Travel to Maharashtra, Mumbai, Colaba.

"Slumdog Millionaire" or "Shantaram" can't do this city justice. How can they? My tourist brochure and guidebook both rightfully fawn over the city's stats and records. For instance, this peninsula city is the second biggest city in the world after Tokyo for population. Half of those, though, populate the biggest slum in Asia. Less than 5km from the slum is the most expensive house in the world. The city produces an unbelievable 40% of India's total GDP and is home to the flourishing art, literature, business and finance sectors of India, if not Asia. Bombay is as famous for her huge cinema industry as she is infamous for her crime. It's a city who's population has swollen beyond the perameters of human decency, yet continues to adapt, housing thousands of refugees and street families that arrive here from all over Asia and the Middle East each day. The facts are fairly impressive and they point to a metropolis that empitomises the Indian civilisation- from the Raj era through to the modern day. In the "land of contrasts" this is truly the capital. I'm at the end of my second stint here, after 5 days total in Mumbai, and have decided it's a city I can see myself living in one day.

From Bhopal, I stepped off the train at midnight onto the empty platfrom of Mumbai's Victoria Terminus - the busiest train station in Asia, apparently - and was hit instantly by the muggy heat that only a polluted inner city can generate. It was also very quiet - where were all the car horns!? Despite the unnaturally large rats on the tracks, the odour carried on the light breeze was not the usual sewage and rotting rubbish, but the smell of fish. This all made a terribly pleasant change, even if the stench of fish in the 30 degree heat isn't the nicest smell either. I got a taxi to a guest house I'd been given the card of by a tourist friend, and was depoited outside a grotty-looking building, in an alleyway where colour clearly came to die. I took the lift to the stiflingly hot fifth floor hostel and took a room. I found it very difficult to sleep.

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Travel to India, Maharashtra, Mumbai, Colaba.

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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