Andaman & Nicobar

The Andaman Islands sit 1,400 kilometres from the Indian mainland in the Bay of Bengal, geologically part of the Arakan range extending through Myanmar, and they contain some of the most biologically productive coral reef systems remaining anywhere in the Indian Ocean.

Havelock Island has one of the longest consistently rated beaches in Asia at Radhanagar — which the Times described as the best beach in Asia in 2004 and which has maintained that assessment in every subsequent ranking by the quality of the surrounding water rather than the fame of the description. The coral is intact in ways that the reefs of the Maldives and Thailand are increasingly not, and the infrastructure remains light enough that the beach functions as a beach rather than a resort.

The indigenous peoples of the Andamans — the Sentinelese, the Jarawas, the Onge, the Shompen — represent some of the last uncontacted or minimally-contacted human populations on earth. The Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island have actively resisted contact for millennia and remain legally protected from outside interference by the Indian government. These populations are not curiosities — they are the living evidence that humans can choose different relationships to modernity.

The Cellular Jail at Port Blair, built by the British to house Indian independence activists in solitary confinement — each cell designed so that no prisoner could see any other — is the most direct monument to the cost of the independence movement and one of the most sobering historical sites in India. The prisoners included Veer Savarkar and hundreds of others whose names are recorded in the cells where they were kept, in a memorial that refuses to aestheticise suffering.