growing steadily, Mumbai (until 1996 known as Bombay) is built on seven islands that, over time, have been so thoroughly connected it is no longer easy to tell where one began and the other ended.

The Victoria docked at the passenger terminal adjacent to the container port. Although walking into town was difficult, some passengers did it. Cabs were abundant on the dock, and most sites of greatest interest were nearby.

The Taj Hotel, not far away, was the site of a terrorist take-over in November. A bloody confrontation there lasted several days.

The Victoria’s staff was again issuing warnings about not straying too far afield, wearing bling and flashing money in public. We opted for a morning tour planning to find shore side Internet in the afternoon to update web sites and make calls back to the United States.

The tour set out early to avoid the heavy traffic. As the morning wore on, traffic in Mumbai gradually ground toward gridlock. We toured the Gateway to India Arch built to honor the visit of the King of England in the early 20th century. The arch was originally built of cardboard because it could not be finished in time for the King’s arrival. With pressure lacking, it took an additional ten years before it was actually completed early in the 1920s.

The Arch was directly across the street from The Taj hotel. The Taj was built because another hotel refused to admit Indians – so an Indian built an even grander hotel. Today The Taj is an icon, while the other hotel where he was refused entrance is gone.

Our tour guide was an Indian woman in her late 40s who, although educated in Christian schools, is a Hindu. At age 16, she lived with a family in North Carolina for a year on a Rotary Student Exchange program. “It was the best year of my life,” she said. “It changed my life.”

As the morning wore on, we covered a lot of ground. We visited the home where Gandhi lived in the 1920s and 1930s. We went to the remarkably interesting Prince and Wales Museum. We visited the outdoor laundry where a huge amount of Mumbai’s laundry is done. And we were deposited at the obligatory “shops” for which tour companies (Cunard too, perhaps) receive a fee for including in their tour. We were cautioned that in these shops the prices were fixed and no bargaining was possible. Carol Anne promptly offered about forty-percent less than a fixed price and wound up buying a scarf for even less than that. So much for “fixed” prices.

On the street in Cochin we started at a third of the offered price, and usually wound up buying it for that or less.

Mumbai was not as beastly humid and hot as Cochin had been. The Mumbai tour had the air-conditioned buses, unlike Cochin. Thank god.

We easily found Internet in the afternoon, and paid for it with Chocolate.

An impromptu Internet café had been set up in the passenger terminal, steps from the ship. It was a maze of Ethernet wires with a couple of card tables. When they ran out of room on the tables, customers spilled over to desks used by police and others. Eventually people were just sitting on chairs cradling their computers, still hooked by Ethernet cable through a central switch.

As Pete was haggling over the price of the Internet, he asked, “What do you really want?” and was surprised by the answer:

“Suh! I want Chocolate!”

Chocolate? Pete had earlier learned that Chocolate in India is awful and Indians crave foreign chocolate. Well – this was going to be easy:

Every night our cabin steward leaves cubes of chocolate on our bed in several varieties: Dark, Orange, Mint and Milk. As you leave the Britannia restaurant in the evenings you also can load up on ginger (“good for digestion,” our British friends tell us, and, hmmm, they’re right) and Chocolate Mints (“takes as many as you want, suh”).

We emptied out a drawer in our room and presented it to the owner of the Internet cafe a bag of chocolate. Internet was ours for the afternoon,
and magically, we were not offered an Ethernet cable – we were handed a wireless password.

In the passenger terminal, besides the usual shops with goods, there were sitting areas. We have a friend in Tennessee involved in manufacturing furniture for Ikea, and here was our furniture – the same rugged inexpensive recreation room furniture in our lake home on Grand Lake o’ the Cherokees in Oklahoma.

PHOTOGRAPHS
Mumbai sunset from Deck 10 of the Queen Victoria
The Taj Hotel, site of the deadly November terrorist attacks.
Early morning commuter trained packed with people
Outdoor laundry
Gandhi office and bedroom
Passenger Terminal sofa

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Copyright 2009 by Seine-Harbour Productions / Studio City, California
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Tags: bombay, cunard, india, mumbai, queen victoria, world cruise