India 2012: Holi Festival on Havelock Island (Andaman Islands, Mar 8)

The way my travel itinerary was shaking out, I was going to be in the Andaman Islands during Holi Festival.

I wasn’t fully at peace with this, because I kept reading articles like this one, forum posts as such and everyone’s favorite, confusing/misinformational Yahoo Answers posts.  South India gets low billing in most articles about Holi, and the Andaman Islands don’t even get mentioned.

Was my festival of color going to be colorless?  I quietly panicked at the internet café (on multiple occasions) and checked train fares to traveler favorites like Varanasi, Pushkar, Jaipur, various places in the state of Bengal.  But it was just too much hassle and interruption of my line (squiggle) through South India to get back to the north.

Despairing, I consulted with my friend Renee, who had spent a good chunk of time in India.  She e-mailed back some comfort.

“I don’t think it is necessary, or worth it, to travel to North India just for that festival.  The only thing I can liken it to is NYE.  Every place is going to celebrate it—you just need to ask yourself, to you want to be in Times Square?”

Thanks Renee!  Armed with new resolve, I briefly conquered my persistent Fear-Of-Missing-Out.  Stay the course:  I was going to go to the Andamans during Holi, color or not!

This post is a bit of a sidebar on Holi Festival and doesn’t discuss the Andamans at length.  But I cover it in existing posts!

For a description of my arrival in the Andamans, click here.

And for a description of my 17 days time on Havelock Island, click here.

Color was laid out in large quantities in the weeks and cities prior to my arrival in the Andamans.  These towers of powder were seen in Mysore, Karnataka.  I didn’t see this level of color quantity in Havelock.

The first real sign/warning of Holi came two days prior to the festival from my German dive instructor Helena.  She planned on spending March 8th indoors to avoid getting painted – pink powder put permanent streaks in her platinum blond hair the previous year, and this fräulein wasn’t ready for a repeat.

Second sign:  I started realizing that a lot of the denizens of Havelock originally migrated to the Andamans from Kolkata and other parts of the state of Bengal.  As in, one of the states of India highly recommended for Holi.  Had the color come with them?

My brain started sparking.  What’s this?  I get to have a chaotic, toxic party, even here on this small island, population under 10,000?  Maybe – but I refused to get my hopes up.  Wait and see.  I bought a kilo of orange powder from the bazaar anyway.  And then I bought another kilo of blue, just in case.  Who wants to run out, right?

Holi festival is more or less an announcement of the coming of spring, and in applicable parts of India, lasts two days.  The festival is also celebrated in parts of Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh.  For more information on the history and significance of Holi, click here. 

March 8th, the scheduled first day of Holi, we woke up early as we always did (it was too hot to sleep past 7:00/8:00 AM).  Diving buddy Callum, his cousin Riley and I rallied in front of our windowless green beach huts at El Dorado resort in throwaway clothes and walked on the main road towards the bazaar without a full idea of what to expect.

I rigged my DSLR in a two-gallon plastic zipper bag with two rubber bands around a 35mm lens for the most basic degree of protection.  Callum build a similar coat of armor for his camera and chose a longer lens.

Good news:  Color was here in Havelock!  The first wave of attacks came from young children in front of their family homes that declared “Happy Holi!” and with a sheepish smile, gingerly applied a powder bindi between your eyes or administered a sweep of color to the cheeks.  You were welcome to return the favor.  It was warm and communal.  Good start!

cutest kid award.

Down the road, things got more aggressive.  Fully militarized 13-14 year olds had reservoirs of purple liquid and pump squirt guns and controlled the only road through to the bazaar.  It was on.  Suicide runs into the fray with handfuls of powder yielded the most results/color exchange/shrieking.

Riley, well below color threshold.

We grabbed a quick breakfast of chai, fruit salad and egg rolls at Powerful Restaurant, our usual breakfast spot, and sallied forth into the bazaar to get dirty.  I mean colorful.  But dirty for sure.

Battle stations!  Havelock is  a small island, and all roads lead through the bazaar at some point.  The locals and travelers knew exactly where to go for Holi merriment / combat.  The street through the bazaar, as a choke point for all activity and transit, turned into a gauntlet more or less everyone on the island had to run.

The bazaar got busy with celebrating locals and travelers by 9:00 AM, and there were almost no rules of engagement.  Administer color to whomever you want, whenever you want.  The more, the better.  The war was on!

No mercy for motorbikers. Purple punishment for pedestrians, too. Buckets and water bottles full of this mystery liquid seemed to hit you when you least expected.

Some bystanders hadn’t checked their calendar.  Middle-aged travelers in beach-destination white/khaki tried to call a temporary armistice for passage through the bazaar, but it wasn’t to be.  Motorbikes got their keys taken away while drivers were bombed with liquid, and rickshaws full of travelers just arriving on the island with their backpacks got stopped and dusted by the friendly mob (but mob all the same).  The polyester-clad cops were the only ones that maintained their clean.

Traveling in India in March?  Check your calendar – the days for Holi change between the years, and it would be a dreadful faux pas to schedule your version of P. Diddy’s White Party on the same day – or worse, to miss the entire thing.

Painting your neighbors by hand and dousing them with purple liquid usually will get you punched or arrested.  But on Holi it was the best way to get acquainted.  By the end of the day, everyone on Havelock felt like an old friend (and some I met that day have become old friends already!).

Cecilia!

There’s something about the reckless abandon of getting as dirty as you possibly can with a bunch of strangers that oozes of pure childlike joy.  People opened up.  It was impossible to stop smiling.

Yes – if you’re wondering, the readily-available chemical powder stains your skin and hair and can be harmful/toxic to your body and the environment.  Some Holi festivals are starting to lean towards more environmentally friendly color use.  I don’t think Havelock’s festival was one of them – my skin was stained for weeks, and two months later, when visiting the dentist, I was told that my molars had been stained greenish-blue (a mouthful of color wasn’t my idea, but it happened).  Eek!

chemical color, all up in yo mouth.

Getting the color on was easy.  Getting it off was another story.

First up:  salt water immersion.  Diving buddy Cal and I, crusty as can be, went for a clothes-on soak in the perfect blue, baby-pool warmth/depth of the waters of Beach No. 5.  The water turned a dark red a la cartoon shark attack when we hit it.

Beach No. 5 (photo by Callum Lynch)

We looked at one another in a calmed ecstasy.  How could things possibly get any better?  We were in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen/been, had a full day of unadulterated messy physical fun, and were in for a full evening of laughing about the day’s events with a gang of new friends to come.  We laid in the water perma-grinning and chuckling like we had gotten away with murder or won the lottery.  Maybe both.

Cal and Riley: Murdered by color. Colored-by-number?

Could things have gotten better?  No.  NOT POSSIBLE.  To date, this was the best day I’ve ever had.  Ever.  Yes.  Mmmhmm.

So many people (oft celebrities) say that the best day of their lives was the day they got married, or the day their first child was born.  These people have never been to Havelock on Holi.  No hyperbole, no, never!

“Best Days Ever” tied for close second(s):

2004:  A full day of: bomb hill by skateboard, drink pint of Anchor Steam (repeat, repeat) with colleague Stacy in perfect, cotton-ball-cloud-and-sunshine October San Francisco weather (2004).

2003:  Daimonji Festival in Kyoto – watching mountainsides on fire with kanji characters, and then dancing until closing at a club called “BAR, ISN’T IT?” with a gang of Polish, French, Japanese and Jamaican fast friends.  Then, coffee and nonsensical conversation until bus service resumed in the morning.

Getting the rest of the color off took makeup remover and a lot of scrubbing.  Cecilia’s hair inherited a permanent pink hue.  My arms carried a red cast for weeks.  Aussie buddy Jared’s dreadlocks, yikes – who knows.  My clothes refuse to give up their color to this day!

Diving buddy Jared. He looks like the Predator when he’s backlit underwater.

We returned to diving at Andaman Bubbles and instructor Helena on March 9th.  She had telltale swaths of highlighter-hair from a color ambush.  Her prior experience and knowledge couldn’t save her – no escape!

For the next week, we ran into our Havelock Holi friends on the road, on the beach, in restaurants.  They looked a little different without purple/red/yellow/blue/green skin, but the recognizable smiles remained:  Havelock and its residents/visitors maintained a healthy post-Holi glow.  I found I had stronger feelings for my Holi comrades I had known for a week than for a lot of people I went to high school with for seven years.  You’re supposed to go to high school for seven years, right?  This is normal?  Nevermind, forget I said that.

me: final color-caked product, pre-dip-in-the-sea.

Some travelers said this was the best Holi they had ever experienced – that it was more fun and more personal than those in bigger, crazier Indian cities.  I can’t attest to that, as it was my first time.  But I can say that the spirit of the festival couldn’t have been better, and there was no trouble or violence to speak of – just joy.

That said, the only Holi-negative I can speak to is that some Indian men take Holi as an excuse to grope traveling women while applying color.  In a country where married or dating men and women don’t even hold hands in public (but men hold hands with men regularly and freely), this is a rare chance for men that don’t know how to behave themselves to reduce proximity between themselves and the ladies.  I don’t think this childish, inappropriate behavior is unique to Holi on Havelock.  More on the inappropriate behavior of Indian men towards western female travelers in a later post.  I’ve got a big, ugly double-sided axe to grind.

Enough!  Now, for PICTURES!  All pictures shot by me, my trusty Nikon D7000 + 35mm f2 and my “water housing”: two rubber bands and a two-gallon plastic bag.  Click for a larger view, please do!

And if you’re a Havelock Holi celebrant – I have more than this.  Contact me via comments if you think you didn’t make the cut in the gallery below.

Next post:  leaving my comfortable, familiar Havelock home for Andaman roads-less-traveled.  Onward to Diglipur and Kalipur, the towns with a names that sound like Pokémon!

For reference to Holi-ers that might want to reach out: this is what I look like without double-digit chemical coatings. Add a DSLR in a plastic bag, and you’ve got the right guy.