Fili’s world

Last days of the trip I spent rediscovering Mumbai, which I kind of ran away from in my first day in India, hoping to catch a more relaxing country-side beach-side chillout. To get a good overview of Mumbai, my dad resulted to having a private tour-guide join us, who thankfully was English fluent and quite friendly and helpful in meeting our strange requests.

We started our day at the northern outskirts of Mumbai, visiting some of the local churches, sea-side views and local dirt-museums. 

After some breakfast and photo-shooting we headed down to the Gateway of India…

From which we took a boat ride to the lovely Elephanta Island Caves…

The island is quite beautiful, and a pleasure to walk around in. 

Once on the island, there’s a long road going up to the mountain caves, with merchants and small shops selling all kinds of tourist souvenirs. The caves themselves, although in a somewhat rough condition, offered something basic to glance at.

Oddly enough, coming back we set on an exploration of the local Mumbai Jewish heritage with two synagogues, one Israeli culture center and one Sasoon hotel.

And… That was about it for me.

I took the flight back that evening, but my dad stayed another full day with our driver till his night flight the day after, and so we took a 3am rickshaw to the airport, said our farewells to each other and to India and I headed back home exhausted on another wonderful Eva-Air flight.

I don’t think it would come as a surprise to anyone who’s been to India when I say that the day after I came back to Taiwan was one of my best days in Taiwan. Everything looked absolutely gorgeous, and I appreciated Taiwan like I’ve never appreciated it before. It takes places like India to allow you to really get to know where you’re at and appreciate the small pleasures of life. Vacation and all, but damn - India, was I happy to be back. Ironically, the trip to India made me love Taiwan even more.