Incredible India Adventure - Mumbai

Day 1 - Gruelling drive from the Mumbai International to YWCA

We had to purchase a prepaid taxi before we were allowed to take any ride in them. Be very careful and not to talk to anyone or let anyone to help in taking bags for you. Many 'FRIENDLY' locals rushed to help us in showing whereabouts of the taxis. My friend on the top was in trouble. He had his bags put into the taxi and was asked to pay tips! They asked to pay in our own currency...BasXXXX!

The receipt of the pre-paid taxi and comes up to Rs440. It was a mayhem as we wanted to get an air-conditioned but turned out to be a non air-cond one!

Our taxi driver.
Horn OK Please! Gosh, the beep was so constant that I nearly went mad. Each and every transport beeped non - stop! It was insane!

Looked like low cost housing estate for the poor.
It was raining so heavily yet these men had no place to cover. One continued to sleep on the road divider and the other one just sat there waiting for the rain to stop. What's happening there?

Travelling in a non air-cond car did no help much in our breathing. The air was really polluted and smelly. I would say that the top is the local market.

Local business.

After a gruelling two and a half hour drive, we finally got to Mumbai but only got to our hostel after another 30 minutes.We gave up and ended up walking and got on another taxi. It's very difficult to communicate with our taxi drivers as they didn't speak any English. We went round in circles..:(
An advice for future India travellers : Pay Rs50 to go via the highway ; we only knew on the second trip and saved 2 hours on the journey! DAMN!

Saw this just outside our YWCA Hostel.

Mumbai when we were circling city.

This is in a photo shop. The reason we were in there was we bought a local sim so that we had a mode of telecommunication. We had to register the sim and unbelievably, they needed 2 photos for registration!

Hotel Taj Mahal is a 5 star hotel. It stands arrogantly by the sea. In 2008, it was bombed but still standing bravely there.

P/S : I was so brainless that I didn't take my camera with me to India. So all my photos are from my friends. Thanks to www.jessying@blogspot.com , Vivian, Lam , Goh and Zoe.