Day 5. Andaman Islands

Today was amazing. I went to the Andaman Islands. They are a group of islands off the east coast of India. I took a short flight from Jaipur, where I was this morning, to a small airport in the east coast. From there, I took a boat to the Andaman Islands. From the bay we arrived in, I took a taxi to a smaller inlet about six miles from it. There was a small shack that was run by an Australian woman, and she took groups of tourists out to the coral reefs off the coast of the island. She fitted me with gear, and I joined the rest of the group on the small boat. She gave us some safety rules, and we practiced in the small caged area she lowered off the boat. We did this for an hour until she deemed us ready to go out. We went in, and the water was crystal clear and very warm. The reef its self was what amazed me the most. It was in all different colors, and there were hundreds of fish swimming around, most of them small but a few were the size of my arm! We were playing with the fish for about half an hour when our guide told us to come up. It was lunch time and we had to give our diving a break. She had brought a lunch of traditional south Indian food that I found good, but a bit spicy. It was nice. Afterward she showed us another part of the reef that had different types of fish and coral because there was a hot spring coming up from the bottom. We were soaking in the warm shallow water when another boat came by. It was full of tourists in bathing suits who were coming to the hot spring to bathe. Our guide was astonished, she thought that nobody knew of this place. When the captain of the boat asked us to leave, she stood up and started yelling at him in Indian. He got mad and started yelling at her! After a while they got it that we weren't leaving, that they finally gave up and went to their usual swimming places. We enjoyed the rest of our day in peace, and we had no one else bother us. It was very fun. At around four, Our guide brought us back to our boat and we went back to shore. We thanked her and went on our way back to the bay we were dropped off at. I got a hotel near the harbor, and I had a nice dinner of Indian style seafood, which I did not like as much as the dinner I had in Jaipur, but it was still good.

The beach off where the reef was.