Namaste India!

View Larger Map

Before leaving for India, we had been warned by many people that the country was not for the faint hearted, and that we would be seeing things we had never seen before. We were prepared for the poverty and the dirt on the streets, we were prepared for the beggars and the lack of hygiene, and even for the over populated narrow streets shared with various animals. We were excited to be a part of it all and to experience this amazing 'love and hate' relationship that India has become known for. So on June 6th as our plane landed on Indian soil in Mumbai at 2am, we were ready, with the biggest smiles on our faces.

It all began as we walked out of the airport and into the pre-paid taxi parking lot. Numerous taxi drivers swarmed us like the fresh meat we were, trying to holler us into their taxi not realizing to their disappointment that we had already had one assigned. We were barely out of the lot before a poor young woman on the street reached into our taxi begging us for chocolate. She had her hands inside, touching our bags, trying to grab whatever she could. As the taxi sped away we looked at each other realizing that maybe no matter how prepared we thought we were, this was going to be an experience we could have never imagined.

The drive to our hotel in Collaba took about 45 minutes. Although it was late at night, there was still a lot of action on the streets. Our driver swerved in and out of traffic cutting off anyone and everyone, not even stopping for red lights. We passed by huge piles of garbage, packs of stray dogs, men peeing off the side of highways in groups, and people sleeping on the streets. After 45 minutes on the road, our driver began stopping on every corner to get out and ask for directions, even though he assured us he knew where he was going. After another half an hour of making U-turns and more stops, we eventually found Hotel Everest. Before we let the driver go, Dave got out of the taxi and headed down the dark alleyway toward the hotel to make sure reception was still open and would be able to let us in. As he walked into the dark, rundown lobby of the building and closed the manual elevator doors behind him, all he could think about was 'what are we getting ourselves into?!'. All the lights were off when he opened the door to the reception, but luckily the night watch man was asleep behind the counter and popped his head up as Dave came in. We said goodbye to the taxi and shooed him away as he was trying to convince us we owed him more money to compensate for his misdirection on the way.

Our hotel room was less than sub-par but we were exhausted at that point as with the time change it was more like 4am. We barely noticed where we were and slept till late the next morning. When we woke up we were a little bit hesitant to leave our room and hit the day time streets of Mumbai but we had a mission to book a train to Goa before all the spots on the train filled up.

Just down the street from our hotel we found an all veg restaurant where we had almost all of our meals for the rest of our time there. The curries and masalas were out of this world spicy and delicious and we enjoyed ordering random items, trying new things at each and every visit.

We spent the rest of our time in Mumbai wondering the streets of Collaba, a small peninsula on the southern tip, walking the coastal walk and taking long taxi rides that never totalled more than 180 rupees ($4)  through the overpopulated streets. We did a lot of people watching as kids in uniform were let out of school

and tying to navigate around the stray cows and their huge feces droppings all over the street.

On our 3rd day we got on our night train to Goa in 2nd A/C class, sharing a room with some people from Barcelona. The experience was quite pleasant as had some privacy, food service and clean sheet and blanket packages. We were excited to arrive as we heard Palolem beach in Goa was a great place to relax and get away from all the craziness. Unfortunately, it was full out monsoon season and the beach town was a ghost town. All the huts on the beach were closed for

business and we could only see 4 other tourists in sight! Despite the lack of sun for the 2 days we were there, we did enjoy the quiet, relaxing atmosphere spending our days walking around the town if it wasn't raining and playing chess and cards at night at the few local restaurants that were open.

After Palolem we took a daytime, very long, very crowded, very smelly general class train to a village a little
bit more south and inland called Hampi in the state of Karnataka. It is popularly known as the

'Bedrock', (like the Flinstones) of India. This village lays within the ruins of the Vijayanagara Empire, which are protected under Unesco as a world heritage site. This area is a very religious place for locals as it holds the Virupaksha Temple and many other historical sites.

We stayed with a man named Rocky and his family in a small little guesthouse in the centre of the village. Despite the early 5am wake ups from his yelling children, Rocky was very hospitable and his mother cooked us up some mean curries whenever we were hungry.

Here, we took a day tour through the temple and the surrounding area and took a quick hike up to the hill near our guesthouse where we instantly fell in love with the place as we watched the sun setting over the horizon.

The next day we took a long walk in the steamy heat to the monkey temple (yes there were monkeys everywhere) outside the nearby town called Hospet. We passed by so many happy kids playing in the street and farmers pushing their bull carriages through their landscapes along the way. We stopped at a small local store to refuel on water and treated ourselves to some homemade peanut butter balls for pennies. When we finally arrived at the temple, it was tough to get up the 600 steps to the top, but it was well worth it as it provided us with a view of all the places we had visited the previous day on one side and endless red rock terrain on the other. We spent about an hour taking in the view before heading back for the evening and indulging in a delicious Thali set (rice, curry, dal and spicy pickled mango) with a new friend we made for dinner.

With love from the dirty streets,
Stay tuned for more from India,
D'Alice