Wandering around South Bombay

Today I will start from Churchgate Station. Lets assume that we start there at around 10.30 a.m. Anytime before you'd have been crushed by the peak time crowd of about a million people pouring out of the station. I would start the day with some exotic tea at Cha Bar in the Oxford Bookstore. From there I would cross the green CCI cricket maidan and head to the Prince of Wales Museum. This should complete the first half of my day.

After lunch at again any of the faboulous restaurants in this area, I would make my way towards Navy Nagar. A beautiful Navy Colony area, as the name suggests, this is again a fantastic place to just walk away the lunch. And in this can be thrown in a visit to the fabulous Afghan Church, built as a memorial to soldiers who fought in Afghanistan!!!

From here walk back towards Nariman Point, the commercial headquarters of Mumbai, and land up at the Oberoi's (Hilton today) from where the Queen's necklace as Marine Drive is described starts. Across Oberoi is the NCPA & Tata Theatre, the first experimental and the second commercial theatre. There is no beach in Mumbai, just a small patch at Chowpatty, which is 2 kms or so down the road. This I guess more or less covers the beautiful haunts of South Mumbai. I would have in some part of the day found time for tea at the very feudal Tea Centre near Churchgate station, sampled the Bhelwala opposite the station and tucked in chilly ice cream or fresh fruit and cream at Bachelor's opposite Chowpatty.

The sights left would be the very posh Malabar Hills & Kemps Corner localities where the famous Hanging Gardens are located and they do warrant a half a day walk around. Then there is the famous Mahalakshmi temple on the sea shore, the Haji Ali mosque at Haji Ali, the beautiful Worli Race course and the Planetorium at Worli and of course the Siddhivinayak temple at Prabhadevi. All these provide a slice of life from Mumbai rather that being places of tourist interest. Dadar is the best area to find outlets for authentic Maharastrian and Konkani cuisine and also offers crowded roadside shopping experiences.

Bandra has the Mount Mary Church and the lovely sea promenade at Carter Road. Bandra and Khar are also the shopping areas and Linking Road is the primary shopping centre.

Mumbai offers great night life in South Mumbai as well as in Bandra and Andheri West localities which have some famous pubs.

South Central Mumbai which is also a part of town, is an area which has textile mills converted to Mall complexes as well as trading markets (textile, gold and others) which I don't find interesting but maybe of interest to others.

And here,my dear friends, we draw to the close of `Sights of Mumbai', my virtual tour of my favourite city.