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Hannah arrived at the airport on time, but she didn't appear until after 0200, her baggage didn't go as smoothly as mine. It was a relief to see her safe and sound after her long flight. She came to me with a huge smile similar to that of a Cheshire cat, which made me feel instantly better.
We made it back to our room eventually after borrowing a phone to contact Raj whom then contacted our disappearing driver, and then after Hannah filling out a mountain of paper work.
That morning I couldn't believe Hannah was with me, quite weird in a good, comforting way. I had booked our train tickets for Saturday down to Goa, so Hannah only had one day in Mumbai together.
After we woke we spoke to some Australian guys who were doing a tour of the "slums" of Mumbai, the largest in India, and we thought we better tag along.
If the various trips to Mumbai central didn't do the number of people here justice, the slums did! The tour consisted of a 3 hour walk through the industrial part of the slums as well as a brief look at a living area. What struck me first was how much cleaner they were than I had imagined. The smell was not unbearable, and the people themselves kept very clean in general and they were all had big smiles, they were happy.
The most interesting part of the tour for me, was to see the workings of the industrial side of things. 50km square was dedicated to making money, mainly of recycling products, plastic, metals, materials a wide range of things. Not just collecting them, but transforming them from waste to shining pellets of plastic separated by colour, ready to be shipped to china for moulding, or pure aluminium bricks from cans. Really was astonishing. The slums are actually built on government land however due to the huge amount of money the slums generate. ($6-8million a year) Its not worth the government knocking them down and re claiming the land since they would loose a huge sum of tax money.
Hannah had a good one day look into Mumbai and it's workings. Although we were both craving to get away from the numbers and head to the beach!
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