Mumbai

We were in Mumbai for 2 weeks, and we had loads of fun there! It was really hot, so it was really nice after Amritsar, which was quite cold.

We went on so many Rickshaws, which were super cool; they could weave through the traffic that was sprawled (without any lanes) across the road. In India, there are signs on the back of trucks that say ‘horn OK please’, and in Mumbai you can really hear it!

One day, we went on a Dubbawala tour; the Dubbawalas are people who take tiffin lunchboxes to people working in offices – they pick the tiffin up from the office workers houses, deliver it to their offices, pick it up from the offices, and deliver it back to their houses! They are always on time and it is very cheap to hire; the whole company only makes an average of one mistake a month! They are very efficient, and deliver the tiffins on bikes or carts that they push through the roads. Some of the people pushing the carts were really old, but they were still doing it really fast.

They have a code that tells you which office to deliver the lunch to, which makes no sense at first, but is really obvious once you know how it works.

They do the first bit of the journey on the train, and we went with them on it – the normal carriages of the Indian trains are super crowded, but the Dubbawalas have their own carriage so that they can fit their tiffins on board and be safe. I was so surprised when I saw that the doors didn’t close!

If the office workers don’t finish their lunch, then they just have to stick a sticker on it and the Dubbawalas will give the leftover lunch to homeless children. They are also starting to launch a kitchen that will make the office workers lunch for them, instead of someone at their houses making it.

The Dubbawalas tour was really cool and I really enjoyed it!

We went to some of the markets and I bought some bangles and some tops. It was super fun!

We also met some of our family, and we loved hanging out with them! We learnt how to play pickleball with our uncle, and I really enjoyed it. As well as this, we went to our uncles office and learnt about the business he works for, VoltUp, which makes and rents electric battery packs for two and three wheel vehicles, and has lost of stations to charge the battery packs so they are easy to use.

Mumbai also has lots of nice cafes and restaurants and we really enjoyed all of our meals there.

We were in Mumbai on Holi, the festival of colour, so we played Holi (throwing colour powder mixed with water on each other) in a forest. We learnt about all the plants, flowers and berries in the forest; we also learnt about their medicinal properties and how you can use some to make colour. Then we went to some local village people’s house and we ate a traditional lunch. After this, we made Holi colours out of different plants and used these to play Holi! We also played with the villagers’ chicks – they were so cute!

Ishani