Bulletin

	Bulletin - 30 May 2002
The Andamans
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a part of India, are on the trade wind route from Thailand to Ceylon, but it is only recently that yachts have been given permission to visit them. Although the southern Nicobar islands are closest to the route, the only port of entry is Port Blair, well to the north, in the Andamans. We set sail on Boxing Day, heading roughly north west from Phuket Island, and had a fast, splashy reach across the Andaman Sea arriving at Port Blair at dusk and finally dropping anchor in the dark, after three and a half days. We had hand-steered for the first two nights of the passage, as Cecile’s steering oar had detached itself, on each occasion just as it got dark, making it very hard to fix. There was one other, Australian, yacht at anchor, who came over to brief us on the check-in process, which they had just completed. We were rather stunned to discover that Customs had asked for and been given 3 bottles of whisky, which, we were assured, had been the norm for yachts in recent years! Tenacity had known and had come prepared with cheap Thai whisky.
	The following morning we inadvertently kept Customs waiting on the quayside, from which they were expecting to be collected, while we pumped up the dinghy for them. They were very pleasant, happy to give their names and have their photo taken, were clearly disconcerted by the meagre declaration of alcohol and tobacco we made (actually asking “no Scotch?”!), but finally, just as they were leaving , asked if we had any “compliments” for them. When a packet of cigarettes each was offered, the senior officer said to the junior “do you fancy a bottle of gin?” (we had declared three), but we explained that this was all we had to last us for the rest of our trip, and offered instead a bottle of wine. There was a momentary concern and hesitation, but the wine was accepted by the junior man, who was then surprised to find that his packet of cigarettes had been swiftly stowed back in their locker by John, before he could pack them into his empty briefcase (which had plenty of room for three bottles)! The naval “inspection” and visit from immigration passed off without incident and we believed we had completed all the formalities well before lunch and went ashore to explore. The first sight to greet us was a Morris Oxford taxi, still made in India as the Ambassador.
We had not managed to find out much detail about the Andamans before arriving and once there found that the information tended towards hyperbole – not unreasonably – but was totally vague, so that it was impossible to tell where exactly any of the wonders described was to be found. The islands are a tourist venue primarily for Indians from the mainland, who either like, or are anyway only offered, group tours by bus or boat, none of which greatly appealed to us. The islands are well spaced apart, and we had been told by the navy that permission would not be given to us as foreigners to visit the Nicobars (even Indians have to apply for permission). So we were finding it difficult to plan our time there. The following morning we were invited (summoned?) to the Harbour Master’s office, with Tenacity. The Harbour Master was very friendly, charming, and keen that we should all enjoy our visit to the islands. But the system required that each boat submit an itinerary of our planned movements with dates, which was difficult in the light of the information we had. The Harbour Master did his best to describe places where the snorkelling is good, though the best of these require permission from the Chief Wildlife Warden to visit at all, and it is not possible to spend the night at anchor at any of them. The Harbour Master also unfortunately had several assistants who enthusiastically demanded the completion of various forms all requiring the duplicate information. The crew of Tenacity remained determinedly calm, but we allowed our exasperation to show – principally due to the fact that there were arguments raging between the officials over which bureaucratic hoops they should require us to jump through – at which one of the assistants pointed out that they had learnt all their systems from the British! At the Wildlife department, we had to write a letter (dictated by one of the clerks) requesting permission to visit a particular site on a particular day; then we had to wait to see the Chief Warden in person to obtain permission for a day visit. Each yacht requested permission to spend a night at one of the islands and each was refused “it is not allowed to spend the night because it is prohibited”. We were then told to return in the afternoon to be given the formal letter of permission, but we refused as we had other plans for the afternoon, so we waited and watched the letter being drafted by hand, using a previous one as example; then submitted for typing; then taken in for signing; then stamping with an official stamp. We then had to take a copy back to the harbour office. Thus was spent the entire morning of day 2 of our planned 5 day stay! The trade winds were blowing well as we left the following morning for Chidya Tapu on the south eastern corner of South Andaman Island, and we had quite a rough, though short, sail down the coast. Only 20 miles offshore, the Andaman Sea is 2000 metres deep, and along the coast the depth falls from 400-600 metres to only 60 – 70 in the space of two miles, which in any wind, results in very turbulent and uncomfortable seas. Not long after we left the anchorage, we were called up by Port Blair radio and told to return as they did not have a copy of some paper or other. We explained that the Harbour Master had everything he had asked for, and, in the end, refused to turn back “we cannot turn back now” and were finally left in peace to proceed, but we still had the requirement laid on us in the HM’s office the previous day to report our position every morning and evening at a set time, and every time we moved, even though they had our itinerary. Once down at the new anchorage, we found a bay with reasonable shelter from the swell. Ashore was a small beach with beautiful graceful trees, all with straight trunks and spreading branches which cast good shade, and locally known as kardimova. Behind these was a fairly dense area of jungle, with again immensely tall trees, with many birds clearly audible, but very hard to see as they are right at the top of the jungle canopy – a long way off, as well as needing constant severe head craning! From here two days later we sailed on down to the Cinque Islands, anchoring on the northern side for protection from the huge swell rolling in from the south east, but then suffering violent winds coming down from the hills alongside us, which tended to push us back towards the reef, only 150 yards astern. It was hardly a comfortable spot, though maybe better than on the southern side, and in those conditions one would not have wanted to stay for long, even if permission had been forthcoming. We snorkelled over the anchor to check that it was holding well, then went round to the south side of the island where we had had reports of good snorkelling, and where we found very pretty coral, much of it edged in white, and a good range of brightly coloured fish. But we didn’t like leaving Flame out of sight for long, and ashore looked tempting too, so we came back into our bay and walked along the beach and through a magnificent stand of tall trees. The beach consisted of some of the softest, whitest sand we have ever seen, making walking quite hard going, and the trees just above had spectacular buttresses, some a full twelve feet across. The conditions meant that we hadn’t risked taking the camera, very sadly, so you have to imagine buttresses four times the size of the one we photographed on Serutu Island in Indonesia.
	We decided that since we were going to have to beat back up through the waves to our temporary anchorage, and then do the same the next day to get back to Port Blair (to victual and clear out) we might as well do it all in one, and we had one of our roughest sails to date back up to Port Blair. This time we entered the harbour in daylight, so that we could see Blair Reef of which the Indian Ocean Cruising Guide warns: “Dangers. Care is needed of Blair Reef in the final approach to Phoenix Bay”. We wonder if the warning about Blair Reef should be more widely spread throughout the UK, and not just confined to sailors in the Andamans.
	The following day we visited the cellular gaol, built by the British to house prisoners who had been fighting for Indian independence. It was so named because it had only individual cells, each well ventilated and shaded and the size of a small hotel room, though of course with no facilities! On display are the work room, where prisoners ground corn and made sisal rope; and the gantry for hanging three men at a time, though there is no explanation for why it was necessary to hang three people together. We heard that only recently the wording of the captions in the museum had been changed from “prisoners” to “freedom fighters” and certainly the displays and accompanying literature were highly emotive, describing the brutal regime the prisoners had to undergo. Apart from work in the gaol, the prisoners were also put to work in the jungle. Since most of them seemed to have been intellectuals and artists from good families, they were not at all used to manual labour of any kind, which might put some perspective onto the claims of brutality. To make matters worse, the jungle was full of local tribespeople (of whom more later) who attacked, killed and ate both Indian prisoners and British guards indiscriminately!
Everyone we met (and many of the residents are descended from the original prisoners) was very welcoming and friendly on hearing that we were British, so we were somewhat taken aback to read the emotional comments in the museum’s visitors’ book “makes me proud of the sacrifices made by our forebears” etc. However the Andamans were subsequently occupied by the Japanese during the war, and although the Japanese had succeeded in provoking mass desertions from the Indian Army in Malaysia during the invasion of Singapore by promising support for the Indian Independence League, their treatment of the Indian population of the Andamans really was brutal and in turn produced some nostalgia for the British, which was acknowledged by a few entries in the visitors’ book!
	During our last two days we hired a small motorbike to explore inland a little. We rode though a small village wonderfully named Humfray Gung; past rather untidy rice fields (compared with the almost manicured look of those in Bali, also being worked by hand) with wonderfully shaped rice straw ricks under construction, and large numbers of areca nut palms, from which the ubiquitous betel nut is produced, for everyone to chew. Large baskets were being woven in one village, in this case from bamboo, to hold the rice crop. As we mentioned, there are few “pale-faced” tourists in the Andamans, and from the reaction we got as we whizzed past, it is clear that none of them ever hires a motorbike. People called and waved from across several fields when they saw us (it was only possible to hire one crash helmet with the bike, in accordance with local legislation) and on occasion, if they missed us on the way out, would be quick to call out as we came back past. The roads aren’t too bad, and out in the country we had no problems. Close to Port Blair the lorries were fairly unfriendly and would just hoot loudly and keep coming at us if there didn’t seem to be enough room on the road for us both, but thankfully we survived unscathed!

There was evidence in the villages of widespread conversion to Christianity in many forms, with Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran and even Syrian Orthodox churches, mixed in with Hindu temples and a sudden cluster of mosques all together in one village. We rode north of Port Blair too, taking the ferry across the harbour first, and going up to Mount Harriet, to where the British administration moved in the summer, and where the remains of the Chief Commissioner’s house are still visible, high on a hill top with magnificent views, and hastily abandoned at the Japanese invasion in 1942.
	We first drove then walked through high jungle, seeing many huge and beautiful butterflies, but again few visible birds. Further north we came upon villages with mainly woven houses, which it seemed were inhabited by Burmese Indian settlers who had first arrived some 50 years ago. This woman was putting the finishing touches to her brand new house, so we felt it was reasonable to ask to photograph it. There were many other woven houses slightly incongruously sporting large white satellite dishes in their gardens.
	Everywhere we went, town and country, there were horned cattle roaming around the streets and buffalo in the fields, though we did notice some apparent farming of cattle too, presumably by non-Hindu farmers.
Driving around, both buses and taxis were decorated with garlands of flowers, often fresh, either inside the windscreens or across the radiator grills. Of course colourful saris abounded in amongst the dresses, and many of the men wore calf length lunghis (sarongs). al We passed plantation after plantation of trees – the locally grown padauk is supposed to be one of the hardest timbers anywhere, and doesn’t require seasoning before use. In fact some is so hard that it is unworkable, except when still very green. The normal yacht anchorage at Port Blair is in the lee of the main saw mill, with almost all of its original machinery still operational. But it had been told to stop all work for the time being – not just felling but sawing too, which augurs badly for the 1000 strong workforce at the mill. Apparently some 80% of the Andamans’ jungle has been felled. The people at the mill are very friendly towards their transient neighbours, and provided drinking water, and a safe place to leave the motor bike overnight. Sadly the mill (even before work had stopped), like the rest of Port Blair, is in a state of some dilapidation, and again and again we met nostalgia for the smoother running of everything under the British. From the excellent small anthropological museum and a book we bought while there, we learnt something of the dismal history of the indigenous tribes of the Andamans and Nicobars. During British rule, various attempts were made to befriend and study the tribes, and to civilise individual members by bringing them to live with British residents of port Blair. These attempts were generally unsuccessful and often caused many deaths from diseases even such as measles against which the tribes had no immunity. (The same story of western diseases causing rapid reductions in indigenous populations following explorers’ visits occurs all the way across the Pacific islands.) Unfortunately the same process is still at work, with numbers dwindling, in one case down to a recorded 33 members of a tribe. And through well meaning Government intervention, the tribes have become dependent on handouts of food, etc; have lost the ability to fend for themselves in their traditional ways, and are still catching outside diseases, even in one case AIDS. It is a sad story, particularly when one learns how hostile the tribes themselves were even to meeting outsiders. Even today, one island contains a tribe about which not much is known and which shuns visitors, yet one can sense the curiosity and desire to understand how they live, which, if fulfilled, can only be damaging. It is for this reason that so many restrictions apply, particularly to the Nicobar Islands , though cynics think this also has to do with the existence of Russian military installations, now run by the Indians. In the end we had a very interesting, if rather frustrating, week in the Andamans, improved by managing the entire clearing our process in just one morning! (We subsequently met a crew who had spent 4 days clearing out). On our last night, we ate at a restaurant we had been to on a number of occasions, and to which we had always taken our own wine. On this occasion we were asked not to drink it, and it transpired that the 7th and last days of the month are pay days, and no alcohol may be served anywhere. We were asked to observe the spirit of the law, even with our own supplies. Having safely cleared out, when we reached Sri Lanka we wrote a letter to the Governor General of the Andamans (at the prompting of the Harbour Master) suggesting some changes required if the Andamans want to encourage yachts to visit, as well as a letter to the Chief Vigilance Officer about the behaviour of Customs. We felt that we could have seen much more of interest in the time given a more informative and realistic approach by the administration – one cannot help asking what the Indian government fears from visiting yachtsmen.
John & Helen Fleming Flame of Gosport 30 May 2002
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