Mumbai

The Gateway of India
The Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus
The Prince of Wales Museum

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Mumbai/Bombay

Ancient Bombay

Nowhere reinforces your sense of having arrived in Mumbai, with an MSC Grand Voyages cruise ship, quite as emphatically as the Gateway of India, the city’s defining landmark.
 
Only a five-minute walk north, the Prince of Wales Museum should be next on your list of sightseeing priorities during your cruise to Mumbai, as much for its flamboyantly eclectic architecture as for the art treasures inside.

The museum provides a foretaste of what lies in store just up the road, where the cream of Bartle Frere’s Bombay – the University and High Court – line up with the open maidans on one side, and the boulevards of Fort on the other. But for the fullest sense of why the city’s founding fathers declared it Urbs Prima in Indis, you should press further north still to visit the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), the high-water mark of India’s Raj architecture.

Beyond CST lie the crowded bazaars and Muslim neighbourhoods of central Mumbai, at their liveliest and most colourful around Crawford Market and Mohammed Ali Road. Possibilities for an MSC excursion include a trip out to Elephanta, a rock-cut cave on an island in Mumbai harbour containing a wealth of ancient art. Another great excursion is the Gateway of India. Commemorating the visit of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911, India’s own honey-coloured Arc de Triomphe, the Gateway of India, is Colaba’s principal monument and the landmark most iconic of Mumbai in the Indian imagination.

The aforementioned Prince of Wales Museum of Western India ranks among the city’s most distinctive Raj-era constructions. It stands rather grandly in its own gardens off MG Road, crowned by a massive white Mughal-style dome, beneath which one of India’s finest collections of paintings and sculpture is arrayed on three floors.

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    India

    Colours, flavours and scents
    Colours, flavours and scents

    A holiday to India doesn’t mean visiting a country, but a continent. Stretching from the frozen summits of the Himalayas to the tropical greenery of Kerala, its expansive borders encompass an incomparable range of landscapes, cultures and people.

    Walk the streets of any Indian city and you’ll rub shoulders with representatives of several of the world’s great faiths, a multitude of castes and outcastes, fair-skinned, turbanned Punjabis and dark-skinned Tamils.
    With an MSC Grand Voyages cruise to India, you’ll also encounter temple rituals that have been performed since the time of the Egyptian Pharaohs, onion-domed mosques erected centuries before the Taj Mahal was ever dreamt of, and quirky echoes of the British Raj on virtually every corner.

    The most-travelled circuit in the country, combining spectacular monuments with the flat, fertile landscape that for many people is archetypally Indian, is the so-called Golden Triangle in the north: Delhi itself, the colonial capital; Agra, home of the Taj Mahal; and the Pink City of Jaipur in Rajasthan.
    Rajasthan is probably the single most popular state with travellers, who are drawn by its desert scenery, the imposing medieval forts and palaces of Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Udaipur and Bundi, and by the colourful traditional dress.