A Visit to the Lungs of the City

🗓 posted Jan 10, 2025 by Josh Erb
🔢 473 words
🏷
a dispatch from: Mumbai, Maharashtra

This week I finally took the time to go on a guided tour of Sanjay Gandhi National Park, the large national park that sits down on top of Mumbai. Our guide was knowledgeable and pointed out where leopards had scratched trees to mark their territory, different plant and insect life[1], and identified different birds by their calls before we saw them. I don't have too much to share aside from pictures and some brief impressions.

Impressions first. This hike was the first time in these past five months of living in the city that I've experienced stillness and quiet. Once you're in the heart of the park, you no longer hear the car horns or the construction. The drone of my apartment's air filters and dehumidifiers became a distant memory. It was a light hike, nothing too strenuous. About halfway through we paused at an overlook and our guide told us that the park is "Mumbai's lungs." The city is so large, so populated, that if the park didn't exist as a huge CO2 sink, the city would probably be uninhabitable.

View from an overlook we paused at.

A fun looking tree. It's bark produces a powder that's reflective in moonlight.

The hike ended at the Kanheri Caves, a cluster of hand-carved caves that were chiseled into the hills by Buddhist monks 2,000 years ago. When you set foot in the caves, you can't help but wonder at the changes that a place can go through with the passing of time. Everything in modern life feels so ephemeral, so contingent and fleeting. But my eyes have seen the work of hands that carved stone before my language existed. Witnessed acts of creation that have survived through millennia.

The interior of a Buddhist temple carved into the hills.

Detail of some of one of the columns in the temple.

Buddha at the entrance. Me for scale.

Met some monkeys on our way out of the park.

After the hike, we grabbed a cab and sat in traffic for an hour (for a ride that's typically 20 minutes) and had lunch at the Tanjore Tiffin Room in Bandra — South Indian food par excellence. The meal was great. They let you sample all of their curries before you order the one you're going to have as your meal.

Photographic evidence of the curry sample platter.

When you move to a new city, one hard part is not knowing how to spend the perfect day when you have the time. After this week, I have a better idea of what one looks like in Mumbai.

  1. One standout observation, which I unfortunately didn't think to take a picture of, was getting to see an antlion larva's pit trap in person.

<< all notes.