Mumbai: Elephanta Island and Bollywood

This morning I went to the Gateway of India in Mumbai, which is next to the famous Taj Mahal Palace hotel, to catch the 9 am ferry for 290 rupees to Elephanta Island.

The island is home to the ancient Caves, which are temples carved into the rock. The caves have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987 and are estimated to have been built between the fifth and eighth centuries. The main sculpture is the gigantic Trimurti Sadashiva, a 6 metre figure with the three faces of the god, representing creation, preservation and destruction.

There used to be a big stone elephant that led the Portuguese to name the island after it, but it fell into the sea when the Portuguese tried to take it with them, and centuries later it was rescued by the British and is now in a museum.

On site there were a bunch of security guards going around acting as photographers, taking elaborately staged photos to earn a bit of extra money from tips.

After exploring the island, I went back to Mumbai in the early afternoon and went to visit the Cinema Museum, because Mumbai has a huge film industry, Bollywood as it’s known, with big studios.

Then I made my way to the Shri Mahalakshmi Devi Hindu Temple, which was full of people with baskets of flowers and food to offer to the gods. On the way out I ended up stopping at a hole-in-the-wall place to eat a mini pizza called Uttapam, which cost me 100 rupees including tip.

The next stop was the Haji Ali Dargah Muslim mosque, which is right by the sea on a kind of peninsula, where I found a sea of people walking towards it.

After dark I walked the elevated wooden boardwalk at Malabar Hill, which goes through a mini forest and offers views of the Arabian Sea and Chowpatty beach.

I ended the night there walking on the sand, where there were families playing, having picnics, some dipping their feet in the water and others at makeshift restaurants with mats on the floor and waiters with menus in hand taking orders and others with brooms sweeping the table, in this case the mat, every time someone left, so it was clean for the next customer.

The big hit at the stalls was Pani Puri, which is a crunchy snack with a hollow shell (puri) filled on the spot with mashed potato, chickpeas, seasonings (like chaat masala) and a flavoured water (pani), spicy and tangy, made with mint, tamarind and spices, which is served and eaten in one go, giving an explosion of flavours and textures.