Mumbai - The Maximum City?

The plane touched down at the plane station at 5am. We were unable to check in to our hotel until noon. This presented us with the ideal opportunity to wander round like boggled-eyed tourists in a new city.  We quickly found out that Mumbai has little in the way of tourist sights and is very much a business city. By 7.30am we'd pretty much done the three or four sights of note in a 45 minute amble and then went to the park.

Plates 1 & 2: Gateway of India at dawn.

I had read much about the extremes of poverty and wealth in Mumbai and how it shocks newcomers; how the oppressive heat sapped the energy of the all but the most insane and how Mumbai had been named "The Maximum City" (taken from Suketu Mehta's book of the same name, which shows the city in a brutal, frank light rather than anything sentimental or positive as the title suggests to me - I haven't read it to my detriment). I had also heard of the Indian's love for cricket, but nothing really prepared me the Oval maidan at 8am on a Wednesday morning. Dozens of games were in progress, with wickets every couple of yards. In places there were 3 fielders stood within two meters of each other, each playing in a different game. Balls (tennis balls, rather than the traditional) were flying all over the park and it was virtually impossible to keep a track of any one game or player as my eyes had to be alert to the possibility of 5 other balls landing on me. And yet everyone was having a grand old time and managing to to play happily in their own games. Balls got lost, or thrown back to the wrong game, or even disappeared out of the park on to the highway. Admittedly, some of the wickets were a touch lumpy, and some of the bowling actions were perhaps borderline legal (the run ups were fine...) but the spectacle was great. Some order was retained thanks to the teams having coloured strips to wear.

Unlike the on the Azal maidan, where all the teams chose to wear whites. This was too much for my tiny, tired mind to comprehend and we slinked off back to the hotel to see if we could force an early entry to our room.We couldn't, so we camped out in the reception - read: an internal room with three metal chairs. We got in at 11am and duly slept through to the next day, pretty much.

Plate 3: Oval Maidan at about 8am.
The cricket is all down the other end.

Plate 4: More cricket.
Not Big Ben in the background.

Mumbai was to be home for the next few days. Home of Bollywood, apparently home of some of the finest street food in India, home to a slum with an economy worth 700 million pounds per year (there's no pound sign on this keyboard), and home to 18 million people. In truth, it was a touch boring. As a result we made plans to head to Goa - where Graham's mate Rich has a villa - fairly quickly. Unfortunately, the Indian train system being what it is (it employs 1.6 million people, read it and weep defunct British Rail), we couldn't get a bed-seat til the day after we wanted to leave. Which turned out (for one of us) to be a jolly good thing indeed.

I woke one morning to vivid greens, bright yellows and the sound of trickling water. Unfortunately not the hotel decor (best described as "seen better days"), but actually what was coming out of my arse. For the next 26 hours I was confined to bed and bog.  Having sampled plenty of streetfood and restaurant food, my cockiness was soon replaced with a stupor as I was knocked for 6. Still, it got it out of the way.

I really have very little to recommend in Mumbai, should you find yourself there. It seemed all a bit tame if I'm honest. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right places, or being roomed at the far end of the city on a peninsula left little chance to get out in to the city proper. Yeah, we wandered the streets for a few hours, found ourselves lost, happened across winding alleys and hidden temples, but for some reason I just didn't click with it.

Plates 5 & 6: Mumbai streetshots.

One night, following some football and beer, we were walking back to the hotel and came across a closed door, beyond which loud music was emanating. Several gents on the door said we could go, we established it wasn't a clip joint and that the beers were expensive but not exorbitantly so, and wandered in. I think we were both hoping for something...interesting. And it was. In a way. We walked in to a small room, with a tiny bar at one end and a small stage down one side of the room. On the stage were several members of a band, a singer and three lasses looking positively bored. We immediately assumed it to be a lapdance club, and ordered beers. There were others in there, all Indian. Two large security fellas manned the door, one with hands like shovels, looking as though they'd walked straight from a villains lair on the set of a Roger Moore-era Bond film - ill-fitting black suits, black ties, white shirts - and several waiters making themselves busy.

We only observed. Honest.

The three bored lasses swayed a little as the singer sang traditional Indian tunes and the band played. A portly Indian gent came in a changed 1000 rupees in to a stack of 10 rupee notes from the bar. I watched. He began waving the 10 rupee notes around (about 12.5p) and pointing to the bored girls, who accepted them and then went back on to the stage and swayed. Or checked their phones. More notes waved and accepted. More swaying and text messages. More notes given away. I tried to establish exactly when the lapdancing would commence, or when the rotund Indian would be lead upstairs. I waited. And waited further. I noticed shovel-hand security break in to a little song and wave of the hands - clearly enjoying the song being sung. Then finally, some sort of monetary level must have been reached and one of the three bored sirens sprung in to action! She started to dance. And dance. And dance. The corpulent Indian loved it, furnishing her with more 12.5p notes. It was all very nice dancing, in a traditional Indian fashion. Then it stopped. She was still fully clothed and went back to the stage and swayed.

Had I missed something here?

The Indian gent was very happy with the show and left shortly after, but not before all the waiting staff queued up for tips. It being late, and Graham and myself being thoroughly confused by what we'd just witnessed (or not witnessed) we opted to leave. In short, this was a lapdancing club, but lacking the lap bit. So just a dancing club. It just didn't make any sense. Why the security? Why the big double door with 4 men manning it? Why the seedy, after hours opening hours? In a tenuous fashion it summed up Mumbai for me. Promised so much, had all the right elements there to make it an interesting place, but it just didn't deliver.

Time for Goa was upon us. I'd read how the hippies had all but cleared off, chased off by Russians and the package holiday dollar/rupee; how the Government had imposed strict, early, closing hours on bars and how in short, Goa was not supposedly Goa anymore. The train ride was a 10 hour sleeper. We boarded the train and bedded down.