Andaman Islands — Five Nights with Elephant Beach

Met at the airport and taken into town, with Corbyn's Cove in the afternoon — a sheltered curve about seven kilometres from the centre. The Cellular Jail follows: finished in 1906, three of its seven radiating wings surviving, and designed so no cell faced another. The sound-and-light show in the courtyard after dark recounts what happened to the political prisoners transported here, and it is the right note to end a first day on rather than to begin one.

The morning crossing to Havelock, about two hours on a private high-speed ferry. The afternoon goes straight to Radhanagar on the west coast, which is the beach the Andamans are known for — two kilometres of white sand with rainforest behind it and nothing built on it. The sunset here is the island's set piece. Swim inside the flags: the drop-off is gentle but the current past the headland is not, and it is patrolled for a reason.

A boat around the coast to Elephant Beach, which is reachable overland only by a forest trail and is therefore usually approached from the water. A packed lunch is included. The reef here starts close in and in good conditions the shallow section is snorkelling you can do from the sand — hard and soft coral, parrotfish, angelfish and the occasional turtle. Snorkelling is optional, subject to availability on the day and charged separately. If the sea closes Elephant Beach, the day goes to Kalapathar Beach instead, or that part of the trip is refunded. The time left afterwards is free on Havelock, the first genuinely unhurried stretch of the trip.

A short ferry to Neil, a flatter, smaller and far quieter island where bicycles outnumber cars and the villages are strung along one road. Bharatpur is the shallow beach and the easy swim; Laxmanpur is where the sunset goes. The natural coral bridge at the north end of Laxmanpur emerges from the reef only at low tide, so the tide table decides the timing of that particular walk rather than the itinerary.

The ferry back to Port Blair around the middle of the day. The afternoon covers the Sagarika emporium for shell, cane and padauk work, and one of the two museums — the Samudrika naval collection explains the reef and the archipelago's natural history, while the anthropological museum deals with the indigenous peoples, several of whose territories remain entirely closed. The evening is free in town.

To the airport for the flight to the mainland, which from Port Blair is almost always a morning departure. If the timing is unusually late, Ross Island is a twenty-minute crossing and worth it — the administrative headquarters of the penal settlement until the 1941 earthquake, now a set of colonial ruins being slowly pulled apart by the roots of the trees that have grown through them.