Kanyakumari is at the very tip of India, the point where the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean converge. For Hindus it's a sacred place of pilgrimage; for everyone else it's one of those geographically compelling spots that justifies the journey on its own terms.
The beach sand here is famously multicoloured — the result of different minerals carried down from different river systems, mixing at this convergence point. The Kumari Amman Temple (dedicated to the virgin goddess Kumari Devi) sits directly on the tip of the peninsula, approachable via a small causeway, and is one of the 108 sacred shakti peethas in India.
Two memorials sit on rocky islets just offshore and can be reached by ferry: the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, built on the rock where the philosopher Swami Vivekananda meditated before setting off for the West in 1893, and the Thiruvalluvar Statue, a 133-foot figure of the Tamil poet-saint completed in 2000.
The sunrise and sunset here are both spectacular — being at the junction of three seas, the light conditions are unusually clear. Sunrise is watched from the eastern beach; sunset from the western side. On full moon nights around the equinoxes, the sun setting and the moon rising are visible simultaneously from the same point.
Kanyakumari is connected by train and bus to Trivandrum (85 km) and Chennai, and makes a natural end or starting point for a journey along the Tamil Nadu coast.