Travels in India, 2016 - Bombay's Buildings & Beaches (& A Charity Shop Bargain)

If you hadn't already noticed I'm more than a bit obsessed with Mumbai, so here's the vintage sheepskin I found for a £1 in a charity shop yesterday if you're bored with the travelogue.

The heat of India seems but a dim & distant memory today, its blinking freezing!

On our third day in Mumbai we ate Achoori eggs for breakfast - a Parsi dish of scrambled eggs with chilli, coriander and green mango. So good that my toes still curl at the memory.

Armed with a page torn from an ancient Lonely Planet we took their suggested heritage walk. If you're a fan of Victorian architecture you could spend hours drooling over the (mostly) wonderfully preserved Bombay Gothic masterpieces.

Majestic House, Colaba & the Rajabai Tower (inspired by London's Big Ben)

The Police headquarters & the University of Bombay library.

The David Sassoon Reading Rooms & Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation Building

(See loads more photos HERE)

If I ever come into loads of money this Marine Drive mansion (or one very similar), opposite the Gateway on India will be mine

St Thomas's Cathedral was built by the British in 1718 for employees of the East India Company.

It looks almost identical to our parish church. Strange to see something so quintessentially British so far from home.

We spent ages reading the carved stone memorials from the eras of East India Company rule and of the British Raj, many with incredibly graphic descriptions of men being "barbarously tortured to death" or "submitting to the ferocity of the sun", of entire families submitting to cholera & typhoid or of dying on the boat on their journey to start a new life. The memorial in the centre is for a former British governor of Varanasi, the carving is how he would have looked, as he'd converted to Hinduism to marry an Indian woman.

There's more to Mumbai's architectural heritage than Bombay Gothic. Mumbai is said to have more Art Deco than anywhere else in the world.

Many of these buildings were on busy roads so I risked life and limb trying to capture them!

The Lonely Planet estimated our walk would take a couple of hours but it took us five. Not many Westerners tend to wander far from their hotels and, being a bit of a novelty, we were asked to pose for loads of pictures. Over the years I think Jon & I must have appeared in thousands of Indian photo albums and Facebook pages.

There's plenty of distractions along the way, impromptu market stalls and street cats to name but a few.

On a Sunday several of the art galleries (Mumbai has a hugely popular arts scene) sell works by local artists from the pavements outside.

After a siesta we did what thousands of Mumbaikers do and headed to Chowpatty beach to watch the sunset.

We simply had to stuff our faces with Mumbai's most popular street food (and our very favourite spicy snack), bhelpuri.

Rich or poor, Chowpatty Beach is the place to be. Nobody needs money to enjoy the sunset.

Some of these children have very little, not even a pair of shoes to their name, but look at the joy on their faces.

After posing for yet more photos with friendly strangers we made our way to Marine Drive, returning to Basilico as the food the night before was just so good.

Its business as usual for us, we're trading with Judy's at Bristol on Saturday (HERE) & Cardiff on Sunday (HERE). Come and see us and I promise we'll try not to bore you with travel tales!