First Morning in Mumbai

At 9 AM I took a taxi back to the Regency Gate, the hotel I had actually booked. Five hours of sleep in an unfamiliar room, and now the original room was ready. I moved in, drew the curtains, and slept again. The logic of arriving somewhere after 24 hours of travel is that the first day is not really a day. It is a recovery exercise that you dress up as tourism.

By early afternoon I was out. The Gateway of India first, the great basalt arch built in 1924 to commemorate the visit of King George V, standing at the edge of the harbor with the Arabian Sea behind it. The monument itself has a lot of competition for your attention: boat-tour touts, balloon sellers, families queuing for photographs, pigeons working the flagstones with professional efficiency. I walked through it and down to the waterfront, then cut back through the Colaba neighborhood and on to the Sassoon Docks.

The Sassoon Docks are one of Mumbai’s oldest fish markets, built in the 1870s for the city’s Koli fishing community, and they have been operating more or less continuously ever since. In the early morning the catch comes in by boat and the quay becomes a fast-moving operation of baskets, ice, and sorting. I arrived in the afternoon when the rush was over, but the scene was still worth the detour: the light on the water, the colored boats, the texture of a working dock that has not been tidied up for visitors.

Another nap. Dinner at a small place a few streets from the hotel. In bed by 9 PM.

Twenty-four hours after leaving Stockholm I had covered roughly 7,200 kilometers, been refused a hotel room in the middle of the night, slept in two different beds, and still managed to see three neighborhoods of a city I’d never visited before. Mumbai sets a pace. You either keep up or you don’t.

← PreviousNext →

India and Sri Lanka 2026 — all posts