Arrival in Mumbai

Mumbai doesn’t sleep. Traffic jams at 2am. Trucks have no rear lights at night and only move out of the centre of the road when on other drivers flash with their headlights. As we wove through the pitted streets of Mumbai, stray dogs slept in the road, people sat around small fires, traffic swarmed through streets, sensing rather than seeing junctions, forks, turnoffs. Signage seems non-existent.  We bypassed the centre of Mumbai and were soon on the new Pune Expressway – numerous tolls later as we climbed steeply to an old hill-town, the road became strewn with broken down trucks parked haphazardly, broken down buses disgorging passengers on to the road. The hill seemed to weed out those vehicles just hanging on by a thread. My driver coolly wove his way between them all, arriving in Pune and by 5am. That was his second journey to Mumbai yesterday.