India Blog: Final Installment

It's my last day in India, and I'm ready to make it count. And by that I mean I'll see sights, eat food, and exercise my deplorable negotiating skills to overpay for keepsakes.

It's actually my second Saturday in Mumbai, and last weekend, I suppose I made it count, too. (Wait, is that the quote from Titanic? Am I just quoting Titanic?)

On that day, I walked from the hotel down to the Gateway of India, one of the most recognizable attractions in the city and a leftover from British rule. It was packed with tourists, and so when a guy with blood-red teeth asked if I wanted a private tour, I jumped at the chance. Because when a stranger with blood-red teeth invites you into his car, you say yes first, and wonder if the $75 you paid was way too much later. (I'm sure I paid double, but really, I got a private 3-hour tour of the city, so everything's relative. His teeth, incidentally, were stained red from chewing arecanut, which also gives one's breath a pungent, sweet smell, like pipe tobacco.)

Anyway, I knocked out some of the big touristy things then. We drove up to Malabar Hill, the swanky part of town that, for the most, really didn't look that much different to me. “These buildings don't look very nice on the outside because of smog and pollutions, but inside, you wouldn't believe how nice they are,” my new buddy said. That made sense. The Oberoi, where we were staying, looks like your average Rodeway Inn from the outside, but once through the doors, lives up to its reparations as one of Mumbai's nicest hotels.

There was one house that stood out in the area, though. The ultra-modern, 27-storey Antilia was there. Named after a mythical island, Antilia is owned by oil refinery king Mukesh Ambani, and at an estimated price of $1 billion or more, it's the most expensive private residence in the world. It has a reported staff of 600.

Contrasting this was a trip to Dhobi Ghat, Mumbai's “laundry slum,” where hundreds of people worked in a big courtyard of massive stone basins and cleaned the sheets for some of Mumbai's less swanky hotels. (We can talk about appropriateness of these types of slum tours later.)

Later we went to Pherozeshah Mehta Gardens, the “hanging gardens” that were built over Bombay's main reservoir–hence the hanging part–and to a Jain temple, where a security guard took a weird liking to me and encouraged me to climb the stairs to see the off-limits upper balcony. (As I came down he was scolding a group of Australians who had tried to follow me up.) We stopped by Mani Bhavan (Storm Boot) to conclude the trip. The unassuming three-story house at #19 Laburnum Road was owned by a friend of Gandhi's and acted as his headquarters from 1917-1934. (In an unforeseen development, by buddy gave Gandhi a thumbs down–“too nice”–but was a fan of Donald Trump.)

With all this in the books, there were really only a few more things I wanted to check off my list on this trip. One was the Prince of Wales Museum, which was my first destination on Saturday. The museum is located about a mile from the Oberoi, and the walk takes you past Oval Maidan park, a blocks-long pitch which, almost no matter the time, is filled with cricketers of all levels squaring up in pick-up games. I stopped and watched a few innings. (We can talk about appropriateness of this sport later.)

Getting to the museum, which means sprinting across four or five streets before being tattooed by a phalanx of speeding motor scooters, was maybe more exciting than the museum itself. But it was fine, with exhibits on Indian currency, natural history and India's cultural past.

I grabbed lunch at Leopold Cafe on Colaba Causeway, a haunt for Westerners and known internationally as one of the first sites attacked during the November 2008 Mumbai attacks (the Trident, the sister hotel directly next to the Oberoi, was also hit). You can still see bullet holes in some of the windows upstairs, but it was less macabre curiosity and more the promise of a cold Kingfisher beer that pulled me in. The place has a dining room downstairs that's almost always packed, but it's the divey second-floor bar that warrants a trip up the back stairs.

Shopping was last on my list, and I was pulled into a side-alley shop by a lackey and shown dozens of designs and fabrics by Tariq, who knew just as well as I did that I had no clue what I was looking at. So really, it was just a matter of how badly I was going to get burned, not if. I talked him down about a third off his starting price, so maybe it wasn't a total bloodbath.

Driving out of Mumbai that night was maybe one of my favorite parts of the trip. I rode in the back of a cab, learning a few useful Hindi phrases from the driver, with the windows down as we rolled past the Marine Drive promenade. The sun was setting over the Arabian Sea, and there were thousands of backlit silhouettes sitting on the seawall. Owner Terry Henderson spoke at the conference about how racing has taken him a lot of places, and it's true–it can be a pretty incredible vehicle for exploration.