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Just a quick update on everything that we did when we went and visited the tip of India, apparantly a must pilgrimage for all Indians although for us it had lost its charm by all the tourism.
We travelled down from Madurai on an overnight train but had no seat reservations so Laura spent the night curled up in the corridor trying to sleep with the cockroaches by the toilet, Kate managed to wangle her way onto the floor between beds, until about 5:30 in the morning when we managed to get a bed, but the train arrived at 6:30 so only got an hour on it.?Firstly?booked ourselves into?hotel the?best hotel we'd stayed in yet for only 4 quid each a night we lived in luxury could even afford room service, and we ordered a lot of it! And we had our first hot shower since we got to India, absolute bliss, also had a TV so Laura spent half the nights there watching English speaking films.
First thing we did was go to the train station and book all the tickets we needed to get back to Salem and then onto Bangalore to ensure we got seats. It took us ages the Indian railway system is so complicated and also we lost one of our tickets which was luckily handed in to the office and then returned to us.
After that we went to the temple, not as impressive as the one in Madurai on our way out one of the priests stopped us and took us into the inner sanctum (which is usually closed to non Hindus) and rushed us into the shrine quickly so we got to have a glimsp of the statue of the Goddess and the huge diamond stud in her nose, and then of course we paid the priest for his troubles.
Then we went to a shrine built because Gandhi's ashes lay there before being scattered into the sacred point where the 3 oceans meet. Stayed there for ages because it was free and cool in the shade.
That eveing we watched the sunset from "sunset point" on the beach which was beautiful. We climbed up onto some rocks, which is where this pic was taken, and nearly got drenched by the massive waves so then followed the locas in retreating to higher ground.
Went for some walks and saw some houses built by the Sally Army after the tsunami disaster that killled about 1000 people in Kannyiarkumari, also saw some relief work still going on, also saw a boy about 13 working as a construction worker in the relief work.
Got a boat out to a memorial built for some monk and a huge statue of him, had to take our shoes of on the island so burn our feet on the rocks in the midday heat.
Went to another temple just outside Kanniyakumari, which ws very interesting and all of it was open to non hindus which makes a change so saw all the inner shrines, and some amasing musical stone pillars that if you hit make the sound of a different musical instrument.
Got up at 4 o'clock in the morning to catch the 5:30 train back to Salem which we arrived at 9:00 in the evening luckily we managed to get seats for that train, but we also got to see the sun rise from the train which was lovely.
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