World Cruise 2012 Sydney to Sydney: Mumbai, Vultures, and Diclofenac

What on earth does that have to do with a ‘round the world cruise you may wonder. You may also wonder what diclofenac is. Or not.

India is a very religiously tolerant country (according to our tour guide, Meherrukh) and there are many religions practiced there. One is Zoroastrianism, a religion more ancient than most, which among other things does not believe in cremation or burial. They lay their dead out in “Towers of Silence” in the Hanging Gardens in Mumbai. The towers are open to the sky and the bodies used to be desicated by the sun and consumed by vultures (Gyps indicus). The towers still exist in Mumbai and their dead are still laid out there, but the vultures are gone, themselves driven to extinction by the use of diclofenac, a veterinary NSAID that causes kidney failure in vultures when they consume the bodies of animals dosed with it.

I love travel! I learn so much about so many things!

Our tour of Mumbai using Mumbai Magic tours was magnificent, especially considering we lost almost 4 hours of the tour! I highly recommend them to future World Cruisers or anybody coming to Mumbai. Farida and Meherrukh were our guides in two 20-passenger busses (12-13 in each bus so we had lots of room).

We had a general tour of the city of Bombay (or Bom Bahia, a good bay, corrupted to ‘Bombay’ until 1997) with stops at some of the more famous places and a few not so famous. Our guide calls it Bombay—as she has all her life—so I shall, too.

We got some sense of how many people live and work in Bombay by entering the Victoria Terminus (train station) via an underground road crossing. You would take your life in your hands to attempt to cross one of the central-Bombay streets where pedestrians, taxis, busses of all sizes and ages, motorcycles, trishaws, cars, and trucks are all in a supreme hurry to get somewhere and with an hearing-damaging cacaphony of horns blowing. The underground passage to the VT was as crowded, just with masses of people rather than vehicles, although our guide said the crowds were fairly light because it was a Sunday.

We walked through a fruit and vegetable market (no durians, however. Durians, if you don’t know, smell so execrably bad that they are banned in most hotels, busses, and trains. But locals—Thais, Malaysians, just about anybody in Southeast Asia—adore them! I ate one, once. Never again!), again crammed with people, buying, selling, moving, packing, cleaning up, sleeping, eating, smoking, drinking, for all I know some were probably having sex somewhere in the teeming mass of humanity.

Mahatma Ghandi lived in Bombay for many years, staying at a house that we visited. He owned very little, his room contained not much more than a pallet for sleeping, some books, and a spinning wheel. He loved to spin, he said it relaxed him. It is also the reason that, if you see a wreath around his neck, it will be of threads to commemorate his love of spinning. It also reminded him of his people and what they needed to do and to have. Because, I guess, he had so little in the way of possessions, the house doesn’t have many artifacts. What it does have are about two-dozen extremely well done dioramas of events in his life from the early days right up to his assassination.

From there we went to a Hare Krishna temple. Those of you reading this who lived in San Francisco in the 70s will remember the Hare Krishna monks at the San Francisco airport, a memory I am not fond of as they pretty much harassed all travellers with requests for money. Eventually they would be confined to only certain areas of the airport. But this Bombay temple was an experience of a whole different sort that has erased the negative memories I have of the Krishnas in the airport.

It was stiflingly hot in Bombay, and even more so in the temple where not a breath of air moved and there was a mass of humanity chanting on the upper floors of the temple. The smells of Bombay permeated the air. The chanters were separated by gender—although our guide says they didn’t have to be—and the monks were separated by a curtain from the chanters. We talked for a very short moment to a monk who sounded American but I didn’t have time to question him. And so we moved on, gathering our shoes, and heading to the Gateway of India and the “Taj.”

I think it’s hysterically funny that “The Gateway of India was built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary to Bombay, prior to the Delhi Durbar, in December 1911. However, they only got to see only a cardboard model of the structure since the construction did not begin till 1915.”

This was a Sunday and it defies description how many people were at the Gateway! It was also our closest view of the Taj Mahal Hotel, the one that was bombed a few years back as was the Gateway. The Indians are, if this is possible, even more security conscious than we (US) are. Almost every building I went into had an xray scanner in use. (Don’t get me going on getting back on board the ship!)

We (the Oz and US tourists) were big draws ourselves in the crowd in fornt of the Gateway. Kim (the husband of the most prolific tour organizer, Narelle) was asked by too many Indian tourists to count to pose for pictures. And one resourceful entrepeneur was charging the Indians to have their picture taken with Kim and then charging them to print the photo on his portable printer.

We saw the Dhobi ghat laundry men (google it) and we heard about the Mumbai Lunch Box men (that, too) who have 100% accuracy. Married women have red in the part of their hair. Giving or taking a dowry is illegal. It is illegal to reveal the sex of a child to the mother before birth. A daughter is a stranger’s wealth. So much interesting stuff! Bollywood is not a place. And the best: there is a private club in Bombay which will not allow film stars or politicians as members. I so love to travel!
In the Gulf of Oman with guards posted

Noon 24° 05’ N

60° 25’ E