2 Best Sights in Mumbai, India

Topped with Moorish domes, Mumbai's finest Victorian building and principal museum houses 30,000 artifacts, divided among art, archaeology, and natural history. While the building is stunning, the artifacts, most of which are extremely interesting, are unfortunately shown in a slightly dusty environment, with less-than-ideal lighting. The picture gallery contains scores of Mughal and Rajput miniature paintings, works by European and contemporary Indian artists, and copies of magnificent cave-temple paintings from Ajanta.

The museum's new name is the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, but no one uses that name, so if you must ask for directions, call it the Prince of Wales Museum.

Children love playing on the "Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe" structure here, at this small park on the eastern side of the top of Malabar Hill. It's primarily a children's playground—and an old-school one at that, so if your kids are used to the finer things, this park may seem impossibly quaint—but it also has gorgeous views of the city below that are worth checking out if you happen to be in the area. From the special viewpoint clearing you can see all of Marine Drive and the Mumbai skyline, from Chowpatty Beach to Colaba Point—try to come up after dark to see why Marine Drive, sparkling with lights, is known as the Queen's Necklace. Just across the road another park, the Hanging Gardens (also known as the Pherozeshah Mehta Gardens), also has pleasant views and a topiary garden. A few minutes north of here, heading down the hill, are the Towers of Silence, where Mumbai's Parsis—followers of the Zoroastrian faith—dispose of their dead. Pallbearers carry the corpse to the top of one of the towering cylindrical bastions, where it is left to be devoured by vultures and crows (a roughly two-hour process) and decomposed by the elements. None of this is visible to would-be onlookers, even relatives, and high walls prevent any furtive peeping.