Mumbai Tour Guide recommendations

May 17, 2017 2:19 PM

I'm travelling to Mumbai with my partner later this month and we'd like to hire a tour guide for one or two days. We're pretty seasoned travellers, but we don't have a huge amount of time and in particular, we'd like to check out the street food scene, and the fun 'off-the-beaten-track' stuff (we can do the big sites on our own)!

We have a flexible budget. It's not unlimited but I'm willing to spend a decent amount to get someone good.

posted by adrianhon to Travel & Transportation around Mumbai, India (1 answer total)

Response by poster: So we ended up going on four different Reality Tours, and we really enjoyed them. Here's my review I did on TripAdvisor:

My partner and I went on four tours with Reality Tours: The Ramadan tour, Markets & Temples, Street Food, and Dharavi Tour. The guides on each tour were unfailingly helpful and insightful, and had a good rapport with the locals. There was a maximum of one guide between five tourists, which meant we could ask questions easily.

Our highlights were the Markets & Temples tour, which took us through Chor Bazaar and multiple other markets, and the Street Food tour, where we had far too much tasty food! The Dharavi tour - which we initially were reluctant to try out in case it was exploitative - turned out to be incredibly enlightening.

My only criticism was that the special Ramadan tour had too many tourists - about 20 - and while there was something like 5-6 guides for all of us, the large size meant that steering us around the different points of interest was tricky. It also overlapped a bit too much with the traditional Street Food tour.

In any case, I can't recommend Reality Tours highly enough.

posted by adrianhon at 1:09 PM on June 17, 2017