Mumbai, city of twenty-one million
My planned month in Mumbai was intended to be mostly ‘down time’, to process and recover from my time in Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea, and so I didn’t feel the need to base myself in one of the expensive hostels in the upmarket Colaba area. Instead I headed to Saki Naka, a cheap part of the city only a few kilometres from the international airport (thus I could walk there from my early morning arrival, rather than having to negotiate taxi fares in a city I didn’t know), checking into a small dormitory most of whose other guests were Indians working in Mumbai. £3.25 a night, with light and socket next to the bed, a locker, and a kitchenette with washing machines! It served the purpose well, even though it was here that I discovered that most Indians go to bed very late, and that the culture does not include showing consideration to others through keeping the noise down after a certain hour… Whilst I did spend most of the first two weeks on my bunk bed resting an...