We managed to get out of Thailand the day the Prime Minister announced a state of emergency
but it sounded like CNN made it sound much worse than it was. We caught a flight from Bangkok to Bombay (Mumbai) arriving late into the city and ending up in a right doss hole. The taxis are old 1950's Citroen's and there are thousands of them! It took us 2 hours through thick traffic dodging people sleeping on the side/or the central reservation of the road. Ended up walking through the streets followed by a comical drunken tramp who insisted he was going to try and find us a hotel, even though we were trying to ignore him. It turns out he does this to everybody and demands a tip at the end of it! The streets are dirty, scruffy and lined with people sleeping on them. A real eye opener. It's a good job Craig's got his brolly!
Spent today with a hired taxi driver on a grand tour of Mumbai. Apparently it is an island once 7 islands which the Brits reclaimed the land and made one. We visited hanging gardens, The Gateway to India (where the last British troops left India, looks a bit like the Arc de Triomphe beside the sea), Gandhi's residence and museum, a Jainism temple (they don't even eat potatoes as they believe food grown in the ground will harm the worms!-hard core) and finally Victoria station where we took the 1st class train to Pune.
Strange fact-A certain religion originating from Persia (Iran) has a temple next to the hanging gardens called Tower of Silence. When a person dies, their body is hung from a tree in the grounds and is slitted and human blood is poured into the slits. It is left to hang until it is eaten by vultures and eagles and then the bones that are left are put in the neighbouring sea! They don't have a God and believe in fire, sea and earth. When we visited the hanging gardens we wondered why there was more than a dozen massive eagles swooping in the sky!
