Beach No. 7, Havelock Island.

Joanne and I were in Port Blair, the capital of the Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a string of tropical islands off the Burmese coast but belonging, by a historical accident, to India. Getting to them from the Indian mainland involves either a tedious process of getting a permit to visit the Andamans (the Nicobars are strictly out of bounds), buying a boat ticket and sailing for almost 3 days, or the quick but painfully expensive US$205 flight from Chennai or Calcutta.

We had blown our budget on a flight to get to get there, and, after almost a month of relaxation on a perfect white-sand beach, we were trying to get a boat ticket back to the mainland. It was clearly going to be more difficult than we had expected. The main problem was that boats sailed to Calcutta only every 10 days or so, and about once a week to Chennai, and if we didn't get on the next Calcutta boat, our month-long permits were going to expire. This would leave us in serious trouble with the Indian authorities, who take a dim view of anyone doing anything in the sensitive frontier area of the Andamans without jumping through the official hoops. In triplicate.

We met a couple of travellers who had arrived from Calcutta for a second month-long visit to the Andamans on the same six-month Indian visa; this violated a little-known government regulation, and they had been arrested and had their passports confiscated; they were in the ticket office trying to get tickets to be sent back to Calcutta on the boat they had arrived on.

Of course, this being India, "sold out" usually means nothing of the sort. Joanne, a veteran of 4 years in Moscow, knows a thing or two about getting past official obstructionism and evading red tape. Looking around the office, she spotted a more senior official of the SCI who was disappearing into his office with a heavy-looking metal briefcase, the sort of briefcase that might accommodate 1000 or so boat tickets. We asked if we might have a word with Mr. Chand, and soon we found ourselves seated in his office, explaining our case. I let Joanne do all the talking, as being blonde and female and having a perfect smile counts for a lot in dealing with middle-aged male bureaucrats.

Mr. Chand outlined the problem to us. On April 1st, as we had been happily snorkelling away at Middle Button Island, frolicking in the most perfect aquarium-clear water we had ever seen, the elementary and high schools of the Andamans had gone on summer holidays. Hundreds of schoolteachers, almost all of them sent from Calcutta and Chennai on two-year "hardship postings" to work in the Andamans, were hell-bent on returning to the mainland, with their families, for some "civilization". The government of the islands was allocated a quota of 80% of the available tickets, and all of them had officially been reserved by teachers and other bureaucrats.

Over the next two days, the people who had reserved these tickets had to appear in person to pay for them and collect them; otherwise the tickets would go back into the "general public quota" and be available on the day before sailing. Mr. Chand thought that the line-up for these last-minute tickets would likely start the night before they went on sale. We gloomily contemplated the prospect of sleeping out in an Indian ticket queue.

It was all a stark change of pace after perhaps the most relaxed month I have ever spent anywhere. The Andamans are a chain of perhaps a hundred islands, large and small, but only a few are open to foreign tourists. The rest are inhabited by dwindling bands of indigenous tribal people, used by the Indian military (for what, we wondered – invading Burma or Sumatra?) or uninhabited and closed to everyone. The most popular islands are Neil Island, Long Island and Havelock Island. Having heard great things about Havelock, we had gone straight there after arriving in Port Blair, imprudently not waiting for the weekend to finish so that we could put our name down on the list for tourist quota boat tickets back to Calcutta. "Do we need to reserve tickets in advance?" we had asked all and sundry, including the Tourist Information Office. "No need; just come back one or two days before the boat sails and there will surely be tickets." Not.

But I digress. Havelock Island, some two and a half hours northeast of Port Blair, lived up to and wildly exceeded our expectations. Formerly uninhabited, it has been settled over the last 30 or 40 years by Hindus who left East Pakistan, and later Bangladesh, as refugees and were resettled by Indira Gandhi's government in the Andamans. This has to rank as one of the better deals for refugees in recent memory. Reflecting this lack of history, the villages and beaches are numbered; we caught a rickshaw from the ferry dock to Beach No. 7, and barely left its friendly confines for the rest of our stay.

A lot of ink is spilled in magazines and travel guides looking for the perfect tropical beach. I certainly haven't seen all the contenders, but of the beaches I have visited in 7 years of Asian ramblings, Beach No. 7 wins hands down for perfection. Picture a gently-curving 4-km stretch of sand so white it dazzles the eyes, backed by a tropical rainforest straight out of The Hobbit. In the early morning the water is so calm that it is like a swimming pool, beckoning blue-green under a cloudless tropical sky. At either end the sand finally runs into rock outcrops, outliers of the limestone cliffs that rise just inland; offshore the rocks support coral reefs tailor-made for snorkelling.

Off the left end of the beach, in one 15-minute stretch of snorkelling, I ran into a turtle, two different types of ray, a banded sea krait (a deadly poisonous sea snake that, fortunately, would have difficulty opening its jaws wide enough to bite a human), several rock lobsters and an octopus. In the sandy centre of the bay, more rays glide gracefully over the grasses dotting the seafloor, clearly visible from the surface through the crystalline water. Offshore a dugong, or sea cow, an endangered and endearingly ugly marine mammal, makes appearances most days; almost every tourist other than Joanne and I seemed to see the dugong at least once during their stay. And, from time to time, olive ridley and leatherback turtles come in from the open ocean to mate and lay eggs in the sand of Beach No. 7 and its neighbouring beaches. The only sound disturbing the peace of the beach is the noise of the surf that kicks up during the day (most afternoons were ideal for bodysurfing), and the harsh screeches of the parakeets that dominate the forest, flashing green in the sun as they chase each other through the trees.

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