Mumbai mumblings

Ollie:
This is an email I sent to my friend, Mark earlier

I am sitting in my cramped but luckily aircon hotel  room in Mumbai, 35 degrees of burning city heat outside. Will is lying next to me, asleep, having thrown up a nice big  green puke all over the bed 2 hours earlier.

Ahh the joys of travelling with kids!!!

Actually we have been very lucky with illnesses so far…Edie one day in Laos, Louis another day in Laos but on our last days in Bangkok, Edie picked up a bug in our favourite restaurant there and brought it with her to India!! She is much better now but it has taken her a good 3 days to shift it!!!

Ironically just before Will was ill, R and I had tasted an hour of freedom which was blissful. No matter how lucky we are to be free and travelling for so long, 24 hour a day child care is very knackering. We left the kids watching TV in the hotel and  went to the main railway station. Its a massive Victorian monster, a bit like kings cross, complete with monkey gargoyles and a booking hall like a church with stained glass windows etc. Full; with people and packages going in all directions, I would have loved to stay and just watch for days. Thrilling!

We have become a bit obsessed with the Tiffin wallahs that collect millions and millions of hot lunches from peoples homes across the city and deliver them , still piping hot to the right people, on time, at work across the city.

 Apparently they never make mistakes (once in every 6 million) and always deliver the right meal to the right place of work, A true feat of organisation in this seeming chaos.

I took lots of pics and even a bit of film of the Tiffin wallhs and their wooden trolleys with all the differently marked lunch bags and boxes, colour coordinated and numbered…rushing here and there.

Afterwards we walked the streets and saw people being shaved at the side of the road, or having their nits picked from their hair, steaming hot chai  being poured into cups from 3 feet up, families living on streets, lying on the pavement, playing cards ….

We were trying to find the retiring rooms at the station, where you can hire a room for a few hours before boarding a train…

It was great just to be Rach and me for a while, just like the old days, both as dumbstruck and amazed at how people live and survive in this beautiful, filthy, brutally hard city.

Tomorrow, we are taking the night train to Goa…Lets hope all the bugs have finally left us

Into our tenth week now. Up to India, I loved Cambodia the best, great people, beautiful scenery and terrifying history…but very welcoming…all so different when you travel with kids…Will got a bit fed up with people shouting out ‘BABY!!’ and wanting to throw their arms around him all the time. But I think he loved it at first, the star of the show!

That hasn’t happened so far in India, but they love staring at the kids. Edie has grown a foot taller and is  looking particularly tanned and beautiful . But then so is Louis who misses the Thai girls …..He’s still obsessed with Thailand and continually talks of doing Thai cooking when he gets home.

We have had a truly great time but it is not without it’s stresses and settling into India will take some doing…R and I have loved most of the cities, Phnom Penh was fab and a real eye opener, I could even imagine living there! A real buzz, full of abject poverty and corruption but a city on the up, a feeling of hope for the future. The kids like the countryside best and can only cope with so much of full-on Asian metropolis!!!

Running out of steam now .....