The madness of Mumbai

Time lost in the dull hum of planes and shiny airports, we threw our bag's in the boot of a taxi and drove into dark noise. I sat frozen with a fixed grin - part fear, part fascination - staring out at a new world. Madness, so much of it my eyes fought to focus. People weaved like ants through traffic: cars, trucks, bikes, tuk tuks, cows, carts and darkness. Split pavements ran in front of concrete buildings smeared and stained, and shop owners perched on plastic chairs chatting and smoking. Rows of cigarette stalls, tea houses, barber shops and mechanics flung past the window. The dazzling lights of welders crackled. The steam of chai pots rose from stands crowded with smiles and the piercing beeps of the road blew on fume thick wind from an oven door.

An hour of driving and my eye's felt heavy. The last day or so was spent snatching at sleep and the throbbing horde of Mumbai was already draining. We chose a restaurant judged by its full tables and went no further than a short, uneasy walk into the city. Fat rats slithered to dark corner's and we fled for the hotel.

I woke to Gayle yelping out of bed - I leapt to my feet and opened my eyes in the same moment, fearing a rat amongst the sheets. Nothing but a pigeon flapped on the window ledge above casting a shadowy flicker on the floor. The culture shock had hit hard. I hoped that in time we could acclimatize to this opposite world and waltz into squat toilets without a thought.

We stayed for two days and two days was enough. I felt a nip of guilt for not exploring the city more - there must be some hidden gems to find if willing to traipse its streets.

This isn't how people should live, pushed together in their millions. Smells gag you in your tracks. Every corner, nook and alleyway, someone is there. Chatting, working, fixing, squatting, sleeping, thinking. Credit to the people, they make the city work. A hundred million get by day to day, with each other. If Europeans had to live like this, with different cultures and religions in each other's pockets, I think there would be a lot more fighting. Its a whole world in a city. You have to feel the slap of sweat and stink to believe it.

The bus that rocked.

We escaped the stares of the city on a night bus to the comparative paradise of Goa. An hour or so late, our bus half pulled to the kerb. A little cubicle just short of a double bed was our home for the next 15 hours, a slidy window let in a draft and the endless beeps of the city.

The driver sparred with the horn and we rolled from Mumbai's smother, a city that throws a punch like no other I've felt; a slap of insignificance and gratitude for a lucky life.

We were comfortably installed in the cabin as the lights of the city fell, when a happy honeymooning couple in a neighbouring cabin knocked on a wall - " a mouse...in your bag", pointing at my rucksack stuffed under the seats. It was scurrying around the pavement in panic as we sat on shop steps waiting for the bus and must have crawled in my rucksack to escape. I thought for a moment, wondering if it was really a problem worth pausing Rick Stein for and what I would do with the thing even if I did catch it. Other passengers pulled their bags into the safety of the cubicle, but I did nothing and left the little guy to it. Maybe he was trying to escape the city too.

Steep mountains rise from India and fall into Goa, and we chased its worming roads. The driver heaved at the wheel, leaning around sharp corners at tipping point, the bus swaying and dipping like a ship on a choppy sea. Gayle drifted off somehow, but I rolled around the cabin for hours, begging for sleep. Mountains cut pitch black into a sky peppered with stars and I peeped around the curtain down into dark, deadly depths, smothering puffs of panic at each clenched corner scarred with a broken barrier.

Gayle patted me awake. A blink of a sleep. I gathered myself and the bags scattered around the cabin and squeezed off the bus to settle on a tuk tuk. Slalom road's wound through tangled tropical green's, through orange dust towns and past bright houses tucked in the shade of palm trees. Lime green fields with sweeps of litter topped streams ran to thick forested hills lying left to nature. And the tuks tuks whirring struggle chugged on to the coast, until a wipe of glimmering blue split the sky.