When you've visited somewhere quite often, it becomes difficult to find anything very new to say about it, doesn't it?
I've been to the hot and humid city of Mumbai (Bombay) four or five times, most recently in 2009 (Mumbai's extremes) when it was a convenient place to meet my young Rajasthani friend on our way south to Kerala. This time, it was a convenient place to start a tour to the north with my travelling companions, the Grey haired nomads , neither of whom had been here before. They like peaceful, wide open spaces and don't normally do cities, so I think they were a bit overwhelmed by it all. Well, this is one of the most heavily-populated metropolitan areas in the world with over 20.5 Million people crammed into it. To put this into perspective, that's more than the populations of London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Berlin and Vienna combined!
It's also the commercial capital, a global financial hub and by far the wealthiest city in India. This you'd only realise by looking at some of the modern tower blocks, glass skyscrapers and tall apartment buildings, which loom above cramped and dilapidated dwellings that house the average
Recycling cardboard in Dharavi
Photo by courtesy of Reality Tours & TravelMumbaiker. Look out of any five-star hotel window and you'll see families living in the streets or in makeshift shanty towns. Poor public-health facilities, limited educational opportunities and unemployment are all familiar scenes to the half of this city’s population which lives in a slum dwelling of some sort.
While I'll include some pictures of the touristy things we've seen during our two days here, I'd like to say a bit about a place in central Mumbai called Dharavi. It's a place that most tourists don’t see – or possibly don’t want to believe actually exists. Perhaps they prefer to bury their heads in the sand, thinking that Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire was produced in a studio rather than on location.
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