We woke up and went back to Indigo for Breakfast. The previous day we bought tickets to fly up to Delhi in the evening. We had the day to sightsee in Bombay and we hired a taxi driver to take us around all day and then drop us off at the airport.
Before we got our taxi driver we had two boys following us around. They were both named Ganesh. They wanted us to buy them some rice. They would say they didn’t want money but would take us to the store and then say what they wanted us to buy rice. Anyway, the rice was 400 rupees ($9.00). I said we couldn’t afford that much for rice. And ended up getting them a 100 rupee bag. A lady tried to get us to buy her baby formula right after that. She waited for thirty minutes outside an internet café for us.
On our tour we drove by a “Tower of Silence” we didn’t really understand what our taxi driver was saying about it. He would make a pinching motion on his arm and point to the top of a hill. The smell around the place was awful and it seemed eerie but we didn’t know why. As the taxi was coasting past the tower a woman with palsy was walking up the side of the road. She was hunched and deformed. She reminded me of igor or some mad scientists maid. It added to the eeriness.
After returning home we looked it up and this is what is said about the tower:
Zoroastrians consider a dead body - as also cut hair and nail-parings - to be nasu, unclean. According to tradition, the purpose of exposure is to preclude the pollution of earth or fire (see
Zam and Atar respectively). Corpses are therefore placed atop a tower and so exposed to the sun and to birds of prey. Bodies are arranged in three rings: men around the outside, women in the second circle, and children in the innermost ring. The ritual precinct may only be entered by a special class of pallbearers. Once the bones have been bleached by the sun and wind, which can take as long as a year, they are collected in an ossuary pit at the center of the tower and/or are eventually washed out to sea. -Wikipedia
Our taxi driver took us to the place where they do laundry. We were up on an overpass and looking over what I first thought was a shanty town. It was actually little shops and tubs of water lined up and clothes hanging on lines everywhere. They did the hospitals and hotels laundry. It looked absolutely filthy.
We went to the home where Ghandi lived when he was in Bombay. It’s now a museum.
Landi temple. There was a long bazaar leading up to the temple and the vendors were selling flowers and coconuts and sweets that you could offer at the temple. We had to leave our shoes and go into the temple barefoot. Men went on the right side and women went in on the left side. They would hand the priests the offering and then exit.
We made it to the airport and waited for our flight in the evening to Delhi. I do not like the spacing on Indian airlines. My legs would not fit. I was absolutely out of it. I wanted to sleep and I was cold and I ended up driving Sarah crazy by trying to use the scarf she was wearing as a blanket.
We got off the plane and pre-paid for a taxi to the YMCA. We didn’t have a place reserved in Delhi for a hotel so we chose one out of our guide book. Once we got into our taxi and had just left the airport the taxi driver and his friend started berating us about not having correctly paid for the taxi. We had our receipt that showed we had paid everything. He just kept saying that we hadn’t paid the “Gorman Pay”(Government Pay). I tried arguing with him. But we just ended up scared and frustrated. At first we thought we hadn’t pre-paid correctly. We told him to take us back to the airport so we could pay the “Gorman Pay.” We had barely left the airport and they said it would be 70 kilometers to get back. Then he said, “You pay us now 1000 rupees or 100 Dollars.” I was being extremely logical in my anger and said, “I’d rather pay you 1000 rupees than a hundred dollars.” They kept berating us for having paid incorrectly and lamenting that they wouldn’t get paid because of it. Finally, at a standstill we all sat in frustrated silence. Breaking the silence he asked if we wanted to buy some hash. They took us to the YMCA and were still asking for the money as we got out. I paid them 200 rupees and walked away.
The YMCA was a mess. There were fireworks going off all night long and someone rearranging the furniture in the adjacent room in the middle of the night and then construction started right above us in the morning. It was like a war at the YMCA. It wasn’t fun to stay at the YMCA.
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