15 hours flying....'fun'
Well, where to start really? Have experienced so much already and it's not even 40 hours since we left NZ. The flights have been pretty standard; although Singapore Airlines interactive entertainment system was pretty sweet.
Didnt manage to absorb any of singapore in the 40 minutes we were there. Pretty much: touchdown, walk 2km to the right gate and board another plane. Enjoyed the use of the travellators whilst Grandad got special service in a little airport-buggy. Thought we'd pop out the PDA in hope of a wireless broadband hotspot (you know, Singapore being super high-tech and all) and managed to get online but it was so RIDICULOUSLY slow that there was no point even trying to update the blog. Come on Singapore, we can do better.
What Singapore are good at though, is employing BEAUTIFUL airhostesses... all petite AS. We decided it must be SA Corporate Policy to employ strictly size 8 or below.
Mumbai
Whilst landing in Mumbai wasnt anything spectacular, it was a completely different story once you left the terminal. Im pretty sure I was speechless for th best part of half an hour. There's shit here you just cant your head around.... All the taxis outside the airport were like 1960s style and there was a parking lot FULL of them, all the roads here are completly HAND made aswell, saw quite a few teams of people hacking at them with axes with women then carrying the rocks and stuff on their head. We met a relative here who got us a taxi back to his family's house where we had lunch before he escorted us to the train station for the train to the village (gaam). We needed it too, this place is a JUNGLE
Dont even consider getting behind the wheel in this place. My life was flashing before my eyes so fast and so often during our half hour ride to this dude's house that I could barely see. The place is just SO out-of-control and so random, I think the roads came after everything else so they fell around what was already there. Ridiculous really. The road is simultarnously shared by people / rickshaws / cars / trucks / animals. What I did manage to see was the ridiculous contrast irony by bombay. Architecutal masterpiece Hyatt Hotel neighourboured by a 4-block-big shanty town, hundreds of rickshaws blotted with the occasional E-class mercedes... What we saw was kinda mid-class Mumbai but we WILL be heading back here to indulge in the finer side of town. Hotels, malls, bars, beatiful ladies.......okay you know where this heading.
Serioulsy, our taxi driver had a big sticker of some god on his windscreen, and you NEED it to navigate this traffic. Beeping is a way of life..... Alright so in an average day in NZ you'd use your horn maybe once, twice if lucky. Here it's at least 20 beeps per minutes. There's no indicating... who needs to indicate when you can toot? Trucks and stuff here have signwriting on the back "Horn OK Please"... Still trying to figure that one out, though heres how far I've got:
Honk if you want to move
Honk if you want to stop
Honk if you want to go left
Honk if you want to go right
Honk if you see a gap
Honk if you want to see a gap
And lastly, if in doubt.... HONK
I think the government forgot the INTEGRAL part of roads / motorways / freeways when the designed the whole system. There are no lanes! The road is pretty much as wide as as many cars as you can fit across it. Even the motorways, technically they're just two lanes (one each way) but they're BIG FUCK OFF LANES that you can fit 5 cars along.
Beauty, so had a nice Indian lunch with a distant relation in an apartment in Mumbai before heading for the train station. Another harrowing taxi ride later (just wait till you see the movie clips) we were at the train station amongst many more throngs of people. Having booked first class we had to find this, luckily enough too as anything but first class was pack wall to wall with bodies. Leaving here at 2.50pm with no real sleep since taking off made for very short fuses whenever the train stopped for long. Made a couple of 'friends' while trying to find our train cabin.... local kids offering to polish my shoes for some coin. Pity this guy just didnt get the message that I didnt want my white plastic choes polished.... his next tack was that he was "hungry", but as I was his "friend" I should help him out. Then he started hassling Mum and Maya too... ended up having to explain to him that he's wasting his time with us and him and his friend "Rahul" (Yes, I asked and No, hes not much of a batsman) would be much better off annoying someone else.
[b]Four hours on a train....more 'fun'
Four hours of train ride later we got to Navsari station. Real dark. No daylight savings. And it's 'winter'. The train ride had potential but turned out to be fairly boring....... Passed a lot of slum type material for the first half hour in the outskirts of Mumbai and then some desert type stuff which is rice paddifield for most of the year. Heaps of people tending to to other plants on these plains. A few hills in the distance but otherwise this place was dead flat. Saw a crazy tower & complex built into the side of a hill that looked like it came out of Thunderbirds. Nuclear powerplant? Biogenetic engineering testplan? Post-Mumbai there was just heaps of moderately dense forrest / weed / pasture with little villages and stuff around the train stations. Haha had a bit of a local advenutre when I jumped off at one of the stations to try get us some 'masala flavoured' chips. The train stops for anywhere between 30seconds and five minutes so you gotta know what you want and see it from the window before you make your move. So.... after getting some ruppees and a gameplan together I jumped off and hitup one of these stalls at a station. Hit the guy with 5 ruppee and thought I'd just add requred. He said something so I slammed another 10 in his direction and grabbed the big bag of chips. Turns out 15 may not have been enough as he strated saying MORE stuff. Rememebering that the train could start again at anytime I quickly grabbed the small pack of chips and hoped for the best. Didnt look like he wanted to give me any change so I jumped aboad again. Think he ripped me off... but end of the day 15 ruppee = 50 cents, so I'm still a happy man.
The others (who'd caught a taxi straight from Mumbai airport to the village / gaam) had sent a car to pick us up. That was all good as it was nice crusing down the road without quite so many people on it. Got to Matvad (home village) at 7.30 and pretty much got stuck into dinner. All Indian vegetarian but pretty bloody hot so I couldn't eat much! Got the lowdown on the house, what was where and stuff before crashing out at like 9.30.... on an absolute BRICK of a pillow.
-Nick
