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Our first day in Mumbai we spent the first part of it reserving tickets.  We got our bus ticket to Goa, our hostel in Goa, and our train ticket out of Goa (to Hampi).  After that we had some fantastic tuk tuk rides around the city.  These are basically motorbikes with a small cabin for 2 other people attached to the back.

Riding around Mumbai in these was similar to riding around Bangkok.  Both cities are horribly run down, stinky, hot, trash all over the place, basically pretty unpleasant places to be.  When you ride around in a tuk-tuk though you get to see lots of the city without having to walk around in the hot stinky sewer-esque air.  Traffic is also completely insane in both places.  Nobody pays attention to lanes, everybody is constantly honking and passing each other.  There are motorbikes, cars, and tuk-tuks flying all over the place.  There are also no cross walks and hardly any stoplights or anything so pedestrians crossing the street have to seriously watch out.

The major difference for me was just how friendly Indians have been to us.  If we make eye contact with people and smile most of the time they smile and wave back.  People yell things to us all the time: “Hello how are you doing!?” “It’s very hot here!” or things in Hindi I can’t understand but at least seem friendly.  People start up conversations with us on the streets sometimes just for fun.  When we took a tuk-tuk to a nasty beach in Mumbai we got off and these three guys immediately started befriending us and even taking our picture.  All 3 of them took a picture one by one in between Chris and I and then they took pictures of me and Chris by ourselves and even a couple pictures of me eating this vegetarian sandwich I bought on the street (50 cents and crazy delicious).  There are some pictures of us on my camera that I’ll post later.

We went to a restaurant later that day and an Indian and a British guy (the 4th white person we’d seen in Mumbai) ended up sitting beside us and we chatted it up as well.  The Indian guy was amazingly cool and said he would show Chris and I around the slums when we came back in late July.  On the way to Goa the people in our bus were also extremely friendly, and now in Goa we’ve already met this Indian guy named Aman who we hung out with some today and will meet up with tonight to go out drinking a bit.  There are of course plenty of people who are nice to us only because they want our money but there are also a surprisingly large number of people who just seem genuinely nice and particularly interested in meeting foreigners.

Our bus ride down here was not the most pleasant experience however… We really tried to get a train down to Goa but it turned out we needed to book it in advance… so we ended up on an overnight sleeper bus.  It was a 14 hour ride from Mumbai to Goa, specifically Anjuna Beach where we are now.  A sleeper bus put me into a 6 foot long, 2 feet wide, and 2 & a half feet high platform.  The bus ride was insanely curvy so I was constantly being rolled to the sides, plus the fact that he’s speeding up and slowing down like a mad man doesn’t make it any easier to sleep.  The bus is also bouncing up and down all the time and honking its horn at everything it passes.  I couldn’t read or write anything or do anything but try to sleep and think and think and think.  Also, no bathroom so you gotta hold out until 1 of the 3 times the bus stopped or pull a Chris and pee in a bottle.  Anyways, experiences like that are what I got myself into so it’s all good but we will certainly be booking trains in advance from now on.  Chris actually had it worse than me.  The ceiling on his coffin-space was even lower, it was really difficult for him to turn around or grab things at his feet.  He also didn’t really have any window he could look out of.  Ouch, word to the wise:  Don’t get seat number 11!

We have a train leaving Sunday morning from Margao to Hampi.  After that we are going to head way up north to Kolkata.  Good deal, will post again from Goa.  It’s been a crazy couple of days already…  I am really enjoying myself and am pretty sure I will be all travelled out when I come back on August 3rd.

If you want Chris’ description of things check out his blog here: http://hongkongchris.wordpress.com/