Arriving in Mumbai was as chaotic as I had expected after the calmness of Rajasthan! I did not feel great as we arrived into the station due to the heat, no food & generally feeling a little nautilus! Jay also looked for his trainers when we arrived & they had mysteriously gone missing, hahah someone had stolen his stinky old trainers that he had for the full year of his travels. Luckily he had sandals as well & was on his way home so wouldn’t need them but still you had to laugh that someone would take them! I was lucky that mine didn’t disappear as well. You hear lots of stories about luggage been stolen but your stinky shoes is not as common, haha!
As you step off the trains you see thousands of people everywhere! Then it took us 3 hours to cross Mumbai to get to the right station for our overnight train to Goa. No lunch, very hot & no food until 5pm! As you can imagine I was so relieved when we finally managed to drop our bags off at the right station & then hunt down some food, a simple chana masala has never tasted so good. I had 2 pepsis as well to get my blood sugar back up! It did the trick & I felt alive enough again to head to the beach to chill out . The beach had a really nice vibe, much more liberal it seemed with men & women hanging out together which normally you wouldn’t see, young couples walking, chatting & wearing more western clothing. Some young children came begging but were actually quite funny jumping all over us & playing, I have to say I was concerned about our stuff! We gave them bananas though which they tried to feed back to us! Bless I did feel for them but still refuse to give any money to kid beggars.
We were not staying in Mumbai as we didn’t have enough time & to be honest been in a city that is said to have more people per square metre than any other city, & has over 16M people, which grew from a once fishing village 500 hundred years earlier, the biggest urban sprawl in the planet. I was glad to get on our final night train to Goa & slept so well. I almost didn’t want to get off at our stop! We then got an auto rickshaw (tuck tuck) to the bus station where we hopped onto our first local bus of the day. The bus was super nice in comparison to the local buses in Dharmasala & was empty! First impressions of Goa seemed like there was a lot more money here, even for local transport. It was also v.green, lots of palm & banana trees & v.hot. Two buses later we made it to Arambul & then got a motorbike taxis to take us to the beach & the main town. I was pretty exhausted by this point but looked forward to finding a place to stay & going for a swim! After been so cold in Dharmasala it was really nice to feel the sun & it wasn't too hot.
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