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We had our first experience of an Indian over night train, 13 hours. Wow. We had fold down beds, 3 high in our sleeper carriage, it was fine once we survived the bundle of people desperate to get on the trains which wasn't easy when you're carrying 18k of crap on your back! Once we settled in the beds and the Indian men stopped staring we all managed to get some sleep on the way to Mumbai. Me and Claire opted to not touch a single bit of water throughout the whole night to avoid the horror of the train toilet which from what i gather was possibly the worst experience for many of the girls out of the whole trip! A squat toilet on a moving train can only mean bad things...
Once in Mumbai i have to say it was the worst smelling city of the trip. But once you're past that you notice just how busy it is. Mumbai is the media commercial capital of India and wow you can tell! We've gone all this time with seeing almost no adverts and now there's an explosion of them, and Matt Damon's face is everywhere! First western celebrity image we've seen.
We visited the slums where they filmed Slumdog Millionnaire which was fascinating. I was prepared for it to be a horrible experience but actually it was fine. Everyone there is so happy, the kids are adorable, posing for pictures playing cricket and little girls giggling and smiling despite living on tons of rubbish. They have TVs (many men watching the football), they even have their own court and lawyers within the slums. Its pretty much an entire community on its own. We were told that people pay to live there and they buy their space. We saw them in the laundry section too. As we left the slums 2 police officers spoke to Ruby and it turned out that 2 tourists were lost in the slums and they wondered if we'd seen them, at that point they had been lost int here for 2 hours- and i thought the Longleat Maze was bad!!
We then visited the Gateway to India which was built for King George V and Queen Mary on their visit to India. And we saw where terrorists held people hostage a few years ago in a huge hotel by the port.
xxx
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