Andaman Honeymoon — 5 Nights with Three on Havelock

A car is waiting at the airport and the hotel is a short drive away. Nothing is compulsory today. The Cellular Jail is the one sight in town that deserves your afternoon: a radial prison finished in 1906, kept as a national memorial, and quieter and more affecting than most people expect. There is an evening show in the courtyard that tells its story; the language alternates between Hindi and English, so ask us which it will be. If you would sooner rest after the flight, leave it, and have the seafood dinner the town is good at.

You leave Port Blair by ferry after breakfast and step off on Havelock some two hours later; which sailing it is gets settled once your tickets are booked. From the jetty you are driven to the hotel that is yours for the next three nights, so this is the only unpacking of the trip. Late in the afternoon the car takes you across the island to Radhanagar, the long west-coast beach with forest behind it, for the first sunset. Dinner is wherever you choose.

Today is the active one, if you want it to be. For snorkelling, boats run round the coast to Elephant Beach, where the coral lies near the sand in shallow water; how clear it is depends on the day. Havelock’s dive schools also take complete beginners on a first dive. Both are optional and priced with your quote, and neither needs deciding before you arrive in the islands. Keep the last of the light for Kalapathar, on the island’s other shore: narrow, dark-rocked at its far end, and much the quieter of the two beaches.

Shorter itineraries drop this day first; keeping it is why the trip runs to five nights. Nothing is booked. Radhanagar is a different beach at seven in the morning from the one you saw at sunset, and that is worth an early start. After that the day is whatever you make it: the beach in front of the eastern hotels, a second dive, a scooter along the island’s single road. After dark, kayaks go out through the mangroves; on some nights the water glows, though nobody can promise which. That, too, is optional.

One more slow breakfast, then the ferry south to Port Blair and a car to your hotel. The afternoon is free. Corbyn’s Cove, the town’s own beach, is pleasant towards evening, and the Samudrika museum is there if you would like the reef explained. We bring you back the night before you fly deliberately. Ferries are sometimes held by the sea, and with a night in hand that costs you a few hours, not your flight.

You check out after breakfast and are taken the short way to the airport. Flights to the mainland mostly leave in the first half of the day, so there is rarely time for more than a last walk. If yours is a later departure, the morning is free, and we can suggest how to spend it once your flight times are known.