Beach o’clock in Mumbai. Too bad its Beaches aren’t for swimming

F**k. After two days in Mumbai I’m down with cold. My body temperature goes high. My chest gets heavy. I cough incessantly. It must be the Mumbai air. Gotta find something to blame on, hey:-) It’s just too foggy and smoggy. I stay in bed the whole day while Ben goes out exploring the city. Urghhh… I hate to be sick. Well, who likes to be sick anyway?

Late afternoon Ben comes back to the hotel with paracetamols and antibiotics. Bless him. I still feel bad the next day but I’m not wasting another day in bed. We go out.

My walks get a bit blurry. I’m feeling very rough. What a nasty fever and chesty cough, especially when on holiday.

Still, I’m not sure when I’d be coming back to Mumbai. So better make the most out of my rough day strolling the beaches around Mumbai.

We start with Dadar Beach. It used to look like a huge dumpster a few years back. But after a year-long clean-up effort in 2016-17, with 400 tonnes garbage fished out of the water and beach, it now looks much better for a stroll. Or sit down, watch the wave coming from under the Bandra-Worli Sea Link Bridge. I’d still not gonna swim in its water anytime soon, though.

On the same “fevering” day, we wade through Mumbai’s notorious traffic to its famous Juhu Beach, the playground of the rich and famous. We don’t spot any though. Or may be we just don’t know any rich and famous person.

Juhu also fell victim to human follies in treating seas and oceans as dumpsters. And dumpster it became. Luckily civil people were still around. They rallied the cleaning up effort.

The effort paid off. Tens of thousands of tonnes of garbage collected from the water & its 6km shoreline. Today it looks swimmable. And I see some people playing in the water. Only that I still won’t go playing in its water so soon.

Juhu reminds me of Kuta in Bali. The waters and sands are almost similar in colours, murky-ish & darkish respectively. And the wave is like “Kuta Wave”. The only difference – Juhu Beach is on the Arabian Sea shore while Kuta Beach is on the shore of Indian Ocean.