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Bollywood flash, big-business glitz and the crushingly poor.
Mumbai is the bubblegum glamour of Bollywood cinema, shopping malls full of designer labels, cricket on the Oval Maidan, promenading families eating bhelpuri on the beach at Chowpatty, red double-decker buses queuing in grinding traffic jams and the infamous cages of the red-light district.
This pungent drama is played out against a Victorian townscape more reminiscent of a prosperous 19th-century English industrial city than anything you'd expect to find on the edge of the Arabian Sea. It's a city with vibrant streetlife, India's best nightlife, and a wealth of bazaars.
Mumbai sprawls across a series of islands jutting out into the Arabian Sea from the west coast of India. Although it feels like a single land mass, the city is criss-crossed by creeks and streams, and large parts of southern Mumbai are built on land reclaimed from Back Bay. The touch of the British Empire is evident in the glorious colonial architecture of the old town at the southern end of the isthmus. Even today, Mumbai seems a world apart from the rest of Maharashtra, despite being the state capital. The old part of Mumbai is concentrated at the southern end of the peninsula. Fort was the centre of the British colonial quarter, served by the docks in nearby Colaba, and the streets are still lined with stately colonial mansions and civic buildings. Travellers gravitate towards Colaba, where you'll find most of the cheap hotels, excellent and inexpensive food and accessible nightlife. Fronting onto Mumbai Harbour are two of the city's best landmarks, the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower (commonly known as the Taj Mahal Hotel). Boats leave from the quayside to Elephanta Island, with its famous Hindu cave temples.
East of Fort is Nariman Point, an upmarket area of modern office towers and government buildings, built on reclaimed land facing onto the Arabian Sea. From here, Marine Drive curls north around Back Bay to famous Chowpatty Beach and the headland at Malabar Hill. Trains from the northern suburbans terminate in Fort at Churchgate Station and Victoria Terminus (aka Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus), perhaps the most distinctive building in all of British India. Long-distance trains run from either Victoria Terminus or Mumbai Central Station, further north, near Tardeo.
To the north are the posh suburbs of Greater Mumbai - Breach Candy, Bandra and Juhu - and also some of the largest slums. Here you'll find the two airports, Chhatrapati Shivaji International and the domestic Santa Cruz. In the far north of Mumbai is Sanjay Gandhi National Park, a vast area of protected woodland home to ancient Buddhist cave temples.
