Caleb and I visited several places in North India on our initial 2024 Circumnavigation Tour. We went to Amritsar, Agra, and Delhi, before heading into Nepal. India can be overwhelming as I described here. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to return in 2025. One of the positive traits I described about India was the overwhelming friendliness and genuine excitement that people expressed in welcoming us as foreign visitors. Caleb and I met so many kind friends, especially on our train from Amritsar to Agra. One of those friends enthusiastically encouraged us to come visit Maharashtra, the province around Mumbai, India (Bombay).

India is such a diverse place, in terms of religion, culture, language, food, and so many other things that a visit to South India would provide quite a different experience. It’s people that always really make the difference, though. So when our friend invited us to visit Mumbai, that sealed the deal. Perhaps I would take the ferry from Sri Lanka and then take trains up through Kerala and Goa, and end up in Mumbai. Eventually, our incredibly generous friend even offered to host me at her family’s home for several days. I then excitedly scrapped plans to visit other places and figured I would just spend my entire India stay savoring the very special opportunity to visit a family and see what life was really like for people in their part of the world. They would show me the tourist sites in their area, but I had been touring for so long that I was far more enthusiastic about just sharing some time with a family. So I arranged to fly directly to Mumbai from Sri Lanka, and directly from Mumbai to Bahrain. I would spend the entirety of my time in India with my generous friends.

Those best laid plans came crashing down the night before I arrived in Mumbai. My friend informed me that her grandmother in Bangalore was gravely ill, and that her entire family would be going that way to visit her the following day. Of course, family emergencies happen. I did the best I could to express my sincere sympathy, and hide my selfish, personal disappointment. Family matters like this are of utmost importance, and I would never want the generosity of this offer to be tinged by feelings of guilt over superseding it with a family obligation.

Even with complete understanding and sympathy for the family, I was deeply disappointed – not that they chose to go to Bangalore to be with their relative, but that I would miss out on the opportunity for a unique experience. After all, this was the real reason I had planned to come to Mumbai at all, let alone spend a week there. I had been lazy in my planning, figuring I would not be controlling my schedule these days anyhow. When I had researched Mumbai, though, I hadn’t seen more than a couple of days worth of things I would do there.

Further, my impression of Mumbai was that it would be a massive press of people, in the heat of the monsoon season, loaded with all of the overwhelming negative aspects of India I described from my first visit – lack of respect for personal space; complete disregard for rules of order or queues, filth, poor infrastructure, those sorts of things. So what was I going to do for a week in the largest city in the most populous country in the world with only a handful of mediocre tourist attractions? I left my room in Sri Lanka without even knowing where I would sleep for the night. It felt overwhelming – like India can be.

The overwhelming feeling didn’t subside when I got off of the plane in Mumbai. As soon as I left the airport, I was overwhelmed by cabs. The airport was complicated enough that I couldn’t even figure out how to get out of it. Once I finally escaped, I saw that the exit points were so far from one another than I had doubled the distance I needed to walk by arriving at the more distant terminal. Perhaps I could find a bus…. I couldn’t find where to get on the bus I needed. There were several bus stands in and around the airport, but I could not figure out which one the bus I needed used. I could have gotten a cab, but the overwhelming pressure of the cabbies didn’t even give me time to think about what it should cost.

I decided I would use InDrive or Uber to call a rickshaw, but I needed to get away from the airport to be able to even think about that. After all, I couldn’t even figure out where in the airport I was supposed to meet the ride sharing app drivers. The rides would be substantially cheaper, not to mention easier to meet once I was away from the airport. So I set off following the walking directions for a hostel I had booked for one night en route. Before long, I was walking on the lower levels of a multi-lane highway as the sky began to darken. Cars and rickshaws zoomed by within a foot or so of me. A pool of mud, stagnant water, and trash prevented me from walking any further from the traffic. Still, I received constant shouts of offers for cabs that I knew I could not trust. Along the muddy side of the road there were shops selling who knows what, right there in the grime. It was, once again, overwhelming. The smell was overwhelming. The filth was overwhelming. The whole situation seemed overwhelming.

When describing a person’s wrecked or chaotic life, women these days often will say, “She’s just a ‘hot mess.’” I could not think of a better way to describe my situation. It was a hot mess, and here I was in India, which also could be very literally described as a hot mess. I had spent much of my time in Sri Lanka irritated by the constant money grubbing and swindling. That certainly would not abate in India. The cleanliness and excellent air conditioning that awaited in Bahrain and Doha were an attractive light at the end of the tunnel. But what would I make of this hot mess of Bombay in the meantime?