Well, I finally went to India.

For many people, India is one of the great travel frontiers, known for being simultaneously one of the most vibrant and best value places in the world, as well as impoverished and full of sickness-inducing foods. For me, India has long been on my nice-to-visit list, not my must-visit list, mostly because I fear Delhi belly and I worry about the poverty and seeing kids and animals in rough conditions. But when I was recently presented with a work opportunity in Mumbai, I saw no better time than to do my usual thing, adding on a couple days for fun.

Because my tourism experience in Mumbai is limited to a few specific activities, that’s where I’ll focus for this article. There are many fantastic resources online about India tourism, most of which are vastly more comprehensive than this.

But we all start somewhere with India and this, friends, was my introduction to Mumbai.

Mumbai is huge, a 25 million person metropolis sprawling from India’s west coast inward. I tackled my free time by searching for walking tours, specifically those focused around food, my favorite way to get an overview of a place quickly.

There are lots of small tour companies that serve Mumbai, and plenty of partial-day tours to cover any number of interests, from colonial history to Bollywood. I took the initiative and booked myself on three separate tours over two busy days (with one tour company that had a schedule of tours that matched my availability). The total cost for all of my tours, plus tips to tour guides, plus Uber rides to and from each destination was less than $100 USD total.

India’s reputation as a great value destination remains intact.

My Markets & Temples tour was a walking tour that made stops at Crawford Market, Mangaldas Market, Mumbadevi Temple, Flower Alley and ended at an amazing urban cow sanctuary. As we meandered around the bustling markets, we visited a spice stall, slowly smelled our way around fruit stalls, watched buyers and sellers hard at work in the fabric markets, got an education on jewelry at the gold market and gaped at artists in Flower Alley as they made offerings and decorations.

I loved getting lost in a market full of saris, India’s most famous traditional dress for women. At a Hindu temple, we got a short religious education while I watched people feed the temple’s holy cows. Finally, after a few hours of navigating an urban maze of markets, we ended our tour at Bombay Panjrapole, a Brahman cattle sanctuary, where 350 beautiful cattle are housed and cared for. This breed of cow is gorgeous and visitors are allowed to pet the cows. A pen full of small calves was eager for the visitors and we quickly became friends (sadly, no photos are allowed of these sacred animals).

Another tour I loved was an evening Street Food Tour. I was the only guest that evening, so I toured Chowpatty Beach, and Mohammad Ali Road with one amazing young college-age tour guide and she happily broached every uncomfortable topic I wanted to ask about. We chatted about real estate prices, women’s fashion, the pressure on kids to pursue higher education, religion, and more.

I also ate my weight in vegetarian snacks, hand-churned ice cream, and charred meat from a family-owned restaurant deep in the Muslim neighborhood. Mohammad Ali Road, the epicenter of the Muslim population in town, was full of pulsing crowds and adorned by a massive mosque on the corner covered in multi-colored twinkle lights. It was unlike anything I’ve seen.

While these explorations of markets and neighborhoods was the exciting extravaganza you’d expect from city life in India, as a tourist I felt safe and respected. There isn’t a huge population of foreigners in Mumbai but it is India’s biggest city, so my presence at all of these locations was barely noticed. Every so often a little kid would lock eyes with me in curiosity but let’s be honest, I love it when this happens.

The final tour I went on, and by far the most controversial, was a tour of Dharavi, India’s largest slum. I have lots of feelings about poverty-tourism, none of them good, and I am very, very reticent to support any organization that makes a profit out of showing off a poor area of town. Dharavi is home to over a million Mumbai-ers, and it’s an economic hub of the city as well as a massive neighborhood. It is hardly the dramatic poverty center that it has been portrayed as in Western films and various community-supported projects have sprung up to set the record straight.

The organization that I decided to support with my visit runs a community center and employs students from the neighborhood as tour guides. These walks around Dharavi are done in very small groups (usually less than 5 people) and no photos of any kind are allowed. With these precautions in place, I decided to visit Dharavi. We explored the commercial area, including a plastic factory and some of the leather purveyors. In the residential areas, we visited the community center, and walked through a few of the narrow alleys of homes. My (very generous) tour guide lived on the route of the tour and she happily showed me her house that has been in her family for a few generations.

One important side note is that the word ‘slum’ is actually a legal term having to do with land ownership (leftover from India’s independence from Britain in 1947) and doesn’t technically have anything to do with poverty. This negative connotation is fair in many cases, but many of the residents of Dharavi would be considered middle-class or lower-middle-class by local standards.

To be a million percent honest, even after doing my homework to select a reputable organization to visit Dharavi, and being a respectful visitor, I’m not sure how I feel about it. Part of me wishes I had been alone, wandering around the neighborhood, like I would do anywhere. Being part of the tourism machine, no matter how small the imprint, still leaves a mark. But also, would I have found this neighborhood without the direction from a guide? It’s not like it has a huge entrance gate.

Bottom line, I implore you, before embarking on any kind of tourism that even hints at gawking at fellow humans in poverty, do your homework and then do it again. And then maybe once more for good measure.

You can only visit India for the first time once, and overall, I’m happy with my first visit into this unknown land. I didn’t get Delhi belly (ugh, I probably just jinxed myself for the next time!), and as usual, the biggest lure for me to return is the food. This visit felt like dipping my toe into a vast cultural ocean, and I am eager to return for a longer paddle around the pool.