The most peaceful place on earth

Thursday 5 Dec 2013

Cape Comorin Kanyakumari

The 5:15am buzz pulled us both from deep sleeps. Trying to gain a sense of where we were, what time it was, if that noise was in fact our doorbell, and why we were being disturbed, Jamie stumbled out of bed and reached into the dark for the nearest clothing to cover himself.

The door buzzed a second time and he opened it to a delighted Indian porter who proudly announced, "Hot water is on! See sunrise from the roof, sir!"

Luckily, we had planned to wake and join the dedicated pilgrims who had travelled from all over India to watch the sunrise from the most southerly point of the country. So the wake-up call, even if a little earlier than we had hoped, was welcome.

Here in Cape Comorin, you can see both sunrise and sunset from the tip of India as three oceans collide before you. It had been a taxi driver in Goa that had first tipped us off. When asked his favourite place in India, the driver had beamed and told us about the mystical wonder of this holy land's end. We'd added this onto our list of must-see places, and the more we found out about it, the more excited we became.

We opted to join the rabble on the beach for this special moment. Although our sense of achievement at reaching the end of India was huge, it probably pales in significance when you think some of these people had heard tales of this place since childhood and probably saved for years to be able to make the trip to the most southerly point.

Of course, being in India, this place of peace and wonder was accompanied by the inevitable harassment from touts and the continuous holler of, "Tea, coffee, tea, coffee." By now, we had both come to accept that chaos is part of India's charm.

The morning was cloudy. We didn't see the ball of red sneak up on the horizon, but the sky turned a delicate pink, and soon the scene was lit up as the rays broke through.

At the shore, the men indulged in ceremonious bathing before adorning fresh skirts and reapplying their symbolic face paint. Children rode horses on the sand, and everyone posed for photos to evidence their own accomplishment at making it.

Having crawled back to bed, we woke at midday and headed out to catch the boat over to the island that had been built in honour of Swami Vivekananda, the wandering monk who had meditated on the rock here for three days before taking his holy message beyond the shores of India.

We queued for a long time and were asked to collect life jackets as we boarded the boat. It was evident that this may have been the first time on a boat for many of these Indian tourists, who had eagerly adorned their life jackets in absolute readiness for a Titanic-esque disaster.

The rock is now buried under concrete, and two temples have been built in honour of the Swami and his mother. We walked around the man-made rock, marvelling at the ferocity of the three oceans.

After paying our respects (I use this term quite literally), we followed the crowd out of the temple. There was a meditation room, which was a dark, marble-lined cube focused toward a central lit-up 'Om' symbol. In the darkness, we sat and tried to focus on our soul, as we'd learned in yoga, and let our breathing sync with the dull chant of 'Om' (or in fact AUM as it is actually written), which filled the room.

Feeling very relaxed, I requested that if we ever made millions, I would very much like to have a meditation room in my mansion. However, thoughts focusing on material wealth are, in fact, the opposite of AUM.

The boat took us to the second island, where a huge statue had been built by over 5,000 sculptors to represent Tamil Nadu's famous poet, Thiruvalluvar.

We quickly scaled the statue, known locally as the Indian Statue of Liberty, and fought for a place on the boat back to town, once again surrounded by a sea of orange waistcoats.

Back on dry land, we managed to find a bird that could tell us our fortunes. This worked by the bird sifting through a pile of cards and discarding them until he found the one that held all of the not-so-unknown mysteries of our future. The card was opened, and we were each given a rather nonsense piece of paper telling us not a lot about what may or may not come.

The gist of mine was that I was nice because my parents were nice. That's nice. Good work, Mother and Father. Jamie couldn't make head nor tail of his, so we're both still somewhat in the dark about things to come, and that's the way we'd like to keep it. Although the immediate future was easy to predict, as the fortune-telling bird's owner asked us to cough up more money.

We also found another dingy watering hole and split a beer or two before grabbing an early veg dinner and heading into our room to indulge in a little bedtime TV.

The following day we achieved very little apart from obtaining a few special gifts, checking out the main temple, and starting a Facebook competition.

We got a TukTuk out of town, boarded our AC sleeper bus, and hunkered down for the night dreaming of the cheese and wine waiting for us in Pondicherry.

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