The enormity and beauty of Pamban Railway

I had never visited Rameswaram as far back as my memory goes and was not sure what to expect out of the Pamban bridge. My sons have special interest in digging up maps of all places and when I showed them where Rameswaram was they were more than eager to get there to see the historic Pamban bridge.

How to get there?

There were few options for me to get there: Rail, bus, car or part flight-then car. We booked a train from Bangalore to Madurai and then an Innova for the rest of our journey. We stayed at Astoria business hotel in Madurai on which I have a separate post if you would like to read.

The shortest distance is about 560km via Salem-Trichy-Pudukottai-Karaikkudi and would take nearly 10 to 11 hours of driving with stops in between. Since this was too much of drive, and I wanted to spend the night traveling the best option was train. I took a train from Bangalore to Madurai. Two common trains are the Tuticorin Express and Nagercoil Express. If you want to know the exact list of trains, click here. I reached Madurai at about 7:00 AM. Please be advised these trains can be late sometimes and if you have tickets in coaches S10 and beyond you can expect lots of people from unreserved compartments to be flooding these bogies as well. If you want to read my experience on that read my blog post here.

Commutation from Madurai

Once you are in Madurai – major places such as Kanyakumari, Rameswaram and Kodaikanal are all nearby – about 3 hours by drive. We took up an Innova on hire from Madurai to Rameswaram which costed us between 10-12 Rupees per kilometre. There is a fixed cost and and a variable cost split in this arrangement. Be aware that if you are going to the hills, then a separate hill stay charge of upto Rs.600/- is levied. This could be 100 or 200 higher depending on the market fluctuations.

Travel from Madurai to Rameswaram takes a good 3 hours by the time you reach you should be hungry for sure. As you go along the route, you will first enter Rameswaram via the Pamban bridge. Most vehicles make an undesignated stop here owing to the popularity of the bridge.

Pamban Bridge Railway

We went in the month of April which was presumed to be hotter but was not really so. Humid yes, but hot no. So you could go to Rameswaram within April end but no later. Best time to visit Rameswaram is between August to February when temperatures would likely be bearable. Its not so much the heat but the humidity which will kill you.

(image source: Wikipedia)

Pamban is an island that has the town of Rameswaram and it is linked to the mainland via the Pamban Bridge. It is the second largest sea bridge after Bandra-Worli Sea Link. The bridge is nearly 2km long and was rebuilt after the initial construction in 1914. Due to a cyclone that damaged the bridge in 1964, the Government had to repair it after. In 2013 the bridge got a damage due to a naval barge again. At a cost of 25 crores, the existing 65.23 metres (214.0 ft) long rolling type span was replaced with a 66 metres (217 ft) long single truss span which could be opened automatically.

The beauty of this bridge is that it even takes the weight of goods trains which are more heavier than passenger trains. At the same time when ships need to go through it can be opened up to allow them to pass. The sea with its myriad shades of blue, indigo and purple is a sight to behold at Pamban. The enormity and beauty of Pamban Railway cannot be stated and has to be seen with one’s own eyes.

This is a 4K video of a train passing through the Pamban Bridge which i hope you will enjoy. If you have a 40-55 inches TV, this would be worth a watch on that size of a TV, its almost as good as being there in real. Remember to set the resolution to 4K on YouTube.

What do you think of the Pamban Bridge experience? Write to me in the comments section.

Review of the Astoria Business Hotel Stay, Madurai

This was a long pending post from my side and I finally found some time to write on this topic. I had a chance to plan a trip to Dhanushkodi and got the opportunity to stay at Astoria Hotel in Madurai for a day. This is a business hotel and I needed a stay only for a day so I chose the hotel.

A few notable things about this hotel are the following

Its walkable from the railway station as long as you don’t have too much luggage
Its preferred to take an auto from the station if you have kids
It is situated somewhat nearby to the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai which is easily reachable by auto within 10 minutes

The front facade of the hotel is one vertical block which mostly present the corridor end windows and the conference room windows on the top floor. There is no access to the terrace as such for visitors.

The entry lounge is good with ample light and seating. This hotel offers 24 hours checkin and checkout with prebooking via multiple travel portals or directly via calling the hotel. I paid nearly about Rs.5000/- per day which is on the steeper side and includes breakfast along with the room. The rooms themselves were well appointed, but were kind of small. Since its a business hotel, the type of travellers mostly expected are the ones who stay in the hotel for about a day and move on to other places near madurai for their business needs.

To this extent the rooms offer the comfort necessary from the relentless heat of Madurai. Thankfully I landed there at a time when Madurai received some rainfall the previous day so the city had cooled down a bit from temperatures of over 38 deg C.

The rooms have thick and large curtains shielding all the harsh light coming in, have a study table with a suitable chair, and a small coffee table with a lounge chair. The beds themselves are a bit soft and springy, the types which you can sink into, though my personal preferences would tend towards slightly harder beds which are not known to aggevate back problems.

The television set is mounted on the wall and the wall also has shelves that hold the glasses and coffee maker. The bathroom is well appointed though the shower is not movable enough making it spray all the water all over the room. It could have been designed better though it does the job for a business traveller. The bath has dispensable soap machines which is the trend nowadays and in my opinion, I prefer this over hundreds of small soap cakes being produced that go a waste on daily basis.

These days hotels have reached a situation wherein you can also say whether or not you want the towels washed or not in order to save water and effort and I highly value this mode of working as it conserves resources.

The cafeteria was good and well appointed in terms of furniture. The breakfast was expensive on the second day, but on the first day it was complementary. I did use the room service once or twice and found it to be good. The people attending to you at the hotel are quick and respond pretty soon to your requests which is what a traveller looks for.

The food itself was good with lots of variety ranging from indian, western, veg and non veg options and was tasty too.

The Astoria Hotel has a view to die for and you can see the Madurai Meenakshi temple very well during the clear nights in the city. The central location, accessibility to Railway station and reasonably close from the airport (~ 10-12km) and a decent variety of rooms, food make this place a business friendly hotel.

If I go again to Madurai, I will stay in Astoria and would recommend this hotel to others too.

Why I may not stay in Daiwik Hotels, Rameswaram again

The travel industry is at all time peak since few decades now, and hotels are doing everything possible to ensure their customers have a pleasant experience while they stay with them.
I had a grand plan for a Rameswaram trip, covering other places along and off the route. My interest was stoked when I wanted to know and in person experience the historic Pamban bridge. Consdering I had read about Autocar’s Mercedes GLS 4×4 review driven in Dhanushkodi, and the kind of scenicness the place offered, Rameswaram and Dhanushkodi got listed as my top priority for this year’s travel.

This post is not really about what these places have to offer, but consider APJ Abdul Kalam was born in Dhanushkodi, consider that Pamban railway bridge is one of the more difficult bridges to have been built and being maintained, and the fact that Dhanushkodi is now a ghost town, after the cyclone that devastated it five decades ago – all these reasons made me to want to see these places.

Add to the fact that the often discussed reality of the bridge Rama built from Dhanushkodi to Sri Lanka and many different versions of its real existence, this fact alone heightened my interests even further. Add to that the absolute beauty of the merging of Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean creating a calm beach on the one side, and a rough and choppy one on the other side, this was surely something to see and have fun.

A quick look on the internet yielded very few hotels in Rameswaram of which Daiwik was the one that has the highest number of ratings on TripAdvisor. For me a hotel is as good as its website and reviews. A brief look at the website made me feel comfortable to go ahead with booking at Daiwik for a couple of days.

The booking process was ridiculously cumbersome. I had to mail and/or call them to enquire about direct rates, and travel portal rate charts. Each mail of mine to them on initial customer engagement, needed a follow up phone call for them to respond to my mail. The hotel is run by people from Kolkata and you have people who do not understand English very well at the front desk. Its either Tamil or Hindi. Each time you have to give a context of who you are, what is your email id, what dates you have asked for the stay and then you will receive a lousy response for all the efforts you have taken with some not so detailed information about what you needed.

Update: The hotel has clarified on their response times, but I am not going to correct the fact that I had to call them almost after every clarification for them to respond. I strongly believe there were times to my knowledge that the hotel did take over 24 hours to respond. And I feel established hotels should process their mails more frequently than this timeframe.

Couple this with the fact that you have to prepay all amount to block a room and this is kind of a financial trap which you cannot get out of. Anything might force a change in your plans and hotels need to understand that its always their customers who are at receiving end of losing money, and not them. They can always find another customer within no time but having no flexibility even to the tune of 50% is a bit disappointing.

Update: As per the hotel’s comments, they have clarified that I will lose 50% if I cancel within 48 hours which is fair. Still I would have preferred something shorter to accomodate travel plans. Anyway this was not the major issue as such.

Anyways after some extra efforts and calls and mails back and forth and a NEFT transfer of the whole amount to them, I finally had a confirmed booking and arrived at their hotel. The hotel itself is very well appointed and decently constructed. After a welcome drink it took like eternity for them to show me my room. This considering the fact that there were only two customers including myself. The staff at the reception is untrained and clueless how to handle customers visiting the hotel. I am not saying this in the ugly sense of the word, but more on the impact and perception it creates in the traveler’s minds.

The room was good and spaciously appointed. However any calls to the room service was basically redirected to the dustbin. It was a repeat telecast of the booking process here. The guy handling room service for over some 200 rooms is the same guy managing the restaurant part. Just imagine the chaos. I waited nearly 20-30 mins each call, and with multiple reminders at 15,10,5 mins each. When you have two impatient kids who are otherwise well behaved, its pretty disappointing to have to teach a room service guy how to handle requests. If you want to compain about this to the reception, it makes no sense as they themselves need to be trained first on many things.

Update: The hotel has clarified that they have only 90 rooms. The Reason I mentioned 200 is an approximation by how many floors and how many rooms they may have roughly had. So I stand corrected to say it is 90 rooms as per their clarification. However the fact remains I had rather unusual wait times on room service calls and the room service charges being higher does not match with the received level of service.

The third part of this hotel was the restaurant. Too many houseflies. I really mean it. You cannot sit and eat at a place which has insects. Really, I have matured a lot over last two decades and there are certain things I really DO NOT like, and this is one of them. I cannot eat in a place with such disturbances. That said, an order took eternity with both me and the waiter being clueless on what is being prepared and when it would be served. Given he was the same guy handling room service, they were lost in attending to customers. Zero marks for this. Sorry you have to answer something to pass an exam right?

In all frankness, I like the place and all that, but the service levels were really pathetic owing to the understaffing of the place. How much more lucky can you get? Yes you can. The days that we stayed there, unfortunately the aircon in the entire 2nd floor had a glitch and they had to switch off the aircon all over the floor. You can probably bear this in a cold country like UK, but imagine doing this in Rameswaram where the average temperature was over 40 deg C ! And again no one explains to me why the aircon does not work. On top of that heavy drilling work. Upon my persistence on this matter, they agreed something was wrong on 2nd Floor and gave me another smaller room in 1st floor. At least I had aircon, and did not have to go through the noisy shit in the other floor.

Update: The hotel have clarified that the room given to me was another deluxe room like the previous one, however I felt it was smaller than the previous one. And no one had explicitly told me that the room given was of similar style. And, until I asked regarding the AC not working well, no one spoke to me on getting shifted out to another room. My only point is that if there is something wrong on the floor, its the hotel who must be proactive to inform guests on this. And not wait until the guests have to ask. Further, it is not that I said things cannot go wrong (such as the AC), which the hotel misunderstood. Its about how the situation is handled post that.

Another small but pesky thing. In one of the rooms opposite to mine, someone tried to open the door with either a wrong card or left the door open for too long or something like that. Apparently the lock technology decided that it was time to beep. At 10PM. So loudly that I could not sleep. I called room service who would respond by 11PM in all my knowledge and they finally plugged the matter. We stay in hotels not to be disturbed by daily city life. And these kinds of issues irk customers a lot. Especially after a long and hard day full of exercise and fun, we have to hit the bed in peace.

Finally the checkout process. You expect the hotel gives you a feedback form if they really mean improvement. And I am a customer who diligently fills it up if given to me. I really mean to give feedback in all respects and expect the hotel to address them depending on priority. After all I have paid a lot to stay there and my opinion should matter to them. But Daiwik did not even bother to offer me a feedback form. And I am not surprised. If they were really meant to take feedback, then they would have done it even without the form. Simple questions like “How was the food”, “did you enjoy your stay” – would do. You can get some really valuable answers.

But no they did not bother. Absoulutely did not even try. And that’s it. I have made my call. I will think twice to stay with them again.

Update: The hotel claims that feedback forms are available. First, I did not find them or ask for them. But while running a hotel, it is the duty of the hotel to understand their guests. Not the guests to understand the hotel. So I stand my ground here. And I wished the hotel gave me their feedback form. It is upto the guest whether they want to fill it up or not. But not being offered feedback form only creates further perceptions which cannot be avoided. Again, this is not about bad-mouthing the place. It is about how the hotel handles guests and their feedback.

There are other better hotels coming up there and its only a matter of time. Including the famed Hyatt right next to Daiwik. It’s a pity when the hotel is good, but people don’t care. Since Daiwik runs their hotels both in Shirdi and Rameswaram both places being piligrimage centers mainly, perhaps they have an understanding that other customers may not turn up there. There are interesting places such as Pamban, and Dhanushkodi and Daiwik management must understand for the sake of tourists from other parts of the world coming there, that they must focus on what matters most – customer engagement. Word of mouth is a powerful weapon and if it is fired wrongly it can damage reputations. I am not meaning to say my blog post does, but there could be others who start talking crap and that would make a difference.

Again the hotel itself is very good. The whole place is understaffed terrbily. To the point that you dont get any attention to matters that you want solved urgently for yourself. So when you go to Rameswaram keep this in mind. Whether or not you book Daiwik is your call. But for me if there are better hotels available by the time I go again, Daiwik will not be a choice on my list.