India 2012: Arrival in the Andaman Islands (Mar 2)

Flying into Port Blair felt a bit like flying off the edge of the map.

But of course, it wasn’t.  The Andaman Islands were only shrouded in mystery in my own smallish brain.  I had been ignorant of the string of islands until I began planning my trip to India.

The thing that first turned me on to heading to the Andamans was diving.  I got my PADI Open Water Diver certification the previous year in Thailand, and was itching to get back in some high-visibility water with a lot of sea life.  The Andamans promised this, or at least everything I started reading did.

The other appealing thing to me about the Andamans is that heading there felt like a holiday within my holiday in India.  A nice blue-water break from intense, noisy, dirty cities.  Achieving this double-holiday became so important to me that I started cutting days off my time in south India just to make sure I got to the Andamans before my time in India ran out (or rather, as it turned out, so I could spend way more time on the islands than I anticipated!).

Added interest:  many places on the islands are protected nature reserves, and some areas are reserved grounds for the activities of somewhat primitive tribal groups like the Jarawa.  Environmentalism and conservation at work in a parent country that throws its trash out train windows?  Wild.

The Andaman & Nicobar Islands:  nowhere near India.  Closer to Myanmar, and part of an underwater mountain range that extends out of Myanmar, too.

Geographically, the Andamans don’t feel like they should be a part of India given their remoteness.  Indian presence was first felt in the 11th century when the string of islands was used as a naval base by a Tamil Chola dynasty king.  The Danish colonized the Andamans in 1756, and later sold the islands to the Brits in 1868.  Japan assumed control of the islands during World War II.  Afterwards, in 1950, the islands formally became a part of India.

The Brits used the islands primarily as a penal colony for Indian independence movement figures and dissenters.  There’s an antiquated prison known as Cellular Jail in the capital of the Andamans, Port Blair, that I’m told is an interesting visit, though I never made it there (I missed out on the brutal past of the islands thanks to long weeks of lazing on the beach and diving.  Blame me?).

Cellular Jail. Not my photo.

There are only a few ways for the traveler to reach the Andaman Islands by conventional means:

• Fly to Port Blair from Chennai or Kolkata (or fly from Delhi and connect).  A direct flight will take about two hours and ran about 6,000 Rupees and up in March of 2012.  Want to fly from Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Phnom Penh?  Nope, no flights are available (yet)!  Only domestic options exist.
• Take a boat to Port Blair from Chennai or Kolkata.  This can take several days (and possibly several days more if weather is bad or boat schedules are not agreeable), but costs significantly less than flying.  I didn’t explore this option much as I valued my time  I expected more travelers I met in the Andamans to have taken the low-budget boat, but most had flown.

India’s lack of visa-on-arrival processing, plus domestic-only access to the Andamans makes it impossible to end up there by accident.   And this makes it so that annoying drunk blowhard you met in Vang Vieng and the girl with puke in her hair at the Full Moon Party on Ko Pha Ngan aren’t going to be there.  Effort was never their strong suite.

Beware, all ye undesirables. (not in India – in Ko Tao, Thailand, 2011.)

I took a 5:50 AM flight out of Chennai on March 2nd, which required a 3:30 AM cab ride.  The hotel, of course, took full advantage of my predicament of leaving at such a stupid hour and made sure to charge me the tourist price of 550 Rupees for the taxi ride there.

How am I supposed to bargain when I’m at such a disadvantage as this?  Striking out on your own and seeking a cab at 3:00 AM could be a total disaster, and when the hotel tells you that they won’t book a lower-priced rickshaw for you instead of a cab, what can you possibly do?  For my purposes, I’d rather have the front desk be responsible for my cab than trying to contract the job out myself and risk missing my flight.  Shrug.

Apparently I could’ve missed the plane even with plenty of lead time:  friends that flew the same route to the Andamans arrived in Chennai airport to find that their Kingfisher Airlines flight was going to depart one hour EARLIER than scheduled.  Only in India, where the rules so often change without notice or apology.

Troubled Kingfisher Airlines is owned by the same company that’s responsible for ever-crappy & ubiquitous Kingfisher beer.

The Andamans operate in the same time zone as the rest of the Indian mainland (UTC/GMT +5:30 hours), which is odd as it’s so far east of, say, Mumbai or Delhi.  But operate on Indian time it does, so the sun rises and sets early accordingly.  So when I arrived in Port Blair at 7:55 AM, it was more like 9:00 AM.  Not a huge difference (and I’m not one to cry about jet lag), but just enough to mess with your perception of time a bit.

Upon arrival by plane, the traveler must sign up for a 30-day permit for a stay in the Andamans.  This is available upon arrival if you come by air – but be warned: if you come by boat, you’ll need to get it in your departing city.  The permit can be extended to 45 days in Port Blair or Havelock, but be ready for a bit of red tape if you try to extend (I tried and failed, because I didn’t have onward airfare booked BEYOND the expiry of my permit.  But it was a complete catch 22 – why would I book onward airfare if I wasn’t even permitted to stay that long?  Oh India.).

The permit is a small, flimsy, easy to destroy, easy to lose piece of paper that you have to show for every single ferry ride you embark upon and every place you stay.  I have no idea what happens if you lose the thing or forget to take it out of your trunks before you take a dip in the ocean, and I don’t want to know.  I’m guessing “the pain of crucifixion via extreme frustration and unending confusion and inconvenience” is a close bet.  Perhaps we should all add laminating machines to our packs?

Fortunately, the permit application process is a breeze.  Before long, I was outside of the airport fighting off rickshaw drivers as usual.

“NO THANK YOU, I AM TAKING THE BUS.  I LOVE THE BUS.  Where’s the bus stop, anyway?”

I posted up at the nearby bus stop (which was of course, not marked) and stood in the sun, ready to wedge myself in with the locals.  It took a while.  One of the friendlier rickshaw drivers agreed to a 40 Rupee fare (he was going my way anyway) and dropped me at the jetty so I could get out of Port Blair just as quickly as I had arrived there.

Most travelers jump in and out of Port Blair as if it was the most undesirable transit town on the planet.  That is, of course, not true (the award for Most Undesirable Transit Town goes to… COIMBATORE, TAMIL NADU!).  Port Blair is the capital of the Andaman Islands, and is the primary hub for getting anywhere else in the archipelago.  There are a few things to do in PB, too, but I wouldn’t want to spend a week there or anything.  A couple of days are enough.

But a couple of days were far too much at this point – Mathieu, my travel buddy from the states of Karnataka and Kerala, was already in the Andamans and having a nice time in Little Andaman, the southernmost island in the chain.  I was going to try to meet up with him.

Travel buddy Mathieu a couple of weeks prior with his corn and plush toys, of course. Ooty, Tamil Nadu.

This is where the problems started.  You see, maintaining an inflexible, time-based goal in India is an error in judgment.  The Andamans, though geographically far from the subcontinent, still operate in the same sometimes-crazy brain space that the mainland does.

To get to Little Andaman from Port Blair, you need to take a government-run ferry, which means a visit to the government ferry ticket office.  The eight-or-so ticket windows were your standard push-and-shove / slight-the-person-in-front-of-you melee, which I can anticipate but never fully accept.  The power dropped out upon my arrival and the place turned into a Sioux sweat lodge (but fortunately, the computers were on a generator).  How’s that for a warm welcome to the Andamans?  Get it?  Me neither.

This is the much smaller, much less annoying, open air version of the Port Blair sweatbox ticket office. Don’t get me wrong, this Havelock-based office is still an exercise in irritation – it’s just that it’s an exercise in irritation with a gentle sea breeze.

I was line-jumped over and over again by 100 lb Indian men dressed for a yet-to-be-filmed ’70s exploitation film, despite my vague, completely empty threats of violence should I get jumped again.  Their shoulders were so thin and knife-like, their sense of common courtesy so nonexistent.  I sweated through my shirt on my first ticketing attempt.

There was indeed a boat going to Little Andaman the next day, but the clerk refused to put me on it and refused to explain why.

“Three day advance, three day advance needed!” was the best I could get out of her.

Seemingly doomed to spend the next three nights in Port Blair, I stepped outside and called Mathieu’s Indian cellphone from my US cellphone to see how long he was planning to stay in Little Andaman (long enough for a three-day advance).  For the two short calls I made, I racked up $70 in airtime bills.  Cool!  An unlocked cellphone and Indian simcard would have been cheaper over the course of my entire three-month trip.  Lesson learned!

$70 poorer, I still had no ferry ticket to anywhere, let alone Little Andaman.  I resolved to head out to Havelock Island, the primary site for diving and all-around island tourism in the Andamans.  After another 45 minutes of pushed-into-a-swimming-pool-with-my-clothes-on-style sweat-drenched aggravation in the ticket lines, I somehow had a ticket on a ferry to Havelock in an hour and a half, for around 200 Rupees.  My sense of accomplishment in achieving my second choice goal (a distant second) was akin to that of curing cancer.  If a person can glow from compromise alone, I was a beacon.

The Andaman Islands. Click on the map for a bigger map. It’s that easy.

After a quick, nutritionally unfulfilling lunch of two samosas and a chai, I boarded the ferry ready for a few hours of autopilot brain.

But before that, a stage play!  A chunky middle-aged Italian man, equally frustrated with the ticket office, had boarded the ferry without a valid ticket.  Several waves of authorities asked him to leave.

“Call the police, take me away!” he called out, jutting his arms out for imaginary handcuffs.

He attempted to hide in the ship’s women’s bathroom.  He made faces and pointed his umbrella at the (quite reasonable) captain of the ship.  He looked to the other foreign travelers for help.  We distanced ourselves as if he was carrying ebola – we had tickets, and only one of us was getting thrown off this boat.

And thrown off he was, by a sizable police officer.  We watched him pout from the dock under his tiny blue parasol as the ferry pulled away (a couple of minutes late, thanks to his efforts).

NEXT STOP: Havelock Island