Kanyakumari – The Land of a Goddess

With large number of devotees, Kanyakumari or Kanniyakumari seems like a typical Indian temple town. November and December is said to be the best season to visit Kanyakumari owing to the pleasant climate. The climate worked out well for me but not the huge number of people there (being a typical crowd hater). We arrived at 9am on a Friday morning by bus. The bus dropped us close to our stay and we walked to our destination – TTDC hotel run by Tamilnadu Tourism Dept. Our checkin time was 10am and we were made to wait until our room got free and cleaned which dragged on till 11am owing to the irritating and foolish rule of the hotel of having both checkin and checkout time as 10am. Meanwhile, we had our breakfast at the TTDC restaurant. We finally got our room to find out that it was not to the standard of our expectations, not even close to it. We freshened up and decided to take up the matter with the front desk staff. We were luckily offered another room due to a cancellation and got a super-sized room at an adjacent building within their property also run by TTDC, the Heritage Cape Hotel. We happily decided to bear the extra cost for the room and our accommodation budget got extended to Rs. 2000/day! I later found out that due to some server issue I was allotted a room online that was not there and hence they had to give me a room (any room) since I had already booked it online. With the matter resolved to our satisfaction we set out to explore the town of a virgin Goddess. First stop was the Vivekananda rock memorial for which we had to take a boat. The queue for the boat was so long that it went beyond 3 streets! We decided to eat our lunch and then see if the crowd gets lesser. We found a pure veg restaurant nearby and had our lunch, I must say that it was unexpectedly costly!! We walked back to check out the crowd and saw to our dismay that the crowd/queue had only increased! We abandoned the plan and went to sit on the beach side and observe the crowd. The temple of Kanyakumari was scheduled to open its doors at 4pm and we stood in the queue at 3pm to avoid the rush. We did avoid the rush to a large extent by this move and finished our darshan satisfactorily. In a span of 2 meter walk from the temple entrance to the chappal stand we were jostled by the crowd, I cannot imagine our plight if we had not stood in the queue an hour early. We asked around a few tour operators there for a taxi for sightseeing the next day and booked one. We then roamed around the streets a bit and settled down around the view point area. This was relaxing but owing to a cloudy day we could not catch the sunset. We returned to our hotel once it got dark and I settled down with a book. We ordered dinner from room service and the service was good!

 

Vivekananda Rock Memorial and Thiruvalluvar Statue

Next day brought us clear skies and slightly sunny weather. We checked out and started from our hotel at 10am with a list of places to see! First in the list was the Guganathaswamy Temple, which is about 2 mins from the beach. It’s a small temple and hardly takes 5 mins to visit and get back since there is no crowd here. We set out to the Suchindram town famous for the Thanumalayan temple. The distance is around 10 kms from beach but took us a long time to reach since we had to cross a bridge which allows one-way traffic at a time and there was much traffic. The temple is unique since its deity is a single form (linga) of 3 lords – Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma. It even consists of a huge statue of Hanuman carved out of a single granite rock and a huge statue of Nandi. However, I could not enjoy this temple much due to the huge crowd. I however enjoyed looking at the temple’s kalyani! 

 

Temple entrance

 

Kalyani

 Next stop was the popular Nagercoil’s Nagaraja temple. It was surprisingly less crowded! We then set out to the padmanabhapuram palace in padmanabhpuram, former capital city of Travancore. Located at the foot of Veli hills which form a part of Western Ghats, this palace is an excellent example of Kerala architecture. Even though this palace is in Tamilnadu, it is under the jurisdiction of Kerala. It took us an hour to explore the palace! We were allowed to go into almost every room of the palace and it would take more time to properly explore the palace.  It held some beautiful artifacts and paintings!

 

The 300 year old clock which still keeps time

 

Kuthira Vilakku - horse lamp that remains horizontal and ensures no oil spill

 

Palace entrance

 

Side view

 

Artifact in the palace

 We then visited the Udayagiri fort nearby. This fort seemed to contain forest with not much to explore. There was a pond and some geese around it put there mainly for tourist and not much fun but since it was on the way and we could cover it in 20 mins, we went for a walk here. We had a late lunch and it was time for us to head back. On the way we visited the St.Xavier’s church which was quiet nice. 

 

Inside Udayagiri fort

 

St.Xavier's Church

We made it to our bus just in time and settles down to look at the countryside! I suggest that you watch out for the wind turbines around an hour after you leave Kanyakumari, the Muppandal wind farm. With more than 2000 wind turbines, they are a sight not to be missed!!!