Our arrival in Mumbai was delayed by 2 hours because of the dodgy engine - now fixed, hopefully. A lot of the crew are of Indian origin and were eagerly awaiting family ashore, many of whom had travelled by train from Goa, and who they had not seen for up to 6 months. A number of passengers asked that the crew be allowed off the ship first so they could spend as much time with their families as possible - the new Captain(since Dubai) all 38 years of him, and a John Travolta lookalike to boot, was happy to oblige. Many of us also told our cabin staff not to rush back just to turn our bed down and provide chocolate neapolitans! Caetano, our cabin attendant, brought us a lovely ornamental elephant, Goan style, which his wife had brought with her from Goa. It's touches like this which are so endearing about many of the crew; unfortunately absent from many of the European members of the crew! Our approach through Mumbai harbour was remarkable for the heavy haze, the debris in the water and the considerable size of the Indian Navy - 2 aircraft carriers and upwards of a dozen other warships - Mr Cameron please note; eat your heart out, Nelson. Indian immigration bureaucracy is second to none. Documentation is inspected by at least 6 different people between the shore and the dock gate, but with a cheerful smile and none of the indifferent surliness of the UK Border Agency, who do so much to protect us all.We were met in the terminal by Perin from Mumbai Magic, a lovely, outgoing, matronly Parsi lady in a beautiful deep cerise sari. 6 of us agreed an itinerary with her and we headed off in Air-conditioned luxury to the Gateway Of India.Here's our itinerary for the day:Taj Mahal Hotel,Chowpatti Beach, the Hanging Gardens in Malabar, David Sassoon Library, Dhobi Ghat, lunch at the Delhi Darbar restaurant, a Government emporium, Gandhi's house, 33 Laburnum Road, Crawford Market and Victoria Terminus.A simple list like this cannot do justice to the range of experiences we had in 7 hours. What are our impressions of Mumbai? Where do you start? The traffic congestion and crowds, you can see in films, read reports, but nothing prepares you for the reality. We thought Cairo was chaotic but there was some measure of discipline to their driving. Here, in Mumbai, anything goes - not always fast, certainly not quietly and pedestrians weave in and out of the traffic with death defying footwork. Remarkably, we did not hear any sirens of emergency vehicles. Police and military - with rifles - had a high profile on street corners, outside public buildings, restaurants and jewellers shops. We saw 1 policeman all day attempting to direct traffic, with limited success. The contrast between poverty and wealth(even moderate wealth) was stark. You really do have to "park your emotions ". At one extreme the 20+ storey billionaire's residence which he slept in for 3 nights, before declaring the feng shui was wrong and moving out, was the most expensive ever to be built. Contrast this with entire families, whose home was a blanket spread out on the pavement, and whose sole income came from begging - some as young as 3, naked. Young children dicing with the traffic, knocking on the car window, with the the most heart wrenching expressions on their faces and in their huge beautiful brown eyes left you reeling and eternally grateful for the smallest of mercies. Clothes which had been washed, goodness knows where, were draped along the barriers alongside the roads, in trees to dry in the humid air. Adults and children scavenged, barefoot amongst piles of rubbish searching for the merest morsel to eat or sell. One thing Perin told us, and which put some of this into perspective, was that Indian culture taught you to accept your lot; she was quite clear in her view though that even if you housed some of these people, their lifestyle would not change. One might feel that it was easy for her to say. Despite the apparent chaos, there are aspects of amazing organisation of which we could be envious. Men go to work by train, usually, from the suburbs, hundreds of thousands of the 20 million or so inhabitants. During the morning men on ancient black bikes collect the workers' lunches in the famous tiffin boxes, take them to a central point from where they are taken to the city and then distributed, perhaps 20 to a bike, to individual offices and places of work. Everybody gets his own lunch prepared by his wife on time! In the afternoon the process is reversed. Equally organised is the Dhobi wallah, seen pedalling throughout the city with great bundles of laundry strapped precariously to bike or back, headed for the Dhobi Ghat. Here the wallah rents a huge concrete sink where everything is hand washed and beaten senseless, rinsed and hung out to dry in the searing heat. Then it is pressed by old fashioned solid irons heated over charcoal(occasionally by women), otherwise this is an exclusively male domain. Apparently no laundry is ever lost, you never get to eat another man's lunch because this is an infallible labour intensive system which works - all items of laundry and tiffin boxes are marked by the wallahs using a unique symbol for each family, marked, in the case of the laundry, on the clothing somewhere with a vegetable dye. No computers, no managers, no jobsworths and definitely no health and safety, but strangely, it works. Little things attract your attention though - like the covered shelter with electric lighting bordering a shady park provided to enable homeless youngsters who do attend school, to undertake their homework; like schoolchildren in spotless uniforms being collected from school in the ubiquitous yellow buses; like the mobile temples whose entourage collect handsome donations - people will always give to religious organisations, we are told; like the many cricket grounds organised by caste, like the ornately decorated water tankers which provide top up facilities for housing units across the city; like the tiny shops smaller than a garage selling everything from number plates to Cadbury's Dairy Milk. The list is endless. At every turn there is something new. Memories of colonial past are everywhere, especially in the Fort, home of the original British settlement. Perin was insistent that Victoria Terminus was the finest railway station in the world; she could well be right. Many of the old mansions could perhaps do with a bit of maintenance and a lick of paint but regrettably, many are being demolished as the city expands upwards rather than outwards. Whilst you can envisage the colonial past of elegant boulevards lined with banyan trees, broad beaches and extensive parks it's quite clear that as the economy of India accelerates there is an inevitability that these relics of India's past will be swamped by the growth of its future. Where else? We visited the house at 33 Laburnum Road where Gandhi stayed in the early 20th century. It has been preserved, unchanged, as a living museum. It is a beautiful Victorian villa which would not be out of place in the leafy suburbs of Kensington. One final assault on our senses was Crawford Market, with a facade embellished by Kipling's architect father. Originally a fruit and vegetable market you can now buy anything here - motor cycle spares, a variety of breeds of puppies, sheep, goats, songbirds, spices, assorted tat, handmade knives and some fruit and vegetables still. Sadly there is only one flower stall left. Rats come in 2 forms - dead or alive! Having followed us throughout the market, one elderly gent, with a passing resemblance to Mahatma himself summed up his view on the day's proceedings and our failure to buy anything by urinating noisily against the wheel of a parked truck - too much information??? Who's got the hand gel!! Two of the joys of not going on P & Os tour were that you get to go to a reputable local restaurant for real Indian lunch - no ordering by numbers here and none of the contents of 18 P&O coaches in a cloned European hotel. The second joy - we paid half what the others paid! We nearly bought a carpet, well, one of us nearly did. It was a bargain and it was beautiful and it was over £1000. But one of us is a boring old fart and said no!!! Shipwise 2 things to tell you. Bet you didn't realise January 25 was Burns Night; Why do 1800 or so passengers have to sit and listen to the tormented squeal of primitive instruments which the Scots will insist on calling music while the head chef processes round the restaurant with a stuffed sheep's gut, so that an expatriate Celt can mangle the English language by reciting an incomprehensible ditty, whilst dressed in a silly checked skirt.Secondly, as we write, today is Australia Day. A different style of celebration here. You can probably hear the band from where you are, there is much flexing of Antipodean muscle (and flab), the consumption of large quantities of the amber nectar and burgers from the on deck barbie and you have to be draped in an Australian flag. Today also happens to be Republic Day in India. With usual insensitivity, that seems to have been overlooked by management. Civilisation takes many forms!!