Kanyakumari

Kanyakumari, at the very southern tip of the Indian mainland in Tamil Nadu, is one of India's most evocative destinations — the fabled "Land's End" where three seas meet: the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean mingle their waters off the rocky shore, and on a clear day you can watch the sun both rise and set over the ocean from the same spot, a phenomenon found almost nowhere else in India.

• Just offshore, reached by a short ferry, stand two of the country's most striking monuments rising from the waves.
• The Vivekananda Rock Memorial, built in 1970 on the rock where Swami Vivekananda is believed to have meditated in 1892 before setting out to address the world, combines a meditation hall and a shrine in a serene granite structure.
• Beside it towers the Thiruvalluvar Statue, a 133-foot (40.6 m) stone sculpture of the revered Tamil poet-philosopher Valluvar, author of the Thirukkural, unveiled on 1 January 2000 — its height of 133 feet deliberately marking the 133 chapters of the great Tamil classic; a glass bridge now links the two islands.
• On the mainland, the ancient Kumari Amman (Bhagavathy Amman) temple honours the virgin goddess who gives the cape its name, the Gandhi Mandapam marks where the Mahatma's ashes were kept before immersion, and the sunrise and sunset viewpoints fill each dawn and dusk with crowds and colour.
• The nearby Suchindram temple with its musical stone pillars and the magnificent Padmanabhapuram wooden palace, just across the Kerala border, make rewarding half-day add-ons.
• For vegetarian travellers, Kanyakumari and the surrounding Tamil-Kerala border country offer excellent pure-vegetarian fare: South Indian banana-leaf meals with sambar and rasam, crisp dosas and idlis, appam and idiyappam with vegetable stew from the Kerala influence, sundal (spiced legumes) on the beachfront, and palm fruit and tender coconut in season.
• The best season is October to March.