Travel with Indigo

In the English language there are single words that can tell us much about a place. When we read that the Sahara is a desert, for example, our mind conjures a reasonably accurate picture. Likewise, if we say Palm Beach is manicured. For the town of Port Blair, capital of the Andaman Islands, the single descriptive word is shithole. No other term adequately conveys its essence and no more need be said of the place.

If you exclude nearly all human habitations, the islands are remote, unblemished and in every way pleasing to the senses. They have recently been discovered by the most intrepid of the backpacker crowd and by adventurous scuba divers. Many of the islands are off limits to tourism the better to protect indigenous tribes. Our agent said that should we be so unwise as to land our tender on some of these without proper introductions and ceremony we would likely be attacked by the savages who live there, bows and arrows their weapons of choice.

At Havelock Island, scuba diving center of the Andamans, we anchored just off a small village and tendered to shore. Set in a shady grove of palms, the place appeared idyllic from a distance. Up close it was something quite different. What had from afar seemed a lovely beach was up close a beach for sure but as far removed from lovely as Shania Twain is removed from Bella Abzug. Across its face at the high tide line was strewn a blot on the good name of tropical beaches. Plastic soda bottles, fast food wrappers, and assorted other flotsam intermingled with rotted palm fronds, fallen tree limbs and the like. Contributing to the scene an unforgettable fragrance and a dense swarm of black flies was the fetid carcass of a dog cooking in the blazing sun.

Palms along the shore shaded dusty shanties lining a potholed dirt path generously sprinkled with cast off gum wrappers, empty cigarette packages, rusted and dented tin cans, and assorted other chaff from people apparently without a nodding acquaintance of sanitation. In the air were not the joyful giggles of children at play, not the earnest tones of men speaking about weighty matters, and not the expectant chatter of commercial transactions. I wasn’t greeted with a warm smile or cheerful waive or even importuned by eager hawkers. There was only the dispiriting quiet of the sort found in the sitting rooms of funeral homes.

After meeting up with our dive guide, an incongruously friendly young lad named Shamir, we loaded up with air tanks and assorted other gear and made our way to the dive site at South Button Island. There we dived to about 30 to 40 feet and over the course of an hour made our way around a handsome reef loaded with all manner of sea life, including some large jacks. Storms that had recently pelted the area had left the water murky.

We had been waiting for a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal to clear out leaving us a clear path to our next destination, the Maldives Islands.

With the advice of our weather routing service, we determined that cyclones spawn in the bay at or north of about five degrees north latitude then reliably move off to the north and northwest. Thus it seemed if we could make our way south, remaining on the east side of the protecting Andaman and Nicobar Islands, turn southwest at the far southern extreme of the Nicobars, and continue on a southerly course until we reached a latitude south of the cyclone spawning grounds before turning westward, we would have a fair chance at smooth seas. With the monsoons closing in and cyclones looming, we decided it was time to get moving, and so we did.