Trip Archives: Around the Indian Ocean

Woke up at 6am to vomit. Looks like I got a little food poisoning yesterday.

The previous days were filled with watching TV, drinking loads of water, and feeling well to varying degrees.

Exchanged a few more emails with Daniel, the guy from Surat I’d met a couple of weeks ago on the highway. I’d decided to visit him in Surat and went to the train station to get a ticket for tonight.

The best option, as far as the waiting list is concerend, was the A/C 2-tier class. It comes with curtains and only 6 beds per compartment.

Arrived in the early morning and spent the day wandering around the city. Also bought a ticket to Mumbai for the day after tomorrow. Again, I chose the one with the shortest waiting list. And that was first class this time.

Received an email from Daniel, telling me he was in Mumbai for family reasons.

Sunrise, somewhere near Surat

Luggage

Brought the bike to the Parcel Office (kind of the check-in for large luggage and cargo when traveling by train) and made a porter unhappy by refusing to pay him an unreasonable sum for loading the bike onto the train.

The platform was changed last minute and I almost missed the train. The bike was no better of, it reached Mumbai with the next train.

So I sat there in Mumbai Central station waiting for the bike, when a guy said ‘hello’, asking me if I was Todd. Sure, that’s me, and the guy was Daniel, who coincidently happened to be at the station with a friend.

We waited for the bike together and then walked to the office of an organization called SPARC which is run by slum-dwellers and works for organizing the slum people and giving them a voice and fighting (politically) for proper housing. They are really nice people. I got invited for lunch and they let me stow my luggage and the bike there for the day.

Meanwhile, Daniel had arranged for me to meet the founder of and moving figure behind SPARC, a guy called Jockin. So we took the train to Dadar, one of the biggest slum areas in Mumbai, where the organization has another office.

Walked around the nightly central Mumbai and to the Ali Something mosque. It’s been built on an island in one of the bays of the Mumbai peninsula, connected to the mainland only by a walk-way that is flooded at high-tide.

Slums

Slums

Street scene, Mumbai

Walked around the city for hours, seeing the Gateway of India, the Taj Mahal hotel, the university (beautiful building, but entry is restricted), the High Court (same same), the Colaba quarter, and much more.

Train station (forgot the name)

Gateway of India

Residential building

University

Barricades in the streets

Went to the SPARC office to get my bike and take it to the cardboard-box-shop to get a box of the right size. The boss had one of the guys working at the office, Sunam, accompany me to do the negotiations. The biggest box they had at the shop was too small and they still wanted to charge 10 Euros for it.

Sunam knew another scrap dealer and I got a fridge box for a more reasonable price there. I modified the box for the bike to fit properly and packed everything up.

In the morning I went to see the Mumbai laundry at Dhobi Ghats and walked through the Mahalakshmi slums along the western railway tracks to Worli. Apparently, several thousand washermen do Mumbai’s laundry at that place every day.

Daniel had gone to Surat on Saturday night and came back to Mumbai yesterday night. He went to one of the suburbs in the morning to do some filming for a movie about children working in salt pans. We met at noon and did some more sightseeing around the old colonial part of the city.

Then we took a train from Victor terminus train station, one of the places of the 26/11/2008 terrorist attacks, to Bandras, one of the posh suburbs. Had a look at the almost completely vanished remainder of an old Portuguese fort and Shahrukh Khan‘s villa. Finally, we had a long stroll along Juhu beach, which was ”crowded”.

Dhobi ghats

Dhobi ghats

Street restaurant

Colonial Building

Colonial Building

Colonial Building

Juhu Beach

Took a cab to the Airport. Security is super-tight there. Non-travellers are not allowed inside the check-in hall. They have to obtain a visitor’s permit and stay in a separate waiting area. The check-in luggage got screened directly after entering.

British Airways was good for a laugh. There’s no extra fee for taking a bike on the plane. However, the bike box counts as over-sized luggage and they charge 25 British Pounds for that.

At the carry-on luggage screening, my backpack was taken apart completely and they wondered about my stove, a box of rechargeable batteries, and my stash of foreign coins. Also, they didn’t let me keep the duct tape I’d bought to possibly fix the bike box in London.

Finally, there was yet another security check by BA personnell before boarding the plane, but that was harmless.