End of October, I decided together with a friend to make a short trip to Rameshwaram, a place in the south, Tamil Nadu, with an important temple and the closest point to Sri Lanka. It was an great trip with many bizarre experiences and quite different from my previous trips to larger cities, especially concerning the traveling part. Let me describe it more detailed...
We started from Bangalore with a night train to Thoothukudi and wanted to continue the trip with a bus. But after Madurai, the night train became a "slow/passenger" train, which means that it halts in every little station and waits for the "express" trains so that they can pass by. Due to this we left the train somewhere around Madurai, I think Tirupparankundram, and hopped on one of the local buses back to a bus stand close to Madurai.
After a delicious breakfast with "muttai(egg) dosa", we took another Bus to Rameshwaram (170 km distance), and this ride was really fun. We drove through many small villages and great green rice paddies. At one point, the driver took a wrong road and we found our bus on a narrow path with no space left for any other car or even bike.
Rameshwaram lies on an island connected to the main land by the Pamban bridge, and the sight while crossing it was wonderful with the fisher boats in the bay and the palm trees all over the place. we were set into the right mood for a few nice relaxing days.
From Rameshwaram bus stand, there were a couple of city buses to the different important parts of the island. The place is also a pilgrimage destination, which had the nice consequence that you could easily get information where to find the temple and a hotel. We found a nice place to stay at the Tamil Nadu hotel, which was close to the sea, which we could see from our terrace at the top (3rd) floor. It was already late afternoon, but soon enough to visit the Ramanathaswamy Temple. It is one of 12 Jyotirlinga shrines, where Shiva is worshiped in the form of a "pillar of light" (see
Wikipedia). The temple was built during the 12th century and is famous for its 24 Teerthams (holy water tanks) and its corridor of 1000 pillars.
For about 2 hours, we wandered through this enormous temple complex and it was great to discover all the parts of different age, to see some very old carvings of gods besides freshly painted ones. Some god statues have become pitch black from the oil with which they have been embalmed for many years. Impressive was also one room where the walls were covered with piled up stone statues of vishnu protected by Shesha in form of a multi-headed cobra. And while we were lonely roaming through a dark part of the corridors, we suddenly stood in front of an elephant who was so kind to give us a blessing! On the way out, I got a bunch of Laddoos (a sweet in form of a ball) for my lab and we have met one of the guys who pull up water from a wholly well to pour it over pilgrims. He was curious from where we were and showed us a place to get good coffee. He earned part of its money as a tourist guide so there was no wonder that we crossed him another three times in the evening, but we had no need of him.
For dinner, we found a non veg restaurant and had very tasty sea food (prawns & fish) and chatted with another tourist guide who claimed to have a sister in Germany. This guide gave us a good advice for our trip the next morning to take a public bus to the beach instead of a private jeep. Happy and well fed, we headed back to the hotel, enjoyed some time sitting on the terrace and listening to the sea, and went to bed.
The next morning, we woke up very early (5.30 am) to have enough time to get to Adam's bridge, the closest point of India to Sri Lanka. It was great to step out on the streets and to see, how active the city already was. For small villages, it is typical that the people are up early to get tings done before the rising sun heats up the air. Our plan to take a bus was not working out, because outside Rameshwaram the road was blocked due to some riots. But we found a Rickshaw who took us to the furthermost village towards Adams bridge. From there, we had to walk along the beach. We were lucky that the sky was cloudy, otherwise the sun would have burned us during the >2 hours walk (about 5km).
On the way was the former village Dhanushkodi, where only some remains of buildings can be seen after a cyclone devastated the flourishing village in 1964. Times on time, we passed some locals who were looking for crab seashells, often accompanied by a dog.
The panorama at the tip of this stretch of land was impressive, the sea from the bay of Bengal and Laccadive Sea join and have different colors. In addition, one can walk on Adam's bridge (a large kind of sand bank) far into the sea without getting deep into water. We shared this morning at the sea with three small groups each with a Hindu priest to conduct poojas (as I heard, most probably to give the ashes of a passed by relative to the sea). This was our luck, because we could drive back in one of the jeeps together with a priest, which first, saved us another long walk back to the city, and second allowed us to experience of driving with a tough 4x4 Mahindra Jeep through sand dunes!
Back in town, we had lunch, listened some nice percussion music at the temple and rented bicycles to ride to the Pamban bridge. On the way back, we wanted to book a bus back to Bangalore, and were told that there would be no bus service due to some riots. Also some private car companies were not willing to drive us, because they feared to get into trouble when reaching the blocked road.
we headed back to the hotel, wondering what to do, because we did not know how to spend another day on this island...we finally decided to take a passenger train to Madurai and to continue from there with a bus to Bangalore.
for information: passenger train means, that there are no reservations and that the train has many stops -> these are the trains which tend to get very crowded (which became true). thus, I had a real Indian travel experience! Another great feature of our decision was that we rode on the train part of the Pamban bridge, which consists of a rails on pillars, nothing left and right! It was an amazing ride while the sun was setting down.
In Madurai, there were also no state buses due to the riots (had to be something really serious, a police officer was killed...), but we got a private bus and had a surprisingly comfortable trip back to Bangalore, where we were welcomed by rain in the morning.
This was a quite short trip with a big amount of travel time, but very exciting and full of new experiences! I will have more of this in the close future...
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