Guest blog by William Kendall, published in Country Life, regarding the Andamans

My Week – March 2019

We travel with some tried and tested offerings when people are kind enough to invite us to stay:  the latest Emma Bridgewater mug, some delicious Pump Street chocolate from Orford and a caddy of Fortnum’s tea (OK, that’s enough plugs for your mates’ products, Ed.). It’s much harder to know what might hit the spot when you join friends who are two years into their voyage around the world.  But a week or two before we took off to The Andaman Islands, anxious messages, via the yacht’s email, appealed for more and more obscure essentials. Some were easy to find:  an expensive brand of granola, wholemeal flour for on-board bread baking. Then the requests became more urgent and technical. The engine was spluttering because of dodgy fuel taken on in Malaysia. It became clear that a large suitcase worth of linen shirts would have to be sacrificed to carry the dozens of diesel filters, solenoids and spare cables we eventually assembled. A dramatic phone call, even as we set off to Heathrow, had us diverting to a specialist chandlers on the Shotley Peninsula for a replacement oil sump cap. Moored off the seductive Havelock Island a day later we handed over our supplies to our hosts. The euphoric reaction made the effort of dragging so many spare parts across the world worthwhile. New friends from neighbouring yachts in the Oyster fleet were invited on board to share the joy. They enviously fingered davit cables and split pins as the tropical sun set over the Burmese coast. Our sailor hosts sat smiling, surrounded by such abundance and easily forgave us that we had forgotten to bring a replacement dinghy propeller.

The Andamans are a long way from the Indian mainland and that probably accounts for their multiple personalities. They are the ‘Islands in Flux’ as one local writer describes them in his collection of critical essays. The sea though is seductive and full of colourful fish. Giant Sea Mohwa trees reach down to the shore from the thick, wooded cliffs of uninhabited islands. If you forget the temperature and the species, this scenery could readily translate to a Highland loch. The locals are charming unless you, foolishly and illegally, visit a tribal reserve when the welcome will be less predictable. It’s a paradise archipelago. All that remains of a long-drowned mountain range, isolated from the rest of South East Asia. Its Indian government seems confused by what to do with the islands. They are ideal for high-end tourism but they are also a security risk. Then they are home to many of the world’s few remaining peoples who live untouched by modern life. Visitors like us are automatically suspect. Our exact location needed to be radioed in daily to the powers that be. Maybe they had a point. Annexing the breathtakingly beautiful and uninhabited Cinque Islands was very tempting. After dropping anchor in their lee I swam ashore to rename them New Suffolk and New Bedfordshire but Indian bureaucracy was one move ahead of me. As I reached the shore in my flippers and mask, I was met by an official from The Forestry Department who, after an exchange of friendlynamastes , warned me that I could only set foot on the perfect white sand with a permit from his superiors in Port Blair.

Time and tide have not been kind to Ross Island. Its ruins are held together by the chaotic root systems of the jungle now rapidly recovering this small land from any trace of the British Raj which made it home for over a century. The once glorious settlement demonstrates how quickly nature will reclaim its territory when we humans retreat. An earthquake in 1941 swiftly followed by the Japanese invasion were enough to seal its fate. The solid walls of what is left of the imposing Presbyterian church made me wonder if the colony’s claim to have been ‘The Paris of the East’ may have been exaggerated. The splendid Subordinate’s Club building certainly once had a large sprung teak dancefloor and a sign informed modern visitors that the island bakery made superb croissants for the residents’ ‘full English breakfasts’. Even at its height though I doubt that Ross Island was a patch on the real City of Light. The few remaining memorials in the churchyard point to nasty tropical diseases and brief lives. It would have taken a lot of dour Scottish expatriates to fill that church and, even if they did occasionally test the strength of the teak dancefloor and really did stuff their faces with croissants for breakfast, I know which Paris I would have chosen to visit, a century or more ago.