AIRPORT: The flight attendant welcomes you to Mumbai; your baggage tag reads BOM: From the moment you land in this city, India’s exhilarating contradictions are upon you. Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport is named for a 17th-century warrior-king lionized by the politicians who renamed Bombay as Mumbai. Forgive them their enthusiasm, and try not to confuse Chhatrapati Shivaji airport with the Chhatrapati Shivaji museum and the Chhatrapati Shivaji train terminus, known earlier as the Prince of Wales Museum and the Victoria Terminus, respectively.
The first challenge of arriving in India is to emerge unbruised from the aircraft. Your fellow passengers will rise to their feet and pull out their luggage sometime between 10,000 feet and the end of the runway. Keep your elbows ready and deplane swiftly if you want to race through customs. Without check-in baggage, this is one of the fastest airports in the world to leave. With baggage, things slow. If your suitcases don’t come, be sure to check if overzealous airport workers have moved them from the belt to the floor. A clever way to pass the time is to stop at duty free and pick up a bottle of Black Label for your local contacts. Nothing delights the Mumbaikar more.
To avail yourself of Gandhi-adorned Indian rupees, use the arrival-area ATMs belonging to ICICI Bank in Terminal 2A or Canara Bank in 2C (or stop on the way to your hotel at one of the many banks lining Mumbai’s major thoroughfares).
When flying out of Bombay, arrive at least two hours early (one hour for business- and first-class travelers). Exploit any chance your airline offers to check in online, select seats and jump into that special queue for the Web-savvy caste. Visit the X-ray line for check-in baggage before graduating to the airline counter, lest you be sent back to the very beginning.
GETTING INTO TOWN: If you want to take the 270-miles-per-hour magnetic-levitation train into town – well, go to Shanghai. In Bombay, you can drive in any way you want – so long as it’s by car. If you’re staying in a nice hotel, it may be worth it to arrange an airport pickup. It will cost you more, but you will appreciate being whisked past the throngs and into a stress-free ride. Or take a taxi, which at the airport cannot be hailed but must be booked at a counter, located in the corridor between the last customs officer and the final exit into the balmy Bombay air. At this pre-paid counter, specify your destination, pay somewhere between $5 and $15, depending on your destination, and you will be assigned a taxi driver and guided in his direction. In the dead of night, the journey to south Bombay, the financial hub known as SoBo to some nostalgic ex-New Yorkers, is 20 minutes; in peak traffic, it can swallow up two hours. NoBo, which has its own share of hotels and is increasingly a second city center, is closer to the airport.
TAXIS: The black-and-yellow taxicabs are a Mumbai institution. They are loud; their doors are typically broken; on mild inclines, their engines are revealed to have less torque than Gandhi’s spinning wheel. But they are everywhere you need them to be, at all hours of night, and they are blissfully cheap. At the end of a ride, be sure to check the mandatory rate card to convert the outdated meter reading into today’s money. The minimum fare is 13 rupees, or about 30 U.S. cents, and for the price of a Heathrow-London taxi ride you could drive halfway to Pakistan. It should be noted that the bumblebee-colored taxis seldom have air conditioning. For longer trips or a drop to the airport, you can book a cooler ride by telephone: Try +91 22 2490 5151 or +91 22 3244 9999 or +91 98211 66890 (or the lattermost’s Web site). Oh, and always get good directions in advance. The drivers, most of them migrants, know less about the roads than you do, even if you’re from Sheboygan. They are not from around here, they will helpfully explain.
PUBLIC TRANSPORT: Bombay’s buses and trains are generally avoided by travelers with limited quantities of time and patience. The best reason to ride them is cultural immersion: They are favored more by journalists and filmmakers than CEOs and bankers. The trains are, hands down, the fastest way to traverse large distances up and down this slender island city. But they are crowded and chaotic, and at rush hour it can be difficult for the uninitiated to embark and disembark without suffering injury. Hop on in nonpeak hours for your own entertainment and education, and you will encounter homemakers chopping vegetables on their way back from work, beggars singing and dancing for spare change and passengers vying stealthily to secure seats. Ladies: Abandon male travel companions and ride in relative comfort in the emptier, more civil women’s compartment.
HOSPITALS: The Breach Candy Hospital is perhaps the most tourist-friendly hospital in the SoBo area, and Lilavati Hospital is a sound choice in the Bandra area of NoBo.
BANKING: The city streets are lined with ATMs with names you will recognize: Citibank, HSBC, Standard Chartered. These – as well as the ATMs of more modern Indian banks like ICICI and HDFC – will accept virtually any bank card. Thomas Cook is a convenient place to change currency.
EATING WELL: Bombay is a town for perceptive tongues. Every flavor on earth can be had here, and at every price point: There are $2 meals and $200 meals, and it is hard to say which taste better. This blog will report regularly on the Bombay dining scene, but here are a few first ports of call, concentrated in the SoBo region where most travelers stay.