Paradise, for Two Dollars a Week

Monday, Mar. 18, 2002 By KIERAN COLVERT AND ESTER WENSING
ANGELO CAVALLI/THE IMAGE BANK; STEPHEN STUDD/STONE
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For rent: a tropical island in the Andaman Sea, covered in primary rain forest and fringed by coral reefs. Current occupants: hermit crabs, several varieties of snake, geckos, bats, rats, shrews, birds and the occasional sea turtle visiting the beach to lay her eggs. Going cheap at $100 a year.

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This is not a sunburned fancy. Five islands in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, a group of 572 islands about 300 km south of Burma, are being offered to developers by the Indian government in an effort to emulate the success of the Maldives in the tourism industry. New Delhi has decided that private investment is the best and cheapest way to encourage lucrative resort development. Successful bidders will get a 39-year lease and following that, an undisclosed revenue-sharing arrangement.

Annexed in the 19th century by the British, who found the archipelago's remoteness ideal for a penal colony, the islands were largely ignored until a newly independent India thought them the perfect location for military muscle building. The Indian Navy still regularly stages beach landings to the bewilderment of sunbathing tourists. Last November, a flotilla of warships, attack helicopters, amphibious craft and even battle tanks occupied a deserted island defended only by cockatoos.

The military's activities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands has meant that until recently many of them were off-limits to foreign visitors. These days—though perhaps not for much longer—it's possible to stay on a deserted island in the Andamans without booking a bungalow through a luxury resort chain. We left for Port Blair, the capital, intending to spend a week on Smith Island. But by the time we made it up to Diglipur,—a 200-km cross-island excursion involving trucks, buses and boats—to catch the ferry, we found that Smith was one of the five put on the market, and therefore out of bounds.

We found the next best thing—a miniature hump-backed lump of igneous rock barely 800 m long and about 400 m wide just off Kalipur Beach, 20 km to the south of Diglipur. It had no name, but it did have a beach, a lagoon and even a patch of forest—we immediately dubbed it Turtle Island.

To get there, we were directed to Meena Stores, the local grocery, for a boat. There was no one at the shop when we arrived save a young man who, we discovered, was deaf. As we stood around contemplating our next move, he started pointing to the island and making paddling gestures. We clearly were not the first foreigners to visit the micro paradise. Probas, as we later found out he was called, brought us to his father, a fisherman named Makhan. We negotiated a price for the trip—a couple of dollars—and the two of them led us through the fields into a mangrove swamp. Our feet sank into mud so black and thick it seemed they would never come back out. But Probas guided our steps and eventually, about 400 m from the shore, we found the boat.

It was a homemade contraption—planks of wood nailed together, no motor—but after half an hour's paddling through the surf, Makhan managed to get us to the island. He and Probas kept us alive over the next week, supplying us with freshly caught fish and ferrying us back and forth to Meena Stores for shopping expeditions. The island was better than anything we had hoped for on Smith. We lived simply, sleeping in a tent, eating out of bowls fashioned from halved coconut shells and learning—the hard way—to gut, clean and scale fish that we then roasted over an open fire. Our days were spent exploring the island both above and below water. There's an extensive coral reef on the sheltered southwestern side, with a healthy population of reef fish and some larger predators such as sharks (mainly black and white tips), stingrays, turtles and barracuda. We also found two sea eagles nesting in a strangler fig in the interior of the island.

New Delhi has big plans for the Andamans. The Islands Development Authority is talking about introducing fast catamarans, hovercraft and helicopter services to link the islands. The airstrip at Port Blair will be upgraded to enable bigger jets to come in from New Delhi, Bangkok and Singapore. It all sounds like progress, but we're glad we got there before the development. Visitors to the sumptuous resort soon to be built on Smith Island will no doubt be able to dine on steak and fries and have American breakfasts served in their seaside bungalows, but they will probably miss out on the things that made our trip memorable: the kindness of Makhan and Probas, the bargain-price basmati rice from Meena Stores and the simple pleasure of eating out of a coconut shell.