In 2020 I was in Bangladesh, planning to continue to Calcutta and fly from there to the Andamans, but then someone in China ate a bat or something, a lot of people got sick, and India closed the border. Now it’s 2025 and they let me in. I am in Port Blair, the capital of the Andamans. The islands are actually closer to Myanmar and Thailand than India, but they are part of India and can only be reached from India.

The culture is clearly Indian, and like Tamil Nadu it does not have Western tourist infrastructure, maybe because it’s kind of hard to reach and until recently you needed a special permit to visit. There are some islands, the Sentinels, where uncontacted tribes live and it’s so illegal to go there that if someone does and gets killed, nobody cares. This happened to a stupid missionary from Alabama in 2018.

Didn’t have much time to explore, just visited the Cellular Jail nearby. It’s a British colonial prison with originally nearly 700, well, small dark cells plus forced labor workshops and the customary hanging cell with three trapdoors.