We made this family trip in June 2017. My parents, my brother’s family and us.
Before our trip, Andamans seemed a fantasy place. It was in the middle of Bay of Bengal, over 800 miles from mainland India. It was a mere speck, if at all visible, on a map. Any reference to Andamans in books or movies invariably had a connotation of distance and isolation.
What came surprising to me was that life and priorities of people on Andamans were so similar to those of people on mainland India. Kids went to schools, played soccer in soccer fields, and people in general went about their lives pretty oblivious to the fact that they were on a small speck of land in the middle of a vast ocean. The capital city Port Blair was like other medium-sized Indian cities. The great Andaman trunk road stretching about 140 miles south to north connected towns like Mayabunder to Port Blair. I naively had assumed that life on these remote islands had to be different, but I guess no lifestyle, however remote, escapes the reach of modern “civilization”.
Of the 330 or so islands in the Andaman archipelago, we visited four. My thoughts on them are at the following links: