Manoli & Musal (Hare) Islands — Western Cays of the Mandapam Group

Musal Island — Hare Island in English — and its neighbour Manoli lie at the western end of the Mandapam group, the string of low coral cays that begins a short way off Mandapam's southern shore and runs eastward towards Pamban.

• Of the twenty-one uninhabited islands scattered through the Gulf of Mannar, these two form the westernmost pair of the Mandapam group: Musal sits at roughly 79°05' east and Manoli at about 79°07' east, west of Krusadai and of the cays beyond it, and both lie among the nearer islands to the mainland at something like six to seven kilometres off the Mandapam coast.
• Stand on that coast, look south across shallow jade-coloured water, and the pale smudge of scrub and sand on the horizon is them.
• Two legal designations sit over this water and are often collapsed into one: the islands and their reef flats were first declared a marine national park in 1980 and finally notified as the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park in 1986, and in 1989 the wider stretch of sea and coast became India's first Marine Biosphere Reserve, with the park as its core zone.
• What sets the western cays apart from the reef stops further east is not scenery but science.
• The waters off Mandapam have supported marine biological and fisheries research for decades, and this western pair — lying within a short boat run of the Mandapam research shore, and therefore straightforward to survey again and again — has long served as reference ground for coral, seagrass and reef-fish monitoring, and more recently for restoration trials that replant seagrass and transplant coral onto degraded patches.
• Assessments of the dugong, the reserve's flagship "sea cow", lean heavily on the seagrass meadows of this western sector.
• Olive ridley turtles are recorded nesting on sandbars among the Gulf of Mannar islands and along the adjoining mainland coast, while green turtles chiefly forage over the seagrass rather than nesting here.
• Gulls, terns and migratory waders use the bare sand as roosts.
• Be clear about access before you plan anything.
• Ordinary visitors do not land on Manoli or Musal.
• The permitted glass-bottom-boat and reef-viewing outings run from Mandapam operate over the Krusadai-area reef flats further east; these two cays sit outside that standard tourist circuit, and entry is granted mainly for Forest Department and research purposes.
• For a traveller, then, Manoli and Musal are something you look at rather than visit — a horizon feature identified from the Mandapam shore, or a low green line passed on the water.
• Treat it as a short stop with binoculars, not an itinerary item, and ask the Forest Department office at Mandapam for the current position on any authorised boat movement.
• Food has to be planned for the mainland, since the cays are uninhabited.
• Rameswaram's pilgrim belt around the Ramanathaswamy Temple has many pure-vegetarian "meals" hotels and tiffin messes serving idli, dosai, medu vada, banana-leaf sappadu and filter coffee, and several vegetarian lodges on West and East Car Streets run their own dining halls; the temple's annadhanam offers a free sattvic meal to devotees, with serving hours best checked on the day.
• Rameswaram is nonetheless a working fishing island and Mandapam a fishing town, so kitchens vary: look for the "pure veg" or "sudha saivam" board at the entrance and confirm at the counter before ordering rather than assuming any street or class of eatery is meat-free.