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Responsible Travel

Our Top 5 Mumbai Sightseeing Tours of 2019

Guests are always asking us what our most popular Mumbai tours are so here you go! While we are most well-known for our signature Dharavi slum tour,  as you can see we have lots of amazing experiences to offer our guests!  

  1.  Dharavi Tour – An economic powerhouse, a city within a city, the heart of Mumbai – There are many ways to describe Dharavi and we are proud to call it home.  From 2.5-hour slum tours to additional activities like a street art walk, Indian cooking class or pottery workshop, Dharavi has a lot to offer visitors!
  2. Bicycle Tour – Another old favorite!  Our Mumbai bike tour has been running for 10 years and is a wonderful way to start the day.  Peddling down the streets of Colaba, feeding cows at a shelter and watching Marine Drive come alive gives you an experience like no other.
  3. Street Food Tour – There is no better introduction to a city than through its street food!  Food plays a very important role in Indian culture and is the backbone of many social gatherings.  Our visitors love the chance to watch the sunset on Chowpatty Beach while eating delicious snacks. Make sure to come hungry!
  4. Elephanta Caves Tour – One of our newest tours, Elephanta Caves has quickly become a best-seller.  A gorgeous ferry ride on the Arabian Sea, a walk through 1500 year old cave temples and lunch at a local family home combine to make this tour the perfect day trip from Mumbai!
  5. Public Transport Tour – From buses to trains to taxis, we believe that the most memorable way to explore the city is the way that locals do –  by public transport. When in Rome! While our half-day public transport tour has been around for a few years, this year we decided to make it better than ever by offering a full-day version.  Check out the new itinerary here!

We can’t wait to see what 2020 brings.  Stay tuned in and we hope to see you soon!

 

Camera Not OK Please: Why We Don’t Let You Take Photos On Our Slum Tours

Our very first tour of Dharavi was in January 2006; shortly after this, we introduced a ‘No Photography Policy’. Some press coverage had been critical of people going to Dharavi and taking photos, and when we saw the results, we agreed.

Over a decade on and the policy remains unchanged: guests on our educational slum tours are not permitted to take any photos for the entirety of their time with us. In a world where social media likes, shares, and retweets carry such clout, a ‘No Photography Policy’ might seem a bit outdated. Back this up with the old Indian adage that ‘the guest is God’, and the more recent marketing maxim that ‘the customer is always right’, and the policy might not only seem outdated but downright detrimental to our desire to grow our business.

Certainly, not being able to capture and share first-hand the vibrancy of the Dharavi, and Sanjay Colony slums may be a frustration for a minority of our guests. But whilst we want to exceed our guests expectations in every other way, there is another stakeholder group that takes precedence – the slum communities we serve… (more…)

What Would The Neighbours Say? A Study Into Community Perceptions Of Slum Tours In Dharavi

Slum tourism has become extremely popular in the 21st century, especially in Mumbai. With its escalating use, throughout media and existing scholarship slum tourism has generated a heated and critical debate especially concerning ethics and its so-called ‘voyeuristic’ nature. However, scholarly research on slum tourism remains limited and fragmented.

Reality Tours & Travel began, first and foremost, to serve the Dharavi Community. To bring people here to challenge the negative stereotypes they held about ‘slums’ and sensitise them to the multilayered, multifaceted cultures, communities and lives being played out in ‘Asia’s largest slum’. To turn the profits we made from taking these tours into tangible, positive change through our sister-NGO, Reality Gives. (more…)

Further Reading – Six Books To Help You Understand Slums

Salman Rushdie once wrote that “to understand just one life you have to swallow the world“. In Dharavi there’s an estimated one million lives. In Sanjay Colony, there’s a not inconsiderable 50,000.

As we try to convey on our educational tours, these communities are incredibly complex. Whilst the word ‘slum’ evokes a negative view (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition runs to ‘an area of a city where poor people live and the buildings are in bad condition‘) the reality is not so cut and dry. Yes, the challenging conditions show a lack of fairness in our societies and a failure of government  but there are also positive aspects; a strong sense of community, rents which make a rural urban migration possible and the potential for residence to play a part in shaping and moulding their environment.

Slums do not conform to a simplistic Dickensian definition of dirt, squalor and crime; neither should we assuage our sense of guilt at all that we have by romanticising the lives being played out there. The reality is it’s far more nuanced. To that end, here’s a few books straight from the Reality bookshelf which might help shape your understanding of what is an incredibly complex topic.

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What The Dabbawallahs Of Mumbai Can Teach The World About Sustainable Business

Freshly cooked dalokra, rice and roti are packed safely into a metal tiffin when the doorbell rings. A white capped dabbawallah is anxiously waiting for the lunchbox but he is sure to flash a smile before he speeds away on his bicycle.  At the local train station, he adds six more lunch boxes to a wooden plank that is hoisted onto his colleague’s head. It weighs 65 kilograms (143 pounds). Fighting the remainder of rush hour commuter traffic, the second dabbawallah steps into the luggage compartment of a Mumbai local, sets his cargo on the ground with the help of two colleagues and chats idly as the train pulls out of the station.
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Five TED Talks We Love, And Why We Love Them

Since 1984 ‘Technology, Entertainment, Design’ (more commonly known the world over as ‘TED’) have been sharing ‘ideas worth spreading’ relating to all things, from education to business, science to development. In the last 30 years, they’ve shared over 2,400 talks in more than 100 languages which have been viewed 500 million times.

These talks are a regular source of ideas, information and inspiration here in the Reality Group office – here are a few we love, and why we love them. (more…)

Is There A Right Way To Respond To Begging?

Mumbai, a city of over eighteen million people, is home to an estimated 300,000 ‘beggars’, people who survive by asking others for money or food in public spaces. Many are children, female or the elderly. A large number are physically maimed. From the bona fide Mumbaikar to the tourist in India for the first time, having to come face to face with this side of the city on a daily basis can, and should, be a cause of great distress, concern and reflection. (more…)

Useful Apps To Help You Make The Most Of Your Trip To India

India is a vast and vibrant country with endless experiences available wherever you look and a culture that is truly unique. Many travelers flock to this birthplace of spirituality, home of mouth-watering cuisine and endless geographical beauty.

However, with so much to experience and such a different way of life to the one visitors are used to, many tourists struggle to navigate the frantic, occasionally over-crowded and somewhat stuffy life that mother India has to offer them. Fortunately, using these five apps can significantly improve your time spent in this wonderful country and help you get around easily and problem free. (more…)

How Seneca Can Prepare You For India

India will not be what you expect. You will meet people that are friendlier and more generous than you ever thought possible. You will taste foods so delicious you’ll begin to wonder why Indian food isn’t everyone’s favourite. You will see sights so beautiful that they will remain embedded in your memory for the rest of your life. But you’ll also have to overcome challenges so great that many travellers write off India entirely. Logistically, you will face a myriad of transportation issues. Culturally, you will have some of your most basic assumptions about life and society come into question. And throughout your visit, a thousand and one things will threaten to make you sick. Your time in India will be uncomfortable in one way or another, but these challenges and the beautiful moments that inevitably follow are precisely why we travel: to get out of our comfort zone, challenge ourselves and broaden our worldview. Recognizing this goal and preparing yourself for the challenges that you will inevitably face can dramatically improve how much you enjoy your trip. The first century Stoic philosopher, Seneca, is the unlikely guide to the importance of mentally preparing for your trip. (more…)

Celebrating 10 Years in Dharavi

On January 4, 2016 Reality Tours and Travel celebrated 10 years of working in Dharavi. To mark the occasion, we’ve created a video that looks at the different ways in which we have impacted some of the lives of the tens of thousands of people who have been a part of our story.

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Dharavi: A Micro City Within A City

Suraj, one of our senior guides, recently wrote an article about Dharavi for the German magazine, Masala, a publication that aims to build an intercultural bridge from India to Germany.


What is a slum?

I have met many people from all around Mumbai and the world and when I ask them this question, 90 per cent of the time I hear something related to poverty, crime and drugs. I won’t say all of this is false. It may be true for slums in other places but not where I’m from. (more…)

From Dharavi To Smokey Mountain: What It Takes To Run A Responsible Tour Company

Chris Way, co-founder of Reality Tours, takes us through his work with Smokey Tours in Manila and compares it with the challenges he faced in Dharavi.


I have been acting as a Consultant for Smokey Tours since March 2013, when I visited Manila for the first time. Juliette Kwee, from the Netherlands, who was working as a missionary for a Manila based NGO working in the slums, saw the potential of providing slum tours in the area. The benefits that she saw were the obvious ones- employment opportunities for the tour leaders, tour receipts being used directly to help the people in the area, but also, she wanted to be a connecting agent between visitors wanting to help out and organisations doing work in the slums. (more…)

4 Essential Travel Tips From “7 Years In Tibet”

Prison escapes, a forbidden city, treacherously high mountain peaks, ancient belief systems – forget Shantaram, Seven Years in Tibet is the best travel story I have ever read. But while I was impressed by what he saw and learned, it was how Henrich Herrer accomplished these things that stood out to me. The story highlights 4 essential pieces of travel advice that can help us not only travel responsibly, but also get the most out of our trips.


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4 Questions To Quickly Vet Travel Related Organizations

Research is an important aspect of traveling responsibly. If you’re going to support a travel company, whether it’s a hotel or tour operator, you should ideally research them before choosing them. We have created the following list of 4 questions to help guide your research. If it is difficult to find the answers, if the answers are ambiguous or if you don’t like the answers, you might want to reconsider choosing that particular organization.

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Making The Switch To Dharavi: When Adding Value Is Not Just About Profit

Our new CEO, Paul Whittle, discusses what prompted him to leave his comfy job at a major tour operator in London to join us in Dharavi.


“You’re doing WHAT?!”

This sentiment, be it a sense of enduring fascination from friends or a cry of anguish from a long suffering family, has pervaded most of my adult life. Six months after leaving a well paid and highly respectable job in London to go on a bicycle ride from the UK to Turkey this last summer, the exact same reaction was again ringing in my ears. This time two wheels had been exchanged for three as I found myself in a tuk tuk whizzing through the streets of Mumbai to my new home. The daily commute now being to the slightly less luxurious surroundings here in Dharavi, one of Mumbai’s and indeed Asia’s largest slum communities.

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The Danger Of A Single Story: Why Dharavi’s Other Story Needs To Be Told

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

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