We have an evening flight from Kuala Lumpur to Mumbai, so it made sense to take it easy in the morning and utilise the hotel room to the max before checking out at 1200. We basically had to kill a large part of the day. We left our luggage at the hotel and went wandering around the malls.
After yesterday’s so-so massage, we tried a different place today. I opted for a pressure point massage as I didn’t want to be greasy all the way until landing in Mumbai. It turned out to be one of the best massages I’ve ever had. Very strong. The Malay masseur told me it was a Chinese-style massage but it seemed quite Thai to me.
Our airline-provided transport for 1600 was about 20 mins late. We met with very heavy rain on the way and the journey to the airport took over an hour.
We had a little time to kill after check-in before our 1945 flight. We went to the gate at which our friends Phil & Kim would disembark from their flight from Europe but we didn’t run into them.
Our flight to Mumbai was on a very new Boeing 777. Kim and I enjoyed a nice chicken curry and a tandoori fish, swapping halfway. There was a further vegetarian option.
We circled around the darkness of the Arabian Sea off Mumbai for quite a while before coming into land slightly late. Our aircraft parked at the furthest gate by the airport fence so it was a long walk to immigration. The queue was long but processing was reasonably fast.
We bought a taxi voucher from the counter before hopping into a small aircon hatchback. The counter staff told Kim not to give the voucher to the driver until we arrival at the destination. But once inside the car, the driver asked for the voucher and Kim handed it over without question. The driver walked away and cashed it for his payment immediately before coming back to drive us to our hotel. Fortunately, we arrived at our hotel without any hassles, after nearly an hour.
Even though this was my third time in India, it is still a shock to the senses looking out the window of the taxi on the first day. There were people sleeping outside shacks on the roadside with dumpsters nearby.
Reasonably-priced accommodation in convenient areas were hard to find in Mumbai. So we had booked an old simple place called Hotel Bentleys in Colaba. The room was large and it came with a newly-tiled bathroom. It will do for three nights, which is just two full days. We settled in to sleep quickly but the nightclub opposite and blaring car alarms didn’t help.