Kingfisher - The King of Good Times

• Ninedeuce's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Havelock Island

Trip Start Dec 22, 2008 Trip End Jan 05, 2009

  Havelock Island, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India
Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Travelling has been both the most and least enriching force in my life at various times. I can't really decide which it is anymore, since I've done enough of it now that I feel jaded (and often embarrassed) about even the most "exotic" of experiences. I remember when I first started leaving the country alone finding myself in some European palace that was bigger, full of more stuff I wanted, and full of way funnier visitors than any mall I'd ever been to and thinking, "Gee, a lot of things have happened in the world that matter more than which band is going to be the 'next Nirvana' or whether Taco Bell is going to bring back the Fiesta menu." But who can really feel a sense of wonder (as opposed to aghast astonishment) on Khao San Road? I mean, I suppose the discovery that there are white people on Earth that are more disgusting than American NFL fans does induce a bit of awe, but you know what I'm talking about. I don't know why I feel that it's necessary that travel be about anything but having a party, but I do for some reason. I think maybe it's reducible to guilt: if I'm going to take advantage of the fact that some other country is poorer than my own so that I can go there and afford to do shit like have other people do my laundry and get massages, I ought to at least be learning something, right? It just seems gross otherwise. Maybe that makes me an even bigger asshole, thinking some country owes me a life lesson in exchange for my tourist dollars.

Fuck it, whatever. The point is, I always do learn something, even if that something usually ends up being where people from this-or-that developed country fall on the rudeness-to-the-locals continuum when visiting developing countries. And I'm also always reminded that no matter how many places I go to, I'm still not free of the kind of juvenile American provincialism that makes me giggle at and take photos of Engrish specimens. I suppose my policy of getting drunk with locals more often than I do with other foreigners also helps; I tend to find out more that way about what it's like to be Indian in the world from Indians than from Swedes.

This site doesn't reflect every trip I've taken in the last ten years. Not even a fourth of them. So let me say that I've now gotten to the point where I'm going back to the same places I've already been multiple times or looking for really far-flung places to go to and see or do something new in. To the world of people who own fisherman pants and those stupid tapestry shoulder bags you can buy anywhere from Hanoi to Goa, the Andaman Islands might
not seem all that extreme as a travel destination, but I've only met one person in my life who doesn't travel who has ever even heard of them. I once shocked a professor in a class on pre-modern Chinese sea navigation by claiming that I didn't think it possible for the Chinese navy in the Ming Dynasty to use the Andaman and Nicobar islands as stopover points in the fifteenth century because it is believed that they stayed within sight of land, and you just can't do that and get from Southeast Asia to India via that archipelago. He wasn't shocked because I knew where they were, but because he didn't. Just my kind of place.

Oh yeah, and I heard they had good diving. So when my best friend, the gracious Esquire, was looking for somewhere to go on winter vacation, I told him he ought to think about these islands I'd heard about where you might see an elephant on a beach, an aboriginal dude with a loincloth, some corals that have yet to die, a few Kingfishers, and relatively few other honkies. I'm broke as fuck, and he -- as I mentioned before -- is a gracious lad, so he took me with him. And here, after that ridiculously prolix preface, is the story of our little adventure in Chennai and the Andaman Islands:

I flew from Atlanta (where I don't live - let me take this opportunity to tell everyone how hip I am because I live in New York City), to Dubai, then to Chennai. It was a shockingly short trip halfway around the world: thirteen hours to Dubai, a short layover, then four hours to Chennai, for a grand total of 19 hours. Badass, right? No. I fucking abhor airplane rides. I know some people think a straight shot is better than a flight with several legs, but that's probably because they're the kinds of assholes who can sleep on planes. I hate those people, because it takes me a serious dose of benzodiazepines and booze to even approach a nap on a plane, and as of now you need a prescription for Valium in the US. So being on a plane for more than a few hours is like being in jail for me. And I've been to jail, man (tax evasion - I don't like to talk about it except to let people know that I have something in common with Wesley Snipes). I mean, yeah, there are more entertainment selections on your average Delta seat-back screen than there are in the average county clink, but I'm fidgety and pee a lot, and I hate sitting in a chair for more than an hour.


It was on the first leg of the trip that I learned my first lesson of the trip: despite the fact that I consider myself a politically-aware sort, I really have no idea of the details of what's really going on in Iraq beyond how "wack" Blackwater is and what a bad idea the whole thing was in the first place. I was sitting there watching the flight path on the little screen in front of me and wishing someone would give me a sword so I could commit seppuku to end the agony of sitting on a plane for so long when I noticed we were flying over Mosul. I found myself wondering whether our plane was flying high enough to put it outside the reach of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. So not only do I not know whether there's anything major going on in Mosul this week, but I also know nothing about the capabilities of the various weapons Iraqi insurgents have at their disposal or about what sorts of terrorist/insurgent activities they might engage in in pursuit of their goals. I then began to feel like a complete idiot for having bought into the US media's "everyone between Greece and Xinjiang wants to kill all Americans at all times" message yet again. I admit it, when I travel alone in Muslim countries in Southeast Asia, I lie to taxi drivers and tell them I'm
from Iceland. Or South Africa (but I stopped doing that when one of them started talking to me about South African politics, which I don't really feel qualified to talk authoritatively about). So, the first lesson I learned is that t he US media is trying to make me a racist and can fuck off, and that I need to learn more about the specifics of what's going on in Iraq. One down, many more to go.

Then I got to Dubai, the world's weirdest airport. It's kind of like a cross between an Indonesian bus station, the Seoul airport, and some white guy's dorky Arabian Nights fantasy. I must admit that, as it was my very first visit to a Middle Eastern airport, I was pretty pumped to see those dudes in the "Rock the Casbah" video outfits. Lesson number two: I'm not as cosmopolitan as I pretend to be or I'd know what those outfits are called and I'd be less excited to see someone wearing one while drinking an Amstel.

On to Chennai on Emirates. Don't believe the hype: the service on Emirates is fine, but the food blows. And they charge for champagne. How am I supposed to celebrate having seen my first Saudi prince look-alike without free champagne?

Lesson number three: yet again, the US media has fooled me with all their bloviation about how India's a centimeter from taking over the world. I consider a country to be on the rise when it has bad-ass airports with free wireless. See Seoul and Kuala Lumpur. I should have known. I mean, fuck, I've been to the Kolkata (See how in-the-know I am? I didn't even call it Calcutta.) and Delhi airports and they made La Guardia, arguably the most ill-equipped airport in America, look like some shit from the Jetsons, so I don't know what I was expecting out of Chennai, but whatever it was, I didn't expect there to be a building between the international and domestic terminals that looked as if it had recently been strafed with cluster bombs. I also didn't expect that Kingfisher Airlines would've cancelled our paid-for tickets to Port Blair even though the plane was less than half full, but that's another story.

We (or should I say the Esquire) paid about six times what the tickets were worth for a new set after that bit of emotional discomfort that comes with learning (or -- in my case -- remembering) that things may not happen the way you think they will in India, but that they'll happen eventually and one needn't fret too much. Shockingly, we got to Port Blair, South Andaman at exactly the time both of us thought we would, despite the fact that we were flying out of different sides of the country and the fact that the Esquire had to route through JFK the day after all the flights coming in and out were cancelled and the day before it happened again. There was truly some force out there trying
to curse this trip, which we were just beginning to find out, but we overcame that shit with aplomb on the way there and would continue to do so.

Port Blair was kind of odd. We got there at 6:30 in the morning and had until 12:30 in the afternoon to get on our boat to Havelock, where we planned to spend the entirety of the time we'd be in the Andamans, so we just wandered around in the vicinity of some hotel we got a day room at called the Holiday Resort (7000 Rupees, nothing to write home about but a decent deal) and then hired a tuk-tuk to take us on a little trip around Port Blair. The driver spoke pretty limited English, but he seemed to feel that it was important to point out everything we were passing so we'd know what Port Blair had going on. So, as we drove around, he'd point at the water and say, "open sea," then point at a park labeled "Public Park" and say, "park." My favorite was when he pointed
at a hill and said what sounded like "Dr. Phil." After that enlightening scoot through town we stopped at the chemist and picked up about 100 Valiums for around 200 rupees, which I thought was a pretty good deal. Not that we intended to spend the entire trip ripped on Valium, but it's hard to just buy 10 when 100 cost less than $5US. Don't worry, we didn't take them all.

We did, however, take enough to get us through the ferry ride to Havelock. It was a grueling two hours on the open sea. We even had to sit outside with nothing for entertainment but the antics of a few geeky Germans (our guess, by their tank tops and socks) who were clearly planning on doing some xtreme! snorkeling based on their enthusiastic comparing of their various neon-hued masks and snorkels. We got off and went to Island Vinnie's,
where we spent our first night in one of the basic huts. They were fine - clean and big enough, ours had its own bathroom, skeeto net, shelves, all the things you need when all you want to do is put your shit away and pass out. 500 rupees wasn't a bad deal.
We were originally planning to dive with them but they looked so busy we decided to walk up the street and see who else was going out. We stopped at Barefoot and the guy we talked to was really funny. He told us the diving wasn't that great, but that we should come party on Christmas and that we could go out diving with them to a few of the bigger-deal sites for some absurd amount of money. He was cool enough, but I don't really like divingwith people who aren't that impressed with the place they've chosen to set up shop. It's indicative of something weird that I can't put my finger on. (I have to say I'm glad we didn't dive with them, which will become real fucking clear by the end of this post.) We walked a bit further up to a new place called Ocean Pearl and met Christian, an instructor there, who is Bavarian, "not German" (he wouldn't be the first person to make that distinction to us - what does that mean, do Bavarians not like to pee on each other or something?). He and his brother Ollie had recently began running the shop and hardly had anyone on their board, so we signed up. I like boats with 3-5 people, not 8+, and it looked like we'd be rolling out with them solo some days. Their rooms looked pretty bad-ass for the
price too, especially the two-story units (though the beach up there kind of sucks unless you like swimming around in mangroves), and we wished we hadn't already reserved five days at Emerald Gecko.

The reason I say that is that Emerald Gecko, while it's on a sweet bit of beach, is a weird joint. The huts are all spread out, they're positioned poorly and don't have beach views, and there's a huge gaping bunch of nothing in the middle of the grounds. It was kind of like staying somewhere half abandoned. The unit itself was alright, but we ended up moving to Pristine later and our two-story bamboo hut there was a thousand times better and had a beach view for the same money. Not to mention the fact that we were staying at Pristine, by far the coolest place on the planet. Alex, the owner, might be the nicest and funniest person alive, and his resort is a gathering place for a reason. I'm planning to go back to Havelock every winter and I'll be despondent If I have to stay anywhere
else. Alex and his family and employees just rule, and the place is perfect. If you like beer, the beach, and cool travelers, that is. I know some people prefer shit that sucks.

The diving was pretty good. I'd say the coral is in better shape than most places in Thailand and Malaysia and there's a bigger variety, the variety of small fish is impressive, and the visibility was really good on all of the dives we did. We saw a pretty big sampling of different types of nuibranchs (I love 'branchs), but other than that there isn't a lot else. Not too many turtles, rays, sharks, etc. A few, but not a lot. We went to White House Rock, some shipwreck near that (which Ocean Pearl had labeled the SS Incestor, snarf), Pilot Reef, Dixon's Pinnacle, and South Button. I really liked all of them. I normally think wrecks are boring, but this one was really good, had a
lot of life, and had a lot of interesting contours that made it ghostly even though the viz was excellent. Dixon's Pinnacle is a really great site that kind of reminded me of Tokong Laut in the Perhentians, but the life wasn't as
varied.

Dixon's Pinnacle is why I'm glad I didn't go out with Barefoot. All of the shops seem to just drop anchor wherever, which bothers the shit out of me and should everyone else as well, but apparently diving in the area is in its early stages and they haven't figured out buoy lines or something yet. Whatever. They need to figure something out. Barefoot and two boats from Dive India happened to be at the site when we got there. Instead of everyone tying to the first boat that had arrived, however, they all just dropped anchor and sent their divers down. I shrugged and went down, had a bad-ass deep dive, and was on my way to a safety stop when easily the shittiest thing I've ever experienced in my 100 or so dives happened. I was at about 7 meters when Ollie, the divemaster, motioned to me to move. I then looked out in front of me to see an anchor line barreling towards me in the water. It hit my shoulder and I pushed it off before it could catch my tank and pull me along with it. Then I turned my head and saw a tank
(the one we had down for the safety stop for the deep dive) flying at my head. I ducked that, then came up to see the Esquire in the boat looking like someone had just told him The Doors isn't a funny movie. I asked what was up and what the fuck the deal was with all the flying objects underwater, and here's what I heard: Barefoot couldn't pull their anchor up, so instead of sending a diver down to get it loose (I had a computer on and could easily have safely done so, so they clearly could have too), they swerved the boat around both sides of our boat trying to get it
loose. They crashed into our boat twice, once so hard they nearly tore their rudder off, then went around the outside of our boat and tore off at full speed, catching their anchor line on ours and pulling our boat along with
theirs until we could pull our anchor free of theirs. What I apparently didn't see underwater was the rusty anchor heading straight for me a few meters down. Not cool.

But really, the diving there is pretty good. The boats suck, but once they get buoys sorted out and get some speed boats, I'd go diving there again in a second. I'd go even if they don't, but I got spoiled in Malaysia.
I'll get to the partying in the next post. I'm sure I learned some lessons from that.

Mumbai (Bombay) hotels Share