Welcome to India!
If anyone was to ask me how long I have been in India, I would have to think pretty hard, honestly it feels like weeks, months a lifetime…. 5 days into our trip going over what we have seen, eaten, spent and endured we can only hold our breath and prepare for the unexpected! Mumbai is definitely the most insane place I have ever been, after our long flight on Air India ( which graciously prepared us for our Indian experience) a long wait for our huge backpacks and then being litterally pushed into the smog filled, mosquito infested streets of uptown Bombay I asked myself, was I scared? hell yeh! Our first two hotels (if you can call them that) were pretty basic. Hotel Samrat, the first stop welcomed us by a huge foreign guy projecting curry flavoured vomit on to our door at 2 am thursday morning. Our porter/manager/cleaner/chef casually stepped over him and ushered us into our fairly large but severly grim room, but we slept well 
Mumbai is a difficult place to describe. Kim and I spent the first 24 hours hardly saying a word to eachother, simply taking in all the madness through my over tierd and increasingly dirty spectacles…….Once settled however the charm of this cosmopolitan melting pot of 1st class hotels, third world slums, and millions of people is truely indearing. We became settled and comfortable in our hotel and surrounding areas, the food is delicious, but paying its toll…curry everyday for 3 months???? can we do it? The people if not a little aggressive will and do go out of their way to help, and we have met so many cool and well traveled people.
We are now in Aurangabad, and let me tell you when we first arrived after a 8 hour train ride I seriously thought I would never say a good thing about this place. The harassment we endured trying to find a hotel, and the dangerously high level of pollution hanging in the air was enough to make kim and I think “lets go!!” But we have come to accept that the fear will and does subside, and there are two sides to every coin…..well lets hope so! After being scared to death by a dog, starred at by everyone in sight and coming close to being hit by the maniac tuc-tuc drivers we found a wonderful haven, in the smokey miriage of Hotel Shree Maya. This is 5 star luxury to us, we have a toilet with a flush, a shower that produces more than just a drip of freezing water and a group of really nice people to hang out with!
India is proving a difficult but truely rewarding place to roam, Kim and I have experienced so much in so little time, I can only grin with excitment thinking of what is to come……
(I apologise for my spelling and grammatical errors….I am on a tight time scale and the heat has caused my hands to swell….I hope you catch my drift!) I am going to try and upload some photos so click on the link for some visual stimulation)
