Madurai, Rameswaram & Kanyakumari — the Southern Tip

Into the city built in squares around its temple. Meenakshi Amman in the afternoon — fourteen gopurams carrying thousands of repainted figures, the golden lotus tank and the Thousand Pillar Hall — and the closing ceremony in the evening, when the god is carried to the goddess and the doors shut for the night. The temple is at its most alive in that last hour, and the procession is a working ritual rather than a performance.

South-east through palmyra country to the coast and over the channel to Rameswaram, one of the four Char Dham sites. Ramanathaswamy fills the afternoon: an outer corridor of about twelve hundred metres, the longest in any Indian temple, each granite pier carved individually. Pilgrims bathe in the sea at Agni Theertham and then at the twenty-two wells within — an attendant pours each one over you, and dry clothes are not optional if you join in.

Dhanushkodi in the morning: nineteen kilometres out along a narrowing spit to where the road stops between two seas. The cyclone of December 1964 destroyed the town overnight and it was never rebuilt — the church shell and the railway remains stand where they fell. Kothandaramaswamy temple back along the road survived it. The afternoon takes Gandhamadhana Parvatham for the view of how thin the island is, and the shore sites at whatever pace the heat allows.

A long westward drive down the coast, around six hours, with Suchindram as the stop that justifies breaking it — the Thanumalayan temple there has a 40-metre gopuram and a set of stone columns that ring at different pitches when struck. Into Kanyakumari in the late afternoon, in time to walk out to the point where the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean meet, and to see the two rocks offshore before the light goes.

Up for the sunrise the town exists for — clearest between October and March, and on a handful of days around the full moon in April you can watch the sun rise and the moon set across the same stretch of water. The ferry runs out to the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, built in 1970 where Vivekananda is said to have meditated in 1892, with the 41-metre Thiruvalluvar statue on the rock beside it. Then north-west to Trivandrum, around two and a half hours, for the flight.