We took a train from Trivandrum to Kanyakumari but unfortunately the train was late and we arrived to Nagercoil (the train terminates at Nagercoil) by midnight.
We learned that Nagercoil was 17 Kms away from Kanyakumari so we decided to take an auto to Kanyakumari and arrived at our hotel by 2 am.
Luckily our hotel was at a walking distance from the Vivekanand Rock Memorial which is a popular tourist monument in Kanyakumari, India. The memorial was built in 1970 in honour of Swami Vivekananda who is said to have attained enlightenment on the rock.
According to local legends, it was on this rock that Goddess Kumari performed austerity. The memorial is not approachable through land and requires a 10 minutes ferry ride.
At this time, we were quite excited to touch the southernmost part of India however our happiness was soon dampened when we realized there was a very long queue to get to the ferry.
Since the weather was really hot, we decided to pay 4 times and take an express queue instead. Luckily, it only took 45 minutes to get to the ferry through the express line.
The ferries were overcrowded and rocked through waves and we arrived at the memorial. The Rock memorial is surrounded by the Indian Ocean,
Bay of Bengal and the Pacific Ocean and it was a great feeling to be there. The rock memorial has an art gallery as well on Swami Vivekanand life however we decided not to visit the art gallery as we were to catch a train to Bangalore from Nagercoil.
There is also a very tall statue nearby, the Thiruvalluvar Statue, or the Valluvar Statue – a 133-feet tall stone sculpture of the Tamil poet and philosopher Valluvar.
We boarded the train from Nagercoil that evening and arrived to Bangalore the next morning after 14 hours of train journey. When we got off the train, we were treated by a comparatively cooler weather in Bangalore.
As I mentioned earlier, at Bangalore station we changed our mind and decided to go to Mysuru first (luckily we hadn’t booked a hotel in Bangalore). We took a train and arrived in Mysuru late afternoon.
