My ride into Mumbai on the very first night in India was the most sensory stimulation I have ever received on first landing in a city. The smells were incredible (and mostly good). We passed a massive construction project on the highway, where workers were using a hot tar cauldron burning actual wood. These workers didn't have safety shoes on. As a matter of fact, they didn't have ANY shoes on. That was pretty wild. It was a long day of travelling, and we all felt like we could use a cold beer. The place to go for beer late at night in Mumbai would be lucky to qualify as a garbage dump, maybe if they cleaned it up a little bit. Some guy sold them from his "house."
Mumbai is pretty dirty, and very expensive, so we decided not to stay long. We saw a Ghandi museum, housed in a former residence of him. The highlight was a letter he had written to Adolf Hitler, it was quite powerful (though obviously failed to do the trick). We also some some other cool things, including hanging gardens, and an enormous laundry complex, where workers "clean" clothes by swinging them over their heads and smashing them against rocks. I would keel over from heat stroke in my first 15 minutes on that job.
The ride from Mumbai to Goa was 14 hours by bus, we figured we would kill two birds with one stone by sleeping on the bus. There were "sleeper" tickets, which we naively assumed meant we would get a sleepable chair that reclined. Instead, we got a shelf that fit two people on it. The top of my head and soles of my feet could simultaneously touch the boundaries of my coffin. I was fortunate enough to sleep 9 miserable hours, the other 5 were terrible. Especially when the trip was unnecessarily prolonged so that the bus driver could take a massive detour down roads that wouldn't accomodate a bus all to drop off some friend of his. Of course there was no apology. We were pretty miserable when we got off that bus, but within an hour we had booked into a beautiful breezy room with an ocean view. Things picked up from there.
The animals I have seen in Goa are numerous, the ones I can name are elephants, wild pigs, dogs, cats, rats, mongooses (mongeese?) and innumerable types of lizards. Others, I can't name but they include several types of cool bugs. We rented scooters on the first day here. Fortunately, we had met a cool Aussie named Nick in Mumbai who gave us a quick tutorial on crooked cops. He told us that they often try to stop anyone white just to get a bribe. He said he just didn't stop ever, and they usually figured he was not worth chasing/new what was going on. We managed to put Nick's theory into practice three times here. Police really aren't interested in chasing someone who hasn't broken the law, and since there are no road laws that I can perceive here, that works just fine for me. We spent several days in Goa seeing beautiful sights and getting into all sorts of back trails on our bikes.
A final, yet gruesome sight, was somewhat hard to take, weak stomachs, especially those who love dogs proceed with caution. We were playing poker in our hotel room and all of a sudden I heard an ungodly dog noise, beyond a howl, more like a scream. It took a moment to locate the noise, but several other dogs ran to the source, which helped me see it. Now my dog, Toby, is a vicious little guy, but I have never seen anything like this. Some dog had pissed of a pack of street dogs, and I truly think they were trying to kill him. The biggest dog from the pack had his mouth on the victim's throat while others tore at his legs and belly. In the end he pulled a physically amazing maneuver to get away from them, but I think he might have died anyway from wounds. It was a sad sight to say the least.
Stay tuned for more, but don't expect any more tales from overnight buses.
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