Mumbai for Foreign Tourists

Mumbai for International Tourists — The Full Picture

Mumbai rewards curious travellers. It's a city that doesn't reveal itself immediately — its beauty is in the layers. The grandeur of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel standing beside the Gateway of India; the incredible human choreography of a rush-hour local train; the smell of Irani chai and bun maska in a 100-year-old café in Fort; the way the city lights up Marine Drive at night like a string of diamonds laid along the sea.

Why Mumbai is unlike any other city in the world

Mumbai is the city of maximum contrasts: extreme wealth and extreme poverty existing within metres of each other; the world's most expensive private residence (Antilia) visible from Asia's largest informal settlement (Dharavi); Bollywood's global glamour produced in the same city where the Dabbawala delivers your office lunch with six-sigma efficiency. To visit Mumbai is to understand India — in all its beautiful, bewildering, wonderful complexity.

Using Mumbai96 as an international visitor

Mumbai96 is a platform built by Mumbaikars — designed to help anyone find exactly what they need in this vast city. For international tourists, our Mumbai guides provide exact location-wise breakdowns of what to see, eat and experience; and our content is always written from a local perspective, not a tourist-brochure one.

A final word for first-time visitors

Mumbai will probably overwhelm you on arrival. The noise, the density, the heat, the traffic — it's a lot. Give yourself 24 hours to settle in before forming any opinions. Because within a day or two, something shifts — and Mumbai starts to reveal its incredible warmth, energy and generosity of spirit. Most visitors who come for 3 days end up wishing they'd stayed for 7. That's Mumbai for you.