A Kanyakumari travel blog - our recent experience

We reached Kanyakumari at 3:30PM. Since we had no plans and no schedule, we followed the signs and drove through the crowd and reached the area near the boat jetty. I asked for the route to the beach but a book seller said "you may want to catch a boat and visit Vivekananda rocks first since the last boat will leave in about 30 minutes". That was a very valuable piece of information; otherwise we would have missed the boat ride to the Vivekananda rocks. To thank the book seller for the valuable advice, I decided to buy a small book from him. I paid Rs 20 and bought a small tiny piece of useless book that had the title "Kanyakumari Guide". It had few pages and I didn't bother to read. After taking the money, he threw another small book with the title "History of Kanyakumari". I was happy to get a free book but that happiness did not last long because my son found from the previous book that the printed cost of that book was only Rs 10 and the seller actually charged me for the "free book" also! Read some travel tips for visitors to Kanyakumari at the bottom of this blog.

We entered the boating area and I was instructed (shouted) that everybody should get down from the car and driver should go and park the car inside. Rest of the people should go through the ticket counter, buy the tickets for boat (Rs 20 per head) and driver can join the rest of the people near the boat. I parked car and went to use the toilet outside the gate. When I came back, the security guards shouted and screamed at me asking me to get out of the place. I tried to explain I just parked my car there and went out to use the toilets but they refused to listen. After some arguments, they allowed me to proceed to the queue for the boat and I waited there for the family to reach there. From that location, I could get a good view of the Vivekananda rocks. It took a while for my family to reach the end of the queue. We marched together towards the boat. It started raining a bit and it was very cloudy. We liked the cloudy sky because there was no sun, but then we heard someone saying 'if it is cloudy, you cannot see the sunset". That was disheartening because we came all the way to see the sunset at Kanyakumari!

Check out other travel destinations in Tamilnadu.

We boarded the boat. It was about 150 people in the boat I guess. All the seats were full and lot of people was standing due to lack of seats. My son was afraid and was asking if there are enough life jackets for everyone in case of a disaster. I told him "all the life jackets in the boat are useless and torn out, so, whether there are enough or not make no difference".

The boat travel was very short. In about 10 minutes, we reached Vivekananda rocks. We were asked to leave the footwear before climbing to the rocks. There was a place to safe keep all shoes at no charge and they will give you a token to claim your shoes/chappals back.

We spent about an hour at Vivekananda rocks and enjoyed the beautiful sunset, which is the best attraction of Kanyakumari. After the sunset, we had to quickly leave the place since boat ride was not allowed after sunset.

Read more: Tamilnadu Tourist Places.

We stayed in the TTDC hotel in Kanyakumari and returned to Thiruvananthapuram next day morning, after watching the sunrise. Read more about the tourist attractions in Thiruvananthapuram.

Read my review of TTDC hotel in Kanyakumari.

Tips for visitors

Here are some important travel tips to the visitors to Kanyakumari