Sometimes it’s the little things in India that you start to notice. You notice the fact they never have change, anywhere, for anything. You notice that there’s signs everywhere for “Clean India is Green India” and yet there’s not a single rubbish bin to be found. But perhaps one of the more obvious things you start to notice is that you can walk down the street and in a single stretch of road you will have come across cows, pigs, cats, donkeys, camels, goats and dogs. Animals are everywhere in India, and for a somewhat “animal enthusiast” (read: obsessed with animals and will pat everything she can including a dog who was eating a used diaper), India is a great place to be.
So this is how, after spotting a sign in a trendy little café in Udaipur, we ended up volunteering for half a day at Animal Aid Unlimited.
Volunteering at Animal Aid if not for the faint hearted. It’s not rainbows and puppy dogs. The first dog to come and greet us was missing the majority of his fur from mange (a blood parasite) and his leg was one giant tumor. The next was missing a leg and completely and utterly blind. And so the list went on. Skin diseases, cancers and tumors, disabilities (both mental and physical), injuries and amputations. But while every one of the 200 dogs at the compound had something wrong with them, we could take solace in the fact that they were being cared for, their wounds were being treated and they were happy.
We spent the majority of our visit in Handicapped Heaven, a segregated section where dogs had been hit by cars or been in accidents and no longer had the use of their hind legs. They even had hydrotherapy for the dogs to help try to rehabilitate them. Yup, like occupational therapy for pooches. We spent the other half of the visit bottle feeding one week old calves whose mothers had died from too much plastic ingestion. You heard me. BOTTLE FEEDING BABY CALVES!
Anyway, as great as all that was, there was more to Udaipur than disabled dogs. Udaipur is a stunning little town in Rajasthan, surrounded by stunning lakes, the city is lined with ghats and canals – the true Venice of India. And while that was impressive enough in it’s own right, lets not forget that Udaipur is the home of James Bond’s Octopussy! And you can’t forget that, even if you wanted to, because every single hotel and restaurant played Octopussy every single night at 7:00pm and there are endless photos of Roger Moore’s face littered around the city.
We didn’t really do a whole lot in Udaipur though. There was the main temple – which we didn’t go to because, you know, it’s a temple. There’s the infamous City Palace – which we didn’t go to, because palaces are palaces. There’s the lake – which we could see from our hostel rooftop, so you know, I guess we ticked that off. What we did do was café-hop our way around the city until we eventually hopped our way into an organic vegan restaurant who ran Indian cooking classes.
The next stop was Mumbai. And when we arrived after 17 hours on the sleeper trains, this lovely view greeted us…
Welcome to Bombay, hey?
We quickly moved on to our part of town, Fort and Colaba, and in all honestly, it was absolutely stunning. The streets were clean and relatively quiet, large parks and trees were scattered amongst old colonial buildings and impressive cathedrals. We visited Elephanta Island and Caves, which was enjoyable aside from the fact that the humidity ensured we were saturated at every single moment of the day, the below picture demonstrates our level of enjoyment. Upon heading back to the mainland, we walked for hours, and stumbled across our first beach in months. I can’t say it was the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen, in fact it was average at best, but it was beach nonetheless, and it meant that the South of India was just around the corner for us – it would be nothing but palm trees and mangoes from this point onwards.
We were fast approaching our last night in Mumbai, and what better way to spend it than with our Bombay Besties, Praveer and Gill (the McCleod Ganj guys), at the India Premier League Twenty20. The Mumbai Indians versus the Delhi Daredevils. Now I’ve been to the cricket before in Australia, a number of times in fact, but I had never seen anything like this. The entire crowd cheered for anything and everything. 6 for Delhi – YAY! Wicket for Mumbai – YAY! There was no consistency to their cheering, but in true India style, they just wanted to make noise.
Our final memory of Mumbai was the image of a 200kg drunken middle-aged Indian man leaning over and kissing an injured pigeon. But that’s a story for another time.
allama withabackpack 