Lighthouse at Surathkal

Port Cities and lighthouses go hand in hand.  Lighthouses are vital guides that facilitate night time navigation. The lighthouse towers in themselves have a beauty of their own, besides history, so much so that they have even become icons and graphics, not to speak of its own charm that has attracted people to them. Many countries have even featured lighthouses on postage stamps, including India.  The lighthouse on North Bay Island in Andaman Islands is featured on the backside of a twenty rupee banknote.  (Click on all images to enlarge)

We cruised past this, from a distance, last year.  The fixed window of our cruise boat was tinted blue. 

One of the most thrilling subjects captured by photographers and painters is of the rough waves in the seas splashing hard at the lonely lighthouses, standing on solid rock.

Web-grab image

Navigation itself is hundreds of years old!  Oldest existing lighthouse in the world is in Spain, The Tower of Hercules, dating back to the late 1st century!

Oldest Lighthouse, Spain.

Then there is a tallest lighthouse in the world, the tallest brick lighthouse, the tallest natural lighthouse and so on.  The Navigation Lighthouse is a great subject of interest in itself, ranging from its shape, location, robustness, optics, antiquity etc.  As such, it has always been visited by tourists.

I read that our Indian govt. plans to tap the huge tourism potential and make them full-fledged tourist destinations!  The Ministry of Shipping plans to draw tourists to the romance of lighthouses by developing 78 lighthouses and generate revenue from their adjacent open areas also.  A portion of the screenshot of press release:

From the first time I had climbed to the top of the Marina Lighthouse in Madras [now Chennai] in 1966, I've always loved it mainly for the panoramic view from that vantage point.  My memory of that lighthouse is rather jumbled, but I can still picture the scene that is impressed in my mind.  If I had the ability of 'Mandrake the Magician', [a famous comic series], who hypnotized the suspect and 'projected' his memory on a wall to 'see' the truth, you would see this - I was on top of the tower: There was the vast sea, the sandy beach and a road. It was Sri Murari Rao [grandfather's client] who had taken us to Madras in his car.

Recent image from The Hindu, of that place.

My next visit to a lighthouse came in Februray 1980 at Surathkal, close to the port city of Mangalore. I was with my college cricket team [for my first tour] to play the Inter-collegiate tournament hosted by KREC [Karnataka Regional Engg. College, now National Inst. of Technology].  One late evening, most of us made a visit to the Surathkal Beach.

Surathkal beach and lighthouse [web-grab]

It was a clean beach presenting a very peaceful ambiance.  Clean, probably because it was not yet frequented by too many visitors at that time. My impression was that lighthouses were old.  But this appeared simple and humble but not old. I learn now, that this was actually built as recently as in 1972.  Entry ticket to the top, reached by a flight of winding stairs, was fifty paisa, if memory serves me correct.  I vividly remember the beautiful optics of the beacon lighting system. A special powerful bulb was fixed in the centre, around which a large lens revolved 360 degrees at a set speed.  It was a very interesting mechanism.  The beacon beam flashing for a long distance at night was a thrilling sight from the town as well.  I was never tired of watching it.  I used to wonder how a neat beam was possible. Here, I found how the beacon light beam worked:

Am yearning to see another lighthouse, no one knows when that will come to fruition.