Summary
Stay: Hotel Sunrise View, Rameswaram
Nearest Railway Station: Rameswaram
Nearest Airport: Madurai (~170 km)
Places Visited: Dhanushkodi, Pamban Rail Journey
Temples Visited: Thirupullani, Rameswaram and surrounding temples
Link to Google Maps:
This last chapter on the Tamil Nadu road trip is going to be as much about names, as about the places they belong to.
At last…we were on our way to the ancient island city of Rameswaram whose eastern tip Dhanushkodi is just 20 km from Sri Lanka. This is where the Ramar Sethu (meaning “Rama’s bridge”, though known to the modern world as Adam’s Bridge) is said to have been built by King Rama and his army so they could cross over to Lanka to fight the demon king Ravana. This is also the place of the relatively new-born structural wonders of the Pamban road and rail bridges, spanning nearly 2.5 km across the sea, that connect the island to the Indian mainland. This is a place full of ancient legends and modern stories, and we were understandably quite excited as we set off from Karaikal on the last leg of our Tamil Nadu road trip.
Knowing we would be taking the East Coast Road all the way down from Karaikal, I once again took the wheel. It was, unsurprisingly, a delightful road and a delightful ride! Wonderful scenes of water-filled paddy fields with peacocks, kingfishers, storks, cranes and egrets, that we sped past; quaintly named sea-side villages; and the not-infrequent fauna on the road that we slowed down for!
The most delightful name we had come across on our trip so far was a few days before between Chidambaram and Karaikal, called Shang-oli-kuppam which translates roughly to “the town of the sound-of-a-conch.” We didn’t stop there, though we did stop this time in the equally delightfully named Manal-mel-kudi (Settlement – on – Sand) for a mid-day cup of chai. Stratford-upon-Avon, take that!
The road kept darting in and out of sight of the sea and we had a very smooth ride right up until the temple town of Thiru-pull-ani, where we visited the temple of Lord Vishnu in the form of Rama, resting before the launch of his final assault on Lanka. By the time we reached the road bridge across to the island the sky had darkened with lashing rain and gale-force winds, and we kept imagining the choppy sea that lay 80 m beneath our feet as we made our way across the 2.5 km long bridge. By the time we reached our hotel, Hotel Sunrise View, in Rameswaram however, the rain and wind had died down though we did hear that train services had remained cancelled that day due to the strong winds. We made sure there were no cyclones in the offing and booked, conditional on the weather, a jeep ride to the ruined settlement of Dhanushkodi at the tip of the island.
After a good night’s rest we got up the next morning to be greeted - as promised by the name of our hotel, by a sunrise over the sea! The sea was flat as a board with scores upon scores of fishing boats gently rocking away, waiting to go out into the waters of the Palk Strait.
The name Dhanushkodi literally means “bow-tip” for that is exactly what it looks like when viewed from the air. Until a morning in the spring of 1964 this was a thriving town on the trade route between India and Sri Lanka. If you wished to travel to Colombo from Chennai in those days before air-travel you would take the Boat Mail. This train service ran from Chennai to Dhanushkodi, where, as the name suggests, you would transfer onto a ferry that would take you to Talai-mannar in the Jaffna Peninsula in Sri Lanka, where another train would take you all the way down to the capital city Colombo. On that morning in 1964 a cyclone, generated locally in the region struck the town with no warning. Normally sheltered by Lanka, this was a region that had never seen a cyclone before in living memory. That morning the two seas on either side of the town churned, and rose in fury devouring the town, and its beach, giving the inhabitants no chance of escape.
Needless to say, the railway line was destroyed and the service halted. The ferry and train services though restored were soon discontinued due to the separatist movement in Sri Lanka in the 70s. All that remains there now is the ruins of old English buildings built during the Raj.
We soon realised why we needed a four-wheel drive Jeep to take us to the tip – the road pretty much vanished as soon as we reached the ruins and no other vehicle would be able to make it across the sand!
Our jeep plodded along until we reached, verily, the tip of India, the meeting point of the waters of the Bay of Bengal to the north and the Palk Strait to the south; and one end of Adam’s Bridge, a strip of sand reefs, rocks and stones that formed a shallow, under-water ridge connecting India and Sri Lanka. The waters were a sparkling blue and the sands white, looking for all the world like the islands of the Maldives.
I will take a short dip into India’s great epic Ramayana, to give context to the next picture. Legend has it, that Lord Vishnu, came down to earth as King Rama to rid the people of the menace of the demon king Ravana. Ravana being proud and vain, kidnapped Sita, the wife of King Rama and held her hostage in Lanka. To rescue her and vanquish Ravana, Rama journeyed all the way from the kingdom of Ayodhya (near present-day Delhi) to Dhanushkodi where he built a bridge to cross over to Lanka. One of king Rama’s greatest devotees and advisors was the monkey god, Hanuman (also known in Tamil as Anjaneya, or the son of Anjana). He not only journeyed to Lanka as Rama’s messenger, to convey a warning to Ravana and a message of hope to Sita, but also advised Rama on matters of warfare and strategy. As this was the place from where Rama, his brother Laxmana, Hanuman, and their army left for Lanka a temple was built here for Hanuman in the erstwhile town of Dhanushkodi. The temple stood right on the tip of the peninsula with the idol of Hanuman facing toward Lanka, praying and waiting for the successful return of Rama, Laxmana, Sita and their army. During the cyclone of ‘64 this temple was washed away with the rest of the town. However, by a miracle the idol of Hanuman was left intact in the sands, right where he stood looking towards Lanka in prayer. Known simply as the '”Dhanushkodi Anjaneya”, he stands there to this day, an idol no more than 2 feet in height, open to the elements and with a single shroud of cloth as protection, more than 40 years since the cyclone!
We spent a good half an hour at the beach, wading in the warm waters and drinking in the expanse before us, all the time wondering how it would have to those living here, to see a cyclone appear out of nowhere! We finally tore ourselves away and headed back to Rameswaram, for the next item on our agenda – a rail journey across the famous Pamban Rail Bridge. When we got to the station, we were pleasantly shocked to find that the ticket from Rameswaram to Mandapam by train cost us all of two rupees. We selected our window seats and awaited departure. The train left on time and after a couple of stops, trundled on to the approach to the bridge.
I am now going to let the pictures do the talking…
This is what we saw below us, standing at the door!
And these piers in the water are the remnants of the old bridge, built by the British, that was also destroyed in the 1964 cyclone.
It was an exhilarating 15 minutes, and I was reminded once again why I love the Indian railways.
Still on a high after that journey we came back to Rameswaram by bus and went to the main Siva temple that gives the town its name. The story goes that Ravana, despite being a demon was a great devotee of Lord Siva. Thus, Rama after killing him, installed a temple to Lord Siva once he got back to India and prayed for his forgiveness. Thus the town gets its name, Rameswaram (meaning the abode of the Lord Rama prayed to). The temple, like most other famous temples in Tamil Nadu is a massive granite-structured complex, with long, wide corridors all around, adorned by majestic pillars with marvellous stone carvings on all sides. It is one of the holiest sites in India for devotees of Siva and Vishnu alike and is the centre of a thriving, bustling pilgrimage town. The temple houses 24 different wells, with waters from several underground rivers, and pilgrims bathe in the water from each of these wells, to cleanse themselves of their sins.
After praying to the main deities in the temple, we headed back to the hotel for dinner and a night’s rest, before starting our journey back to Chennai via Karaikal.
We were glad that we had decided on Karaikal as our night-halt as the resort was very comfortable and nice, and it was a good stop strategically, being almost exactly mid-way between Chennai and Rameswaram. On our way back from Karaikal we stopped off for a couple of hours at the Danish fort in the seaside town of Tranquebar. The Tamil name for this town, Tharangam-padi means “Singing waves”. We wandered around this wonderful 800 year old fort, along its ramparts, and inside its rooms, enjoying the rhythmic pounding of the waves, and learning a bit about the adventures of the Danes in pre-British India.
We could picture the cannons firing away as the Danes spotted other European colonialists trying to take over their patch of land!
Our trip almost at an end, we headed back to Chennai barring a brief stop-over in the town of Pondicherry for a sea-side cup of coffee. It had been an absolutely wonderful trip, exceeding every expectation we had and throwing up quite a few surprises in terms of places and experiences along the way. We felt happy and recharged with our holiday, and happy to get back home – as there were so many more places to travel to, see and write about!
General Information
1. Hotel Review: Hotel Sunrise View, Rameswaram
- Tariff – Rs. 1300/- per day for an AC double room
- Location – Rameswaram town, very close to the east gate of the Temple.
- The hotel is well-maintained with decent, clean rooms – and insisting that we get a room with a good view worked, as we were given a room with a sea-view! The hotel did not accept card payments.
- Eating – there is no kitchen / restaurant, though they do offer a catering service with food from the restaurants nearby.
- We found a good vegetarian restaurant called Shanmuga Bhavan, around 15 minutes walk from our hotel.
- The hotel organises jeep tours to Dhanushkodi at Rs. 1000/- per trip. These tours include a tour of the main temples between Rameswaram and Dhanushkodi
2. We were told that very early morning (3.30-4 am) and anytime after 5 pm in the evening were the best times to visit the temple during the festive season in December-January.
3. The rail journey is a must-do for those visiting Rameswaram – even if you are travelling by bus or car!
4. There is a Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere tourist centre on the mainland in Mandapam, just by the start of the road bridge. They organise glass-bottom boat trips, for coral and sea-life viewing in the Palk Strait from April – September. They do normal boat trips upto the rail-bridge and back in other months, though there is no coral viewing then as the waters are too muddy. The charges for the coral viewing trips are around Rs. 600 - 800/- per group of 8 people.
