Mumbai

Back to the city. We're prepared for a bit of a bumpy ride after the slow pace of Kerala. Things get off to an edgy start when two fellow air passengers warn us to take care in the city and to on no account get on the public transport system. Great, a taxi it is! There's been lots of disturbance in the city and elsewhere in the last few days with rioting from some parts of the region's Dalit populations (dalit is the more pc term for untouchable) in the slum areas. Something to do with the defacement of a statue by supporters of one political faction or another. difficult to work out what exactly has happened and the BBC is keeping quiet about it. Two train carriages were incinerated by an angry mob and a line of women from one of the slums brought one of the expressways to a standstill. The morning paper reports that they were still wearing their nightclothes, as if this is more shocking than the burning down of railway property, with railway customers presumably not long gone from the premises.

Out hotel is in Colaba, more or less the tip of Mumbai and the other side of town from the airport. Naturally, this scares the living daylights out of me and i scour the crowd at Mumbai airport for signs of terror and confusion. No signs of either but then maybe they all live north of Mumbai. At the pre-paid taxi rank I scrutinise the man at the desk for signs that our trip south of the airport might be dangerous. He barely looks at us, bored to the point of misanthropy, but he charges us 750 rupees (we'd expected 350) - the extra 400 must be danger money for the taxi driver. Why didn't we stay another night in sleepy, fluffy tourist friendly Kerala and cut out the big, bad city? The man who walks us to the taxi seems a bit nervy, walks us up to a 4x4 taxi complete with bull bars or whatever they are. is it that bad in downtown mumbai? But we walk past to a cab with blackened back windows and get in ready for the ordeal.

Of course, we sail through Mumbai with not a rioter or a protesting lady in her nightdress in sight. And I'm not disappointed, oh no,not at all. Just embarrassed all over again by my lily-livered constitution. A few minor squabbles with the cab driver who tries to make us pay all over again for the cab, then gets totally lost, can't find the hotel at all, not even the main road in Colaba, and then scrapes the cab's undercarriage on the curb when he eventually does make it to Bentley's Hotel.