Kanyakumari, the End of India

Travel Day 979 – Sivananda to Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, INDIA

One last time we had the usual 5.20am wake up call, but instead of going to the Satsang, we were walking to the bus station…

Statue of Thiruvalluvar, Kanyakumari

Actually things were not quite as easy as we thought they would be. After almost being kicked out of the ashram yesterday, now that we wanted to actually leave, they wouldn’t open the get let us go because I didn’t have a leaving permit. When I checked out yesterday afternoon they never gave me this permit and as I came to realize just then that my payment receipt  had the wrong name on it as well…

So, it was already 5.35am, our bus was leaving at 6am, we had a 15 to 20 minute walk and the ashram office was not open until 8am… great! Some engaged conversations, phone calls and talks to a supervisor later, we finally found ourselves on the street and walking, happy to finally have left this strange Sivanada Ashram. At this point we didn’t have enough time any more to actually walk all the way to the bus stop, but luckily good fortune was with us this time and a rickshaw came driving up the mountain, just in time to bring us to our bus… : )

Vivakananda Memorial, Kanyakumari

One our later found us in Trivandrum, where we bought a train ticket to Kanyakumari and an onward ticket for the next day to Tiruvannamalai, which left us just with enough time to have some nice breakfast and say a final good-bye to Kerala. After two and a half months, I finally left his interesting state for good and was once more back to Tamil Nadu and the very end of India…

For the longest time I had actually been debating if it was worth the effort to go all the way down to Kanyakumari, but now that I was so close by, it seemed to make sense to see the end of India. This was the place where the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea meet and where they built a little Thiruvalluvar statue on an island. Well, the statue wasn’t too much to write home about and it was actually under construction, but at least visiting the Vivakananda Island and seeing the very tip of India was quite nice…

Gandhi Memorial in Kanyakumari

Also quite nice was the big temple which could only be visited topless, at least for men. Then there was a Gandhi memorial where parts of his ashes were kept, but we only passed by since we wanted to walk all the way to the sunset beach. Despite the heat we really wanted to see as much of the area as possible and so we walked along the coast to the viewing spot where the sun was slowly setting over the Arabian Sea…

Much to our disappointment, it turned out to be so cloudy that no real sunset could be seen and all that was left to do for us was to enjoy the nightly walk back with some new-found friends and have some nice dinner. It had been a nice and hot day in Kanyakumari and we were happy that we stopped by, even if there was not too much left to do for tomorrow…