Kundukal Point

Kundukal Point is where Rameswaram island simply runs out. Follow the coastal lane north-east from the temple town for about 4–5 km, past the last of the tiled fishing houses, and the tarmac gives up on a low, scrubby headland with water on three sides.

• This is the island's north-eastern land's end, and the water it faces is Palk Bay — the shallow inland sea between the Tamil Nadu coast and Sri Lanka — with the eye travelling east and south-east across it towards the low sand-line of Dhanushkodi and, further out, the Palk Strait.
• It is worth being precise about that geography, because travel copy often muddles it: the Gulf of Mannar lies on the far side of the island's spine, south of the Rameswaram–Dhanushkodi–Adam's Bridge line, and the divide between the two bodies of water sits well away from this headland — at the Pamban channel to the west and along the Adam's Bridge shoals to the south-east.
• Nothing "meets" here; Kundukal looks out over one sea only.
• What gives the point its own character, rather than a generic quiet-beach mood, is that it is a landing rather than a bathing shore.
• Country boats are hauled up on the packed sand where the lane ends, outboards and coiled nets stacked beside them, and the hamlet's day is arranged around the tide rather than around visitors.
• Olaikuda Beach, a couple of kilometres back towards town on the same coast, is the shell-and-coral wading stretch with the famously glassy shallows; Kundukal is the working tip beyond it — flatter, muddier underfoot, more exposed to the wind, and with no bathing use at all.
• Seeing both in one morning gives you the two halves of this shoreline rather than the same beach twice.
• At low tide the point uncovers a broad apron of tidal mudflat and sandbar, and these flats draw the same waders seen along much of the Palk Bay shoreline: egrets and reef herons stalking the shallows, sandpipers, stints and plovers working the wet margin, with numbers generally higher between October and March.
• Bring binoculars, keep well back from feeding flocks, and stay clear of nets, drying grounds and beached boats — this is somebody's workplace.
• There is no shade, no lifeguard, no shop and no ticket counter; the footing is soft mud and broken shell, so treat it as a place to walk the tideline and watch, not to swim.
• For food, nothing is sold at the point itself, so plan to eat back in the temple belt about 4–5 km away.
• The pilgrim streets around the Ramanathaswamy gopurams are dominated by pure-vegetarian "meals" hotels and tiffin messes — unlimited banana-leaf sappadu at midday, idli, dosai, pongal and filter coffee from dawn — but Rameswaram is a working fishing island, so look for an explicitly pure-veg board at the door and confirm before ordering rather than assuming any coastal eatery is vegetarian.
• Our Car Street banana-leaf sappadu trail and pilgrim-town tiffin and filter-coffee trail walk that belt in detail, and the temple's annadhanam serves a simple sattvic meal on many days.