Mumbai

Mumbai is the largest city in India so we needed to go and see it.  I spoiled us by booking us in at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel which is considered one of the best hotels in the world, let alone India.  We were greeted with a blessing of good health and fortune:

 Our hotel:

Mumbai was not what we were expecting at all.  It is about double the size of Bangalore with 11 million people so we were thinking that it was going to be crazy.  I don’t know if it is because we are desensitized to the noise and busyness of India that we found it so calm.  Rickshaws have been banned in the heart of the city due to pollution and too many accidents so that takes away a lot of the buzz. 

There are not very many tourist attractions in Mumbai other than the city itself.  The British influence is still felt in the look and structure of a lot of the city, it is just unfortunately really run down. 

The Gateway to India:

The Arabian Sea which makes a little bay called the Queen‘s necklace:

A slum about a five minute walk from our hotel, we find that the contrast between classes here is extreme. I am not sure that there is anywhere else that you go from 5 star to slum so quickly.

Here are some kids playing marbles on Chowpatty beach:

 We also visited the Elephanta Caves.  This is an hour boat ride from the gateway of India to an island.  It has lot of temple caves.  These were impressive as they were not as detailed but much more grand in their height and size from the Badami caves. 

We also saw the slums that the movie Slumdog Millionaire was based off.  It is massive, stretching for kilometres.

We really lucked out that even though it is monsoon season, we only got rain on our boat ride home from the caves and on Monday on the way to the airport.

Badami Caves

On our trip to Hampi, we stayed a second day so we could take a side trip to Badami cave temples.  It is a 3 hour drive over very bad roads.  We thought the roads were bad in Bangalore but these were incredibly potholed and rough.  Our driver should not have driven any faster than 50 km an hour but he at some points was going close to 100 km which was a little bumpy.  We did not say anything though as we both have developed a huge dislike for being in the car so much as it takes forever to get anywhere here….and it still took us 3 hours.
The caves are really neat.  It took us about 45 minutes to go very slowly through the caves as we were not in any rush to get back into the car. 

Due to the fact that we had gone so far, our driver also took us to a market, to some temples in Aihole and some more ruins in Pattadakal that were in close proximity to Badami.  Everything was ok to see, but we were kinda templed out by this point so it felt like too long a drive for what we saw.

These little kids were pretty rambunchus and talkative with us, so I asked to take their picture but then they stood so proper.  It was really cute.

The further you get outside of Bangalore, the poorer it becomes.  Here is a couple of women doing there laundry in a ditch.  It makes you feel a bit spoiled as last week I had a conversation with one of my friends about how I sympathized with her for not having a clothes dryer.

We sat and got a drink and there was this cat with her kittens hanging around, so i bought it a coconut so that it could drink the milk out of it.  Miss my kitties!