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 Part 13
Wish to get back to the beginning? BACK IN BOMBAY Then click on the Image! |
 Bombay
is, to be modest, a wild and sometimes crazy city where the traffic is
both
so rapid and congested that any attempt to drive around there would be,
from my point of view, quite futile. After our 36
hour train ride to the city we were transported around for hours by a
taxi
driver who was persistently trying to find us accommodation within
feasible
proximity of the international airport. Without succeeding and finally
leaving
that part of the city behind, we ended up in a middle
class hotel near the center boasting
a huge staff comprised of countless bell boys and personnel of all
kinds. However - and much to our dismay - the very minute we had
checked in we were forced to throw ourselves
back
into the taxi to
chase head
over heals in search of a bank where we could exchange travelers
checks. Bell boy by the elevator hoping for a generous tip.  During this last part of our
journey our location happened to be right in the midst of a muslim
dominated
area of Bombay and apparently in close proximity of a mosque. This
meant
we had
more than excellent Islamic restaurants in the neighborhood serving
the most
exquisite food one could ever imagine. After Tamil nadu where we
exclusively kept to a vegetarian diet, I found it hard to resist these
treats
of tandoori dishes and all that went with them.
 Woman selling religious
merchandise of all kinds in the vicinity of a very busy Jain
temple. Common
articles are festoons, garlands and wreathes of flowers but also
various kinds
of Indian sweets,
nuts and cakes.
 After eight long weeks
of being on the road a few
"funny faces" inevitably had to come out, here featuring "The
Indian bureaucrat" with that inherited
British stiff upper
lip and then a "strange set
of looks" implying: Gee it's
gonna
be great to get back home....Or is it? Because after all,
when sum- ming it all up, this
trip certainly had its ups and downs although for the most of it we did
feel the myth and the magic of being there in our beloved INDIA! |
 At the very last moment and
after having been guided by some street boys the last few blocks to our
destination, we
managed to
save
ourselves from having to beg our way around Bombay on this, the very
last leg of
our journey. Never had we expected a
major
city like this to close all its exchange services right on the hour of
6 PM on a Friday night lasting all through the remaining weekend!
Neither had
we prepared ourselves
for the crazy ride we had to endure on the following day with a taxi
driver who took us to just about every other place than where we had
been expecting to go! But all the same, looking back in hind sight, it
was after
all a bit of a laugh all that confusion and commotion we went through
on those last
few days of our stay.
 Working on our guilty
conscience for several hours while showing us
around, these young hoodlums almost succeeded in getting us on a
ride to some remote suburban area where we were supposed to purchase a
shoe
shining box for them to share. Finding this a bit risky, we chose
instead to pay for their meals, drinks and taxi rides where ever we
went and at the end, right before we broke up, we
paid them a rather large sum each and made our escape.
 Outside our hotel restaurant,
next to the parking lot, they kept tame geese in a pond while there
were also a sad Ara and an equally sad grey Jacko parrot chained inside
cages wh
 ich were far too small for them. The restaurant, which
incidentally served a really classy muslim cuisine, was divided into
two different sections, one with an open air atmosphere where all the
male
visitors constantly kept huffing and puffing on their hookahs and the
other one situated in doors with
the AC turned on so intensely that even an Inuit from Greenland would
have
been begging for mercy! Strange as it may appear, but for the upper
class
Indians
the motto always seems to be: "Regardless of the weather or time of
year, the
colder the better!" 
 One of many catering companies
serving one of what seemed to be an endless number of weddings in
Bombay. In parts
of the
city center big festivities take place right in the middle of the
street. Everyone is
dancing and
partying
around to music performed by what appears to be some sort of military
jazz band counting in drums, brass and woodwinds, while
the musicians themselves are sometimes dressed in a similar attire as
that
which the Beatles wore on
the Sgt Pepper sleeve back in 1967.
Click on
the NOTES to listen to a street orchestra! View from our hotel window
across a typical shanty town to some newly
erected skyscrapers in the background. As everywhere, crows fill up the
sky with their fluttering wings and croaky conver- sation while the
traffic grinds on down in the streets below.
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