2015 ADVENTURE – PART 8

I can’t imagine two more different cities than Singapore and Mumbai.  It may well be the financial capital of India, but Mumbai leaves quite a different impression with the first-time visitor: filth, decay, chaos, and poverty.  Walking through the streets, one is overwhelmed by sights, smells, oppressive heat, and the ear-splitting cacophony of car horns.  Crossing the street is a risky venture to say the least.  The rule is: if you walk, vehicles may slow down; if you run, you’re target practice!

About 19 million people live in Mumbai.  That’s more than half the population of Canada shoe-horned into a space - 440 square kilometres - less than one-tenth the size of Prince Edward Island!  The ultra-rich and the poorest of the poor live next door to one another.  One of the richest men in India lives with his family in a 24-floor skyscraper while, less than a kilometre away, people live in cardboard shacks with plastic tarpaulins for roofs.

We spent two days in Mumbai.  Our first day there, we took a Holland America tour to visit the Elephanta Island Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site with a Hindu temple dedicated to the deity, Shiva.  The largest of the temples measures 40 metres x 40 metres x 4 metres, carved into solid volcanic rock, features magnificent carvings of ancient Hindu mythology.

We were told that 1,300 people live on the island, with no electricity and few prospects.  Islanders eke out a living by selling trinkets, mangy dogs wander everywhere and cattle have the run of the place.  The site has great potential as a tourist attraction, but it’s just another sad reminder of just how far behind the rest of the world India really is.

On day 2, we took another tour called A Day in the Life: Mumbai on the Move.  Our excellent tour guide and bus driver took us through downtown Mumbai, pointing out the more significant buildings, many of them dating from the British colonial era.  We visited Mahatma Ghandi’s Bombay house, an interesting memorial to one of the nation’s founders before making our way to a city train station.

Here, we were introduced to one of the world’s most amazing businesses: lunch box delivery by a guild of men called the dhobi-wallah.  Every day, 5,000 dhobi-wallah pick up and deliver 200,000 hot lunches from people’s homes to their workplaces.  The door-to-door service involves transport on foot, by bicycle and by train, with several transfer points along the way.  Each lunch box is coded.  The error rate is 1 in 6,000,000, meaning that only one lunch box per month, on average, ends up in the wrong place!

After a short ride on one of the city’s trains, we stood at a overpass and looked down on a spectacle straight out of the Dark Ages: the Dhobi Ghat.  Here, much of Mumbai’s laundry is washed, dried and ironed, before being returned to homes, hospitals, restaurants, and hotels.  As with the lunch box system, it’s a door-to-door service, performed exclusively by a guild of men, all of them migrant workers from outside the city.  They work seven days a week in conditions that are unimaginable, live on-site in hovels perched around the perimeter of the site, and go ‘home’ once or twice a year to help with the harvest or attend a wedding or funeral.

The concrete structures in the centre of the photo are cement laundry ‘tubs’.  The tin-roofed structures are living quarters.

Mumbai was just too much for me.  While some people marvelled at how “it all seems to work”, I couldn’t get the images of misery and hopelessness out of my mind.  And, we didn’t even get to see the slums.

After three days at sea, we sailed into the port of Salalah, second largest city of Oman.  It was the main trading point on what was called the Frankincense Trail, named for the highly-prized aromatic resin used in religious rituals and healing.  The Sultan of Oman, Qaboos, lives here in his palace during the summer months, presumably to escape the heat of Muscat.

From the ship, all you can see are container ships and the huge cranes that unload them.  It’s clear from these and the frantic construction activity around the port that this is a country on the move economically.  We drove to the centre of the dust-dry city.  Judging by the size of the new houses we passed along the way, there is tremendous wealth here. 

While the women indulged themselves at the souk, I walked along the main street.  One whole side of it is being razed to make way for a seaside tourist development, an area three blocks wide by two kilometres long.  I’d say that, within two years, the whole area will be covered with high-end resorts.

One of the few traditional tourist attractions near Salalah is the tomb of Job, the long-suffering Old Testament prophet admired by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.  Along the way there, the terrain changed from flat, dry desert to hill country, interspersed with deep ‘wadis’: valleys or canyons in our parlance.

Our taxi driver, Mohammed, proudly showed off his family’s camel herd.

After leaving Salalah, we sailed through the Arabian Sea and past the Horn of Africa before entering the Red Sea.  On March 20, not far off the starboard side of the MS Rotterdam in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, 137 people were murdered while at prayer when two suicide bombers blew themselves up.  It’s tempting to say of the warring Muslim sects: “Let them kill one another if that’s what they want to do!  Why should we care?”  Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.  Just two days before, 19 cruise ship passengers visiting a museum in Tunis - people just like us - were gunned down by the same group that took credit for killing the worshippers in Sanaa.

We stepped ashore in Aquba, Jordan’s lone port city, and boarded a bus for Petra.  Our guide reminded us that the country is an oasis of relative calm bordered by countries that are unstable or hard to get along with, or both: Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestine Territory, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.  Jordan, with 7 million residents, also provides shelter to 4 million refugees, mainly Syrians and Iraqis.

Since the Arab Spring uprisings and the advent of the Islamic State, tourism has nosedived by at least 80%.  Plans for economic development have been put on hold as the country is forced to turn its attention to military priorities.  I’m reminded of the horrific image of the caged Jordanian pilot burned to death by Islamic State butchers.  The Jordanians are a brave and determined people and represent the only hope for peace and civility in this war-torn region.

Ah, Petra!  One of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, and on my bucket list.  Pictures cannot describe what we saw.  At its height, around the time of Christ, Petra was one of the most important cities in the region.  It was home to some 30,000 people who enjoyed a relatively high standard of living.  Of the many monuments hand-carved out of solid rock to serve as tombs for Nabatean rulers, the Al-Khazneh (aka the Treasury) is the most recognizable.  Note the difference in colour of the sandstone in these two photos taken two hours apart.

To get to and from it, you walk through the As-Siq, a 1.2-kilometre-long deep, narrow gorge of red sandstone cliffs soaring above to a height of 80 metres.

The theatre, also carved out of solid rock, could hold about 7,000 spectators.

The largest of the royal tombs is called the Urn Tomb.  The colours are incredible.

To see Petra properly would have taken two or three days; we had about three hours!  Just the same, it was one of the highlights of our trip!