Spending 9 days on the andaman islands is pretty much living in paradise. Port Blair, the capital, in middle andaman is a flight of over 2 hours from Chennai on the main land. They are really out in the middle of the ocean. You can take a boat there, which takes 3 days and apparently gets pretty dirty in that time, but gets you there none the less. However since we were travelling with the folks we were luvky enough to have some flights paid for. PB is a really bustling place with a really mixed crowd of llocals from all over. Theres a landscaped jetty area with a parade and canons and statues of various people who have conquered the islands. That first night I saw a meteorite, although I don’t know whether it burned out or not, but an incredibly bright and low shooting star. From Port Blair theres loads of islands you can go to. The one with most accomodation and dive schools is Havelock about 30 x 50km, but south andaman and neil island and several others are reachable by ferry and will be outrageously beautiful as well. During the 2 and half hour ferry ride we saw dolphins and loads of flying fish. As you follow the coast of havelock to the jetty there are zero biuldings in view, just beaches, palms trees and a riased centre of hills covered in big trees. Only about a fifth of the island is inhabited, follow the tiny road for a while and it just ends in the jungle. The beaches are unnamed, refered to as beaches number 1 to 7. Theres one road on the island. There a string of resorts which wooden huts to kip in, and local fresh fish everywhere to eat in most places. You can go to the fish market and chose a fish, 90 rups a kilo, and have a guy cook it for you over some hots coals next door for next to nothing. 2 quid for a whole fresh curried barbequed barracuda… but you can eat much cheaper than that. Iisland mangoes are delicious and sold for 20 rupees a kilo in the market. Kathryn dveloped an addiction to these that threatened to turn nasty.
As I said the place is paradise, the beaches are so clean, the water starts from a beautifully deep dark clear blue and turns green and then completely transparent on the beaches. The sand is so unbelievably soft. Palms trees line some beaches, mangroves others and huge banyon and teak trees others. We went with Dave and Karen to Elephant beach, littered with bare upended root bowls of trees flattened by the tsunami and went snorkelling to look at the colourful reef fish and coral that lines the island, but the best stuff is reached by boat.
Our first dive was at south button, a rock with a few palm trees sticking out of the ocean 2 hours by slow noisy boat from Havelock, passing between the mangroved coasts of the nieghbouring Lawrence islands. Beneath the surface of south button is a beautiful bright coral garden and its accompanying plethora of iridescent reef fish. Visibility 25m and picture perfect. We were down for 64 minutes and got round about half of the island. Next The Wall. It’s 40 quid for 2 dives in a day. The next dive was Johnny’s Gorge, much deeper, with large rocks coming out of the sandy bottom. Mega strong current but the fish didn’t seem to mind. It was like being in an aquarium, just amazing, schools of tuna and huge trevally and so many others, a huge white tipped shark and all round amazingness. On the way back we dived an enormous coral garden called Minerva that just went on and on with colour and life. Nothing clues on the surface in either case, just GPS. There are 27 recognised dive sites and we went to 4 and they were all amazing.
On the 5th day we headed back to Port Blair to see Dave and Karen off who I must thank for their great company, transporting us into a world of luxury during their visit and apologise to for dragging them across southern india with a series of epic journeys!
Unfortunately we missed Holi on those two diving days, and came back to the island to find paint all over cars, roads, buildings and especially people. From head to toe in these colourful paints that every shop sells for the 2 days festival. It’s the whole of India 2 day festival of paint throwing. Simple as that! Being full of young people from various places and all of the above, its easy to understand why we didn’t want to leave.
But the Visa runs out in 4 days and theres 1800km to travel and a stop to make in Calcutta (14.7 million) to get new visa before we head into Bangladesh . We’re on the train now having spent yesterday in the mental markets in Georgetown in Chennai, which is a friendly city of 12 million. A road for steel, a road for bile parts, a road for rice, a road for lentils, a road for fruit, spices.. and a small army of men with carts, trailers, and bicycles and cows to deliver them. Everything manual, amazing place.
So in BD there’s some nice tribal hills area, coast, and the 100mile wide Ganges delta which should be a fairly unique environment, and Kat to visit in her Burmese refugee camp. We finally met some people on Havelock who had good things to say about Bangladesh which has us really excited. However everyone has agreed that the 150 million people who live there, 83% of whom are muslim, speak little English, have everything written in Arabic, no tourism infrastructure, shocking roads, awful pollution, no beer and insist you wear clothes to keep covered up in the sticky heat. So it should be an interesting 4 weeks really!
