Welcome to the worst city in either hemisphere

I'd love to begin with how wonderful it felt to be finallyarriving in the exotic, spiritually uplifting city of Bombay, but that would be a huge lie. As the plane cruised into the airport, the six middle aged Australian women (here for The Yoga) sitting in frontof me yelped with glee and swathed themselves with ethnic fabrics, hefty bum-bags and cargo trousers, and talked loudly about 'the magic of India' and 'Mr Iyengar' and 'The Practice'. This is a terrible mistake, I thought and began furiously plotting escape routes back toAustralia. I could stage fake India photos with Indian kids in curry houses and in front of palm trees, and no one would be any the wiser,I thought. I was shitting myself – and I hadn't even eaten a dodgy curry yet. So I looked to my guidebook for solace. The introduction quotes Aldous Huxley who called Mumbai "the worst city in either hemisphere"and travel writer Robert Byron who called it "that architectural sodom" and warns tourists that it is a city to be "endured rather thansavoured" due to overcrowding, heat, pollution and lack of decent hotels in the buget price range. Maybe I could hide under one of the airplane seats and wait for it to fly back to civilisation and airconditioning?Thankfully the Indian gods (Shiva, Ganesh etc) were smiling down on meand I managed to find my hotel taxi driver at the arrivals gate wavinga sign 'Miss Harriss' in amongst a 500-strong swathe of Muslimpilgrims pushing trolleys and shouting at each other. Walking through the carpark I was careful to avoid swarms of vicious looking mosquitos ('A malarial blackspot' said the guidebook) and we began the drive through the chaotic outskirts of the city, past vegetable streetmarkets lit with the fluorescent glow from small shops, buzzing television screens, billboards and garish Hindu shrines strung with fairy lights – and the occasional anorexic cow, loping grandly by theside of the road. Opening the window, I inhaled deeply and rememberedthe familiar stench of human crap and rotting vegetables stewing onwarm tarmac, traffic fumes mingling with spicy woodsmoke and someother more fragrant smell, like cardamon and cloves. Suddenly inflated with a sense of my own importance at being in India all by myself, I leant my head further out of the window to look out at the street andtake in a bit of street life. No sooner did I venture out of the taxiwindow, another car pulled up along side us, rolled down the passenger window and an old woman began explosively vomiting her dinner into thetraffic, about 3 inches from my nose. Ah! There it is, I thought, the Real India.

Reassuringly, the guesthouse was called "Bentley's" and was allcrumbling colonial grandeur with wrought iron spiral staircases, heavy antique wardrobes and threadbare sheets, with balconies where you can eat your morning tray of toast and neon Indian marmalade. There were even flocks of crows that squarked you awake and sang you to sleepevery night. One evening there was a loud flapping/dying sound comingfrom the air conditioning vent outside my bedroom, which went on forabout 5 minutes and then went very quiet. I would like to say I stopped watching MTV India and did something about it, but I didn't.

In spite of my worst fears, life was pretty sweet in Mumbai, hanging around with my new best friend Angus from Australia who I shared the first couple of days of dodging death-by-rickshaw, walkingbarefoot around temples, avoiding paraplegic street children andeating Sikh barbeques by the side of the road. In fact I liked it somuch that I decided to stay an extra night. When I asked the man behind the reception desk if that was OK, he conferred for 5 minutes with a couple of other men in a back room, looked earnestly at hisbook, made a few notes and said 'OK madam I tell you tomorrow, OK?'. I said, 'Can you just tell me now?' and he rested his elbows on the desk, scratched his head some more and said, 'OK, stay' - so i did.