Alankrita is a guest blogger for the Geography Awareness Week Blog-A-Thon.

Alankrita, daughter of Saraswathi Krishnan, is in class four of The Hyderabad Public School in Hyderabad, state Andhra Pradesh in India. She is eight years old and is a bundle of energy. Her hobby is dancing. She has been learning the classical form of dance called Bharatanatyam for the past 2 years. She is also learning the Kerala martial art called “Kalari”. She enjoys listening to music and entertaining people.

I am going to give you a write up about my visit to Mumbai, as my Dad stays there, and you will read about things you have never heard before.

Let’s begin with my train journey to Mumbai. I slept at 9 pm and got up at 6 am, to see a beautiful scenery and pretty flower beds through the window. It was a pleasant morning. It suddenly was dark inside the train, and there was sunlight again, this kept happening on and off, and I wondered what it was? It was the train passing through the tunnels that are cut through the Western Ghats. They are lit up on both sides, and some of the tunnels are really long. We went through about twenty tunnels and at a distance I could see the Western Ghats. We reached Mumbai around 12.45 pm, and on my way home I could see many huge buildings on both sides of the road. From my bedroom window I was surprised to see many sparrows chirping.

We experienced some street shopping at Fashion street and Linking road. At Linking road, the display of the variety of footwear took us to a different world for a while. My sister and I enjoyed trying out different varieties and ended up picking three pairs for each of us.

Over the week end, we visited a place called Lonavla, three hours drive from Mumbai. It was interesting to visit a wax museum there. The sculptures of many famous people across the world were present, to name a few-Angelina Jolie, Michael Jackson, and from India Kapil Dev and Anna Hazaare. We got to taste the famous sweet called “chikki”, a sweet made with groundnuts, cashew, dry fruits and jaggery. This sweet was prepared to give people energy while the railway track from Pune to Mumbai was being laid.

In Mumbai, we also went to the “Elephanta caves”. On our way to the Elephanta caves there were stalls on both sides. They had things like chimes, coasters, wall hangings, all made up of natural things like stone, wood or shells. We could see the 3 headed sculpture of Lord Shiva. The one hour boat ride from the “Gateway Of India” to the Elephanta island on the Arabian Sea was very soothing and refreshing.

The caves are made up of basalt rocks. One shop that had plain ordinary looking rocks attracted my attention. I asked the shop keeper, “why he was selling plain dull looking rocks”? He then opened a rock into two pieces, and I was shocked to see some shiny stones inside. He then explained, how many semi precious stones lie in these caves. We got to see amethyst and jade.

My trip to Mumbai was awesome, and I felt I should travel to different places to learn about many more things, and explore the world.