Andaman Islands Coastal Break

About this pack

A 6-day premium trip to Port Blair, India, taking in Cellular Jail, Radhanagar Beach, Ross Island ruins and Neil Island.

Inside the Andaman Islands Coastal Break trip

Andaman Islands Coastal Break opens at the Cellular Jail, the former British colonial prison in Port Blair known to generations of Indians as Kala Pani, "black water." Built between 1896 and 1906 from puce-coloured brick shipped in from Burma, the prison was designed on Jeremy Bentham's panopticon principle, its seven wings radiating from a central watchtower so that guards could observe the 696 solitary cells without prisoners ever seeing one another. The jail held many of India's independence movement's most prominent figures, among them Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Batukeshwar Dutt, exiled here in solitary confinement precisely to keep political prisoners isolated from one another and from the mainland; the prison suffered damage in a 1941 earthquake, and two of its original seven wings were later dismantled, first by occupying Japanese forces during the Second World War and then in the 1950s to make way for a nearby medical facility, leaving only the watchtower and three wings standing as the national memorial visitors see today.

From Port Blair the route crosses to Radhanagar Beach on Havelock Island, officially Swaraj Dweep, prized for its white sand, clear turquoise water and the dense tropical forest that lines its shore. The beach has earned Blue Flag certification, the international eco-label awarded only to beaches meeting strict environmental, cleanliness and safety standards, and its gentle waves and sheltered waters have made it one of the most recognised beaches in Asia, featured in international travel media in the years since it first drew wider attention.

The trip continues to Ross Island, renamed Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Island in 2018 in honour of the Indian nationalist leader, just three kilometres east of Port Blair. First surveyed by Archibald Blair in 1789, the island served from 1858 as the administrative headquarters of the British penal settlement in the Andamans, its heyday visible today in the ruined bazaar, church, printing press, secretariat, infirmary, swimming pool and grand ballrooms that once surrounded the Chief Commissioner's residence, now reclaimed in places by the roots of overgrown banyan and rubber trees. Subhas Chandra Bose stayed briefly on the island in December 1943 during the wartime Japanese occupation, hoisting the Indian national flag there for the first time, before British administration resumed in October 1945 at the end of the Second World War.

The route closes at Neil Island, officially renamed Shaheed Dweep, or "Martyr's Island," also in 2018, part of Ritchie's Archipelago some 36 kilometres northeast of Port Blair. Named originally after the British brigadier general James Neill, who fought during the 1857 uprising, the island remained uninhabited until settlers, many of them refugees who had fled the 1971 conflict surrounding Bangladesh's independence, arrived in the late 1960s; today its comparatively flat terrain supports paddy cultivation across five villages, with forest cover concentrated mainly in a reserve on its northwestern side — a quieter, low-key close to a route that has already carried the traveller from a colonial-era prison through award-winning sands to the ruins of a Victorian penal headquarters.

• Cellular Jail — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Radhanagar Beach — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Ross Island, South Andaman district — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Neil Island — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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