A small wonder happend – we managed to get all our luggages on board. (I was really nervous about our hand luggage since it had about 4 more kilos than it was supposed to.) The flight was smooth, only Petr seemed a bit tense as we approached Mumbai.
Landing. 22:35 local time, 26 °C. Holding our immigration forms in one hand and the luggage in the other we went to meet our destiny with the immigration officers (or so it seemed from the guide: „the immigration procedures are lengty and unpleasant...“). Actually no drama happend. My officer even smiled on me as he let me pass through to India.
So what now? Exchange some money and get a taxi. The queue at the first exchange office was incredible, luckily Petr guessed right that there will be another one further on. No queue there :-) The pre-paid taxi office was just next to the exchange. We knew well from our friends that the pre-paid taxis are owned by the state and the prices are given so that the foreigners do not get cheated on. So we asked abou the price to our hotel. 700 Rs?! But we were told it should be around 300 Rs? No, the price is 700 Rs. We were a bit discouraged but we decided not to pay that and we went on. 50 m further there was another pre-paid taxi office. How much to get to the hotel? 390 Rs. (!!!) Really? So no cheating on foreigners at the pre-paid service, right?
We got to the hotel, it was quite nice. The next day we went to explore Mumbai. We thought we would walk but we learned soon that the information about the location in the internet was not right, so we decided to take a bus. We depended totaly on the help of locals, because there are no means how to find out about bus routes and even the streets are not labeled some do not have any name at all.
Luckily there has always been someone willing to help us and no one really cheated on us. It was not that difficult to tell who is going to try to sell you something and who just wants to help you. We went to see the Gate of India and one muzeum. The admission for locals 15 Rs, foreigners 300 Rs... but they recognized ISIC so we could go for 15 Rs! There was a whole bunch of beautiful statues, ivory carvings, pictures and clothes but we would have to pay more to get the permission to take the pictures so no pictures from here, sorry.
In the evening we got into the train without any problem (the only problem was how to fit all our luggage in such a small space) and we even managed to sleep on the way to Hyderabad.
