When we finally decided to leave Goa, we begun our two day journey to Mumbai. It was 650km away and so we thought it would be nice to rest somewhere part-way, and we chose a place called Ratnagiri.
One of the more unusal sightings. I'd never seen a dead cow, or realised how much they look like big plastic figurines
We'd never heard of it before but it was on the way and had a small beach, so we hoped we could have a few more hours of sandy relaxation before we hit the big city! This almost happened... When we arrived there it was about 4:30pm, and the race to find a place to stay and get to the beach was on. It was a nightmare; everywhere was so expensive! The town wasn't touristy for westerners at all, and so every place to stay was a hotel and wanted double our budget. Eventually we came across a hotel and I negotiated him down to a point between our budget and his asking price of 850 rupees. It's always annoying when you pay the most in the places that are just stop offs, but after a long day driving you just think MEH... And we had a sea to go and splash in!
Another mangled vehicle we saw to add to this list
The main section of the beach was rammed, so we went a little further away from the crowds where I felt a bit more comfortable stripping down to my bikini and where we weren't going to be asked for a million photos. The water was nice, and we were just in time for sunset - a relaxing way to end a day of tuktuking!
Just about caught the sunset at the beach
The next day we set out at a similar time and reached Mumbai at around 5pm. On the drive, I had been looking on booking.com for places to stay, as well as well as googling cheap budget home stay guest house and similar keywords hoping for the cheapest place we could find! It didn't go too well so for the first time in India I decided to take a look on Airbnb. My brothers, mum and I love Airbnb, and have used it to find great places to stay in areas including Chicago, New York and Verona. When you log onto the website you type in where you are looking for a place to stay, a specify whether you want to share a room with the owner, want to rent a room from them, or hire the whole place out. It then pulls through all of the matches, giving you the opportunity to see photos of the place offered, see what's included (ie wifi, any meals), read reviews and contact the owner. I feel pretty safe using the site, knowing from experience that when you join to be a user you must provide photos of ID and give them all of your contact details. The reviews left by other users are a good indicator that the place is okay too, so definitely give them a read! In my opinion the main bonuses of using this site are that it's usually a lot cheaper than a hotel in the area (definitely true for my mum and brothers in Brooklyn, NY!), and you get to meet a local who can give you hints and tips on where to go and what's going on. Saying all that, every place in Mumbai that we were interested in was either fully booked, or too far away from where we wanted to be, haha waaa! In the end we were left with The Salvation Army Hostel and Indian guest House, both in Colaba. The Salvation Army was cheaper but was shared dorms an we had been given bad reviews from people we'd met who had stayed there, so booked The Indian Guest House. It was considerably cheaper than the 3500 rupee places we'd seen at 750, and right round the corner from Gateway of India and near to Wankhede Stadium for our cricket match, so seemed an ideal location.
Indians really do seem to take pride in their lorries!
One of the usual crazy sights on Indian roads - 20 people on the back of a tiny lorry
Entering Mumbai, one of the first things we saw was a road-side slum with two little boys having poos on the pavement... Not like any welcome I'd been before! Everything was a little more intense there... Especially people. Criiiiikey I have never been somewhere so busy - cars crammed onto the road, people begging at any red light long enough to hold you until they can get over to you, streams of people falling off the pavements... I couldn't imagine Delhi! Another thing we didn't really realise was the size of Mumbai, it was about an hour drive once in the city, to the area near the southern tip that we were staying at.
This wasn't an optimistic looking scene on the main highway to Mumbai
As we got closer to Colaba we noticed that there weren't many rickshaws (I say many - there were none other than us), which we found rather odd, and people were staring and waving at us even more the normal, which is the opposite of what I though Mumbai would be like! When we finally got to our guest house we were a bit disappointed with our room; the bathrooms were shared (wasn't really a problem, there were 4 spotless bathrooms each with toiler, urinal and shower in) and the walls of the bedrooms didn't reach the ceiling. So the two rows of bedrooms were quite like public toilets, never really letting you feel like you had privacy. However, this was a very cheap place for Mumbai prices, and hey we got a towel thrown in too, so can't complain too much!