On the morning of the 4th in Kollam, while it was still somewhat cool, I took an auto rickshaw to the Government Guest House in the old British Residency, said to be 250 years old. The large old mansion has a Keralan gabled roof, whitewashed walls, a red tile roof, and pillared verandas. Nobody was staying there and the manager let me look around. He told me it had been built by Colonel Munroe. (I've seen his name written also as Munro and Monroe.) I wandered through big rooms with 25 foot high ceilings and tattered furniture. In one glass cabinet were pieces of old chinaware. I wandered around the verandas, both upstairs and downstairs and then walked around the grounds. Behind the old Residency is the recently built new block of the Government Guest House, a hideous rectangular concrete building painted orange and lime green. The contrast between the two buildings could not be greater.
I had a big buffet breakfast in a fancy hotel and then bought new sandals. Both of my old ones were losing their soles. I asked the shopkeeper to through away the old ones for me, and as I left the shop I noticed that he had already done so, tossing them onto the sidewalk outside the shop.
From Kollam, rather than continuing to head directly down the coast to India's southern tip, I decided to make one more crossing of the Western Ghats first. I left on a 10:30 bus heading east to Tenkasi, 65 miles away in Tamil Nadu. The two and a half hour trip initially passed through typical green Kerala scenery, with many towns and quite a few rubber plantations. We didn't ascend much until we approached the state border, and then we climbed to only about 1200 feet through a not particularly scenic low pass through the Ghats. At the top of the pass I could see the plains of Tamil Nadu below, and we quickly descended to them about 500 feet below. Within a mile or two of the pass, the forest had already turned from green to brown, with most trees now leafless. The plains looked very dry, too, though there were trees with green leaves, including lots of coconut palms. But the grass was brown and there was even cactus. Also, there were no political posters, quite a contrast with Kerala. Perhaps that is because Tamil Nadu's election day is a few weeks later than Kerala's.
As we approached Tenkasi, the high ridgeline of the Ghats stood to the southwest, looking very dry on this side. Entering town, I spotted the tall gopura (entry gate tower) of the temple, typical of Tamil temples. I hadn't yet seen a gopura on a temple in Kerala. My bus I was continuing to Tirunelveli, about 30 miles to the southeast, and I decided to head there with it. The landscape on the way was dry with few towns.
Tirunelveli is a big city, with 400,000 people. We arrived there after 3 at the new bus station several miles out of town, and I decided to head south to Kanyakumari at India's southern tip. I had thought about staying in either Tenkasi or Tirunelveli, but neither looked very appealing. To reach Kanyakumari I first had to take a bus south to Nagercoil, near the coast. The 50 mile trip took about two hours, mostly on a four lane highway through hot, dry, flat country. Big propeller type windmills were frequently sighted along the way. Approaching Nagercoil, we drove through a very low pass in the Ghats, only 200 or 300 feet above sea level, with scenic jagged hills on either side. The hills to the north are higher, one reaching over 5000 feet only 20 miles or so north of India's southern tip.
From Nagercoil it is only about 12 miles to Kanyakumari and I arrived there about 6:30. After checking into a hotel I walked, just after dark, to the southern tip of the subcontinent, about a ten minute stroll from my hotel past dozens of souvenir stands, a temple, and a memorial to Gandhi. Lots of people, all Indian but for three other foreigners, were also out strolling around. At the southern tip is an ancient stone pillared hall, the sculpture on it worn almost to disappearance by wind and water. The sky was dark, but two islands just off shore were lit up. One has a memorial hall celebrating Swamy Vivekanada and the other holding a 133 foot statue of the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar. The Vivekanada memorial hall was built in 1970 to commemorate the spot where he swam to in 1892 to meditate, finally deciding to travel to the United States and speak on Hinduism at the Congress of Religions, part of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. The statue, not particularly attractive, was built in 2000. It is 133 feet high because the poet's most famous work has 133 chapters.
I enjoyed standing there at southern tip of India with a col breeze off the ocean. It is just a bit north of 8 degrees north latitude and is considered the meeting place of the three seas, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Bay of Bengal, though to the west is not the Bay of Bengal but the Gulf of Mannar. Though on the coast, it had been a warm day in Kanyakumari. The newspaper the next day reported a high of 95 degrees. Still, it felt good to be on the sea.
The next morning I was awakened about 5 or 5:30 by the Indians in my hotel getting up to go watch the sunrise. I didn't get up until about 7:30. Despite my being so close to the sea, the temperature in my room was 86 degrees. I walked down to the southern tip of the subcontinent under an overcast sky. Few people were there. About 9:30, after breakfast and under now sunny skies, I walked to the boat jetty to take one of the boats to the islands offshore. The line seemed too long, so instead I visited the Vivekanada Exhibition nearby, which turned out to be an excellent museum chronicling his journeys around India up to the time he left by ship in 1893, travelling from Bombay to Vancouver via Yokohama in order to attend the Congress of Religions in Chicago, where he was a big hit. I wish it had continued beyond 1893 up to his death in 1902, at age 39. His story was told on 41 panels in very well written English (and also in Tamil and Hindi) with very interesting old photographs of him and the places he visited. I spent two hours there. The caretaker kindly provided me with a plastic chair I could tote around and sit in while reading the informative panels, which sometimes were quite long.
By the time I finished it was noon and very hot in the sun. I walked to the nearby Gandhi Memorial in a blue and white concrete building built to look somewhat like an Orissan temple. It wasn't much, with a hall inside with a few of the standard Gandhi photos, now faded. At one end of the hall is a plinth in which some of Gandhi's ashes were stored before being immersed in the sea. On his birthday, October 2, the sun is supposed to shine on the plinth. Nearby is a green concrete building commemorating K. Kamaraj, the main Congress leader in the south of India at the time of independence and in the early days after independence. I think he served in Nehru's original cabinet after independence. Later he was Chief Minister of Madras from 1954 to 1956 and then from Tamil Nadu, after it was created, from 1956 to 1967. There was nothing inside but old photographs, but they were very interesting. One showed him meeting Martin Luther King. Others showed him greeting two very dour looking Russians, looking uncomfortable in suits and ties and hats.
After lunch, I spent some time in an internet cafe before returning to the southern tip about 5:30 to watch the sea, the crowds, and the sunset. Quite a few people were bathing in the water, some, mostly old folks, ritually after visiting the Kumari Amman Temple just to the north. I watched one girl, perhaps about ten years old, have her more than shoulder length hair completely shaved off by a man in a dhoti with a straight razor. That was very interesting. Her three brothers, all with shaved heads, looked on. After it was done, her father, with a full head of hair, gave the barber, who kept the girl's hair, stuffing it into a plastic bag, 100 rupees. I asked a fellow onlooker why her head was shaved, and he said to sell the hair, but that seems unlikely. The sun set into haze over the coastline to the west. After dinner, I returned about 8:30 and almost no one was there. The lights illuminating the memorial and the statue on the two offshore islands were now turned off.
The sky was overcast the next morning as I left on a bus at 8:30 heading northwest, paralleling the coastline, to the town of Thuckalay, 25 miles away. On the way we passed several very full churches on that Sunday morning, with women in saris kneeling or sitting on plastic chairs on the entrance porches. The hour and twenty minute trip to Thuckalay passed through Nagercoil. The rugged southern end of the Western Ghats could be seen to the east along the way. In Thuckalay I took another bus a mile or two to the Padmanabhapuram Palace, residence of the Maharajas of Travancore from the mid 1500's until 1790, when the capital was relocated to more central Trivandrum to the north. The princely state of Travancore included most of southern Kerala plus what is now the southern end of Tamil Nadu down to Kanyakumari.
I spent about three hours looking around the old wooden palace, with something like 14 buildings in all. The narrow passages and small rooms were crowded at times, with big Indian groups. The wooden carvings throughout, on ceilings and walls and pillars, were particularly interesting. Some of the outside walls were of stone or plaster painted white, while others were made of slats of wood to let air in. Some of the halls were very long. Two were used to provide meals, each with room for a thousand diners. One room had a particularly ornately carved pillar and all rooms had polished black floors, which I was told were made of egg whites and coconut shells, but they must have more in them than that. The Maharaja's bed, a gift from the Dutch, was very beautifully carved. One room was the former armory, with a watchtower at one end. Another hall had paintings in it, including one depicting the surrender of a kneeling Dutch commander before the Maharaja in 1741 and another a battle scene from 1790 with Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, being carried off the battlefield in a litter after being wounded while trying to capture the Travancore fortress at Aluva, just north of Cochin. Tipu Sultan is considered a national hero because he fought the British, but he also fought other Indian states. Travancore and Cochin allied with the British, which eventually led to British supervision of their kingdoms.
The palace has a European style section, for the stay of European guests, and just outside the palace compound is traditional wooden house of what must have been a rich family, though the rooms and courtyards are very small. Back in the palace again I walked along a stone pillared, open air hall with a very polished black floor, used for entertainment such as dancing and music. A wooden room with wooden screens right next to the hall allowed the royal family to watch the entertainment without being seen. At least one of the bas reliefs on the stone pillars was an erotic scene.
A museum is next to the palace, with stone and wooden sculpture, weapons, and one of those human shaped cages, labelled a "capital punishment cage," like the one I had seen at the Hill Palace of the Raja of Cochin. The sky was now sunny and the day hot. I drank a liter of water and had an omelet and some potato chips for lunch before taking buses back to Kanyakumari, arriving after 4.
At 6 I walked down to the southern tip. Lots of people were there, all Indians but me. Quite a few pilgrims were bathing in the sea, including a couple of laughing, heavy women being rolled by the waves. I spent an hour there, until it got dark, watching the people and the sea in the cool evening breeze. The sun set just over the coastline to the west.
About 7:30 I entered the walled enclosure of the Kumari Amman Temple just north of India's southernmost point, and spent a half hour looking around. It wasn't very crowded at the end of the day. I had to take off my shirt to enter. I checked out the carved stone pillars, many of them oily. Some of the pillars were covered by gold plates. The bare chested priests were friendly and I was permitted to stand before and look into the inner sanctum at the statue of the goddess Kumari. An avatar of Parvati, Kumari was thwarted in her desire to wed Shiva and vowed to remain a virgin ("kanya" means "virgin"). She is reputed to have a jewel in her nose that is so bright that the door of the temple facing the sea is kept closed so sailors aren't distracted by its shine. I did notice a gleam of light on her nose in the dark inner sanctum, with flames of oil lamps all around her. I walked around a bit and then came back to the inner sanctum as temple priests brought platters of food for her. Then the doors of the sanctuary were closed as about 20 of us watched. Shortly after, they were reopened. I guess she was finished with her dinner. The temple was hot and humid. It felt good to get out into the cooler night air.
I had a big buffet breakfast in a fancy hotel and then bought new sandals. Both of my old ones were losing their soles. I asked the shopkeeper to through away the old ones for me, and as I left the shop I noticed that he had already done so, tossing them onto the sidewalk outside the shop.
From Kollam, rather than continuing to head directly down the coast to India's southern tip, I decided to make one more crossing of the Western Ghats first. I left on a 10:30 bus heading east to Tenkasi, 65 miles away in Tamil Nadu. The two and a half hour trip initially passed through typical green Kerala scenery, with many towns and quite a few rubber plantations. We didn't ascend much until we approached the state border, and then we climbed to only about 1200 feet through a not particularly scenic low pass through the Ghats. At the top of the pass I could see the plains of Tamil Nadu below, and we quickly descended to them about 500 feet below. Within a mile or two of the pass, the forest had already turned from green to brown, with most trees now leafless. The plains looked very dry, too, though there were trees with green leaves, including lots of coconut palms. But the grass was brown and there was even cactus. Also, there were no political posters, quite a contrast with Kerala. Perhaps that is because Tamil Nadu's election day is a few weeks later than Kerala's.
As we approached Tenkasi, the high ridgeline of the Ghats stood to the southwest, looking very dry on this side. Entering town, I spotted the tall gopura (entry gate tower) of the temple, typical of Tamil temples. I hadn't yet seen a gopura on a temple in Kerala. My bus I was continuing to Tirunelveli, about 30 miles to the southeast, and I decided to head there with it. The landscape on the way was dry with few towns.
Tirunelveli is a big city, with 400,000 people. We arrived there after 3 at the new bus station several miles out of town, and I decided to head south to Kanyakumari at India's southern tip. I had thought about staying in either Tenkasi or Tirunelveli, but neither looked very appealing. To reach Kanyakumari I first had to take a bus south to Nagercoil, near the coast. The 50 mile trip took about two hours, mostly on a four lane highway through hot, dry, flat country. Big propeller type windmills were frequently sighted along the way. Approaching Nagercoil, we drove through a very low pass in the Ghats, only 200 or 300 feet above sea level, with scenic jagged hills on either side. The hills to the north are higher, one reaching over 5000 feet only 20 miles or so north of India's southern tip.
From Nagercoil it is only about 12 miles to Kanyakumari and I arrived there about 6:30. After checking into a hotel I walked, just after dark, to the southern tip of the subcontinent, about a ten minute stroll from my hotel past dozens of souvenir stands, a temple, and a memorial to Gandhi. Lots of people, all Indian but for three other foreigners, were also out strolling around. At the southern tip is an ancient stone pillared hall, the sculpture on it worn almost to disappearance by wind and water. The sky was dark, but two islands just off shore were lit up. One has a memorial hall celebrating Swamy Vivekanada and the other holding a 133 foot statue of the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar. The Vivekanada memorial hall was built in 1970 to commemorate the spot where he swam to in 1892 to meditate, finally deciding to travel to the United States and speak on Hinduism at the Congress of Religions, part of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. The statue, not particularly attractive, was built in 2000. It is 133 feet high because the poet's most famous work has 133 chapters.
I enjoyed standing there at southern tip of India with a col breeze off the ocean. It is just a bit north of 8 degrees north latitude and is considered the meeting place of the three seas, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Bay of Bengal, though to the west is not the Bay of Bengal but the Gulf of Mannar. Though on the coast, it had been a warm day in Kanyakumari. The newspaper the next day reported a high of 95 degrees. Still, it felt good to be on the sea.
The next morning I was awakened about 5 or 5:30 by the Indians in my hotel getting up to go watch the sunrise. I didn't get up until about 7:30. Despite my being so close to the sea, the temperature in my room was 86 degrees. I walked down to the southern tip of the subcontinent under an overcast sky. Few people were there. About 9:30, after breakfast and under now sunny skies, I walked to the boat jetty to take one of the boats to the islands offshore. The line seemed too long, so instead I visited the Vivekanada Exhibition nearby, which turned out to be an excellent museum chronicling his journeys around India up to the time he left by ship in 1893, travelling from Bombay to Vancouver via Yokohama in order to attend the Congress of Religions in Chicago, where he was a big hit. I wish it had continued beyond 1893 up to his death in 1902, at age 39. His story was told on 41 panels in very well written English (and also in Tamil and Hindi) with very interesting old photographs of him and the places he visited. I spent two hours there. The caretaker kindly provided me with a plastic chair I could tote around and sit in while reading the informative panels, which sometimes were quite long.
By the time I finished it was noon and very hot in the sun. I walked to the nearby Gandhi Memorial in a blue and white concrete building built to look somewhat like an Orissan temple. It wasn't much, with a hall inside with a few of the standard Gandhi photos, now faded. At one end of the hall is a plinth in which some of Gandhi's ashes were stored before being immersed in the sea. On his birthday, October 2, the sun is supposed to shine on the plinth. Nearby is a green concrete building commemorating K. Kamaraj, the main Congress leader in the south of India at the time of independence and in the early days after independence. I think he served in Nehru's original cabinet after independence. Later he was Chief Minister of Madras from 1954 to 1956 and then from Tamil Nadu, after it was created, from 1956 to 1967. There was nothing inside but old photographs, but they were very interesting. One showed him meeting Martin Luther King. Others showed him greeting two very dour looking Russians, looking uncomfortable in suits and ties and hats.
After lunch, I spent some time in an internet cafe before returning to the southern tip about 5:30 to watch the sea, the crowds, and the sunset. Quite a few people were bathing in the water, some, mostly old folks, ritually after visiting the Kumari Amman Temple just to the north. I watched one girl, perhaps about ten years old, have her more than shoulder length hair completely shaved off by a man in a dhoti with a straight razor. That was very interesting. Her three brothers, all with shaved heads, looked on. After it was done, her father, with a full head of hair, gave the barber, who kept the girl's hair, stuffing it into a plastic bag, 100 rupees. I asked a fellow onlooker why her head was shaved, and he said to sell the hair, but that seems unlikely. The sun set into haze over the coastline to the west. After dinner, I returned about 8:30 and almost no one was there. The lights illuminating the memorial and the statue on the two offshore islands were now turned off.
The sky was overcast the next morning as I left on a bus at 8:30 heading northwest, paralleling the coastline, to the town of Thuckalay, 25 miles away. On the way we passed several very full churches on that Sunday morning, with women in saris kneeling or sitting on plastic chairs on the entrance porches. The hour and twenty minute trip to Thuckalay passed through Nagercoil. The rugged southern end of the Western Ghats could be seen to the east along the way. In Thuckalay I took another bus a mile or two to the Padmanabhapuram Palace, residence of the Maharajas of Travancore from the mid 1500's until 1790, when the capital was relocated to more central Trivandrum to the north. The princely state of Travancore included most of southern Kerala plus what is now the southern end of Tamil Nadu down to Kanyakumari.
I spent about three hours looking around the old wooden palace, with something like 14 buildings in all. The narrow passages and small rooms were crowded at times, with big Indian groups. The wooden carvings throughout, on ceilings and walls and pillars, were particularly interesting. Some of the outside walls were of stone or plaster painted white, while others were made of slats of wood to let air in. Some of the halls were very long. Two were used to provide meals, each with room for a thousand diners. One room had a particularly ornately carved pillar and all rooms had polished black floors, which I was told were made of egg whites and coconut shells, but they must have more in them than that. The Maharaja's bed, a gift from the Dutch, was very beautifully carved. One room was the former armory, with a watchtower at one end. Another hall had paintings in it, including one depicting the surrender of a kneeling Dutch commander before the Maharaja in 1741 and another a battle scene from 1790 with Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, being carried off the battlefield in a litter after being wounded while trying to capture the Travancore fortress at Aluva, just north of Cochin. Tipu Sultan is considered a national hero because he fought the British, but he also fought other Indian states. Travancore and Cochin allied with the British, which eventually led to British supervision of their kingdoms.
The palace has a European style section, for the stay of European guests, and just outside the palace compound is traditional wooden house of what must have been a rich family, though the rooms and courtyards are very small. Back in the palace again I walked along a stone pillared, open air hall with a very polished black floor, used for entertainment such as dancing and music. A wooden room with wooden screens right next to the hall allowed the royal family to watch the entertainment without being seen. At least one of the bas reliefs on the stone pillars was an erotic scene.
A museum is next to the palace, with stone and wooden sculpture, weapons, and one of those human shaped cages, labelled a "capital punishment cage," like the one I had seen at the Hill Palace of the Raja of Cochin. The sky was now sunny and the day hot. I drank a liter of water and had an omelet and some potato chips for lunch before taking buses back to Kanyakumari, arriving after 4.
At 6 I walked down to the southern tip. Lots of people were there, all Indians but me. Quite a few pilgrims were bathing in the sea, including a couple of laughing, heavy women being rolled by the waves. I spent an hour there, until it got dark, watching the people and the sea in the cool evening breeze. The sun set just over the coastline to the west.
About 7:30 I entered the walled enclosure of the Kumari Amman Temple just north of India's southernmost point, and spent a half hour looking around. It wasn't very crowded at the end of the day. I had to take off my shirt to enter. I checked out the carved stone pillars, many of them oily. Some of the pillars were covered by gold plates. The bare chested priests were friendly and I was permitted to stand before and look into the inner sanctum at the statue of the goddess Kumari. An avatar of Parvati, Kumari was thwarted in her desire to wed Shiva and vowed to remain a virgin ("kanya" means "virgin"). She is reputed to have a jewel in her nose that is so bright that the door of the temple facing the sea is kept closed so sailors aren't distracted by its shine. I did notice a gleam of light on her nose in the dark inner sanctum, with flames of oil lamps all around her. I walked around a bit and then came back to the inner sanctum as temple priests brought platters of food for her. Then the doors of the sanctuary were closed as about 20 of us watched. Shortly after, they were reopened. I guess she was finished with her dinner. The temple was hot and humid. It felt good to get out into the cooler night air.
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