Havelock & Neil, the Andaman Islands

Met at Veer Savarkar airport in Port Blair — officially Sri Vijaya Puram since 2024 — and driven straight to the jetty for the ferry to Havelock. The crossing takes about an hour and a half, out past the forested islands of the archipelago, most of them uninhabited.

Havelock Island, renamed Swaraj Dweep in 2018, is the largest island of Ritchie’s Archipelago. It was settled after Partition by Bengali families from East Pakistan, and its villages and beaches still go by numbers: Radhanagar is Beach No. 7. Check in, and give what is left of the day to the sand and the sea.

After breakfast, a shared speedboat from the jetty up the coast to Elephant Beach, a ride of about 25 minutes. The reef begins almost at the water’s edge: close to shore the coral lies in about a metre of water, easy for a first-time snorkeller, while the larger reef further out is dense with hard coral and the fish that live on it.

Between swims, the beach itself: white sand, shallow blue water, and the grey trunks of fallen trees lying where the sea brought them down — the photograph everyone takes. The speedboat brings you back to Havelock in the afternoon, and the evening is free.

The ferry south to Neil Island, renamed Shaheed Dweep in 2018: small and flat, with paddy fields and vegetable plots behind its beaches, much of their produce going by boat to Port Blair. Its villages take their names from the Ramayana — Bharatpur, Sitapur, Lakshmanpur and Ramnagar. Check in at your hotel.

In the afternoon, the beaches: Bharatpur, by the jetty, with a shallow lagoon over coral; Sitapur at the eastern tip, where the sun comes up; and Lakshmanpur, a long white beach on the west side, where it goes down. Walk the sand at low tide and look into the rock pools on the way.

The morning ferry back to Port Blair and your hotel. The rest of the day is free for the town: the waterfront at Marina Park, the Anthropological Museum on the islands’ first peoples, or the Samudrika naval marine museum.

Leave time for the Cellular Jail, whose museum closes at four. The British built it between 1896 and 1906 to hold prisoners transported from the mainland, many of them fighters for India’s freedom, each alone in a cell — hence the name. In the evening, the sound and light show in the courtyard tells its story as the dark comes down.