Diglipur

Getting to Diglipur is the commitment that filters most people out, and I say this without judgment — I almost turned back myself when the twelve-hour bus from Port Blair hit the ferry crossing at Middle Andaman and we sat waiting in the heat for an hour and a half while the driver slept and the passengers produced various foodstuffs from bags and shared them in the easy, temporary intimacy of long-distance Indian transit. By the time we crossed the final stretch of mangrove channel and arrived in Diglipur in the late afternoon, I had eaten someone’s mother’s pickle, shared a bench with a man transporting two live chickens in a basket on his lap, and accumulated the kind of goodwill that comes from just staying on the bus when you could have gotten off at Rangat.

Diglipur is the northernmost significant settlement in the Andamans, a market town rather than a tourist destination, with provision stores and repair shops and the particular energy of a place that is the end of the road. The accommodation is functional — concrete guesthouses with ceiling fans and bucket-flush toilets — and the food is straightforward: fish, rice, dal, whatever vegetables were on the morning boat from the mainland. What you are here for exists outside the town.

Saddle Peak is the highest point in the Andaman Islands — 732 meters — and the trek to the summit takes four to five hours through forest that starts humid and wet at the base and becomes progressively cooler and stranger as you climb. The vegetation changes in a way I found almost surprising: below, it is tropical jungle, the usual palms and ferns and creepers; higher up, a different forest takes over, mossy and dim, with giant ferns that look prehistoric and epiphytes carpeting every surface. At the summit, on a clear morning, you can see the ocean on both sides of the island simultaneously — to the west the Bay of Bengal, to the east the Andaman Sea — and the whole tangled green mass of North Andaman laid out below you. I sat up there for forty minutes and saw no other hikers. A group of hornbills flew past at eye level, enormous and improbable, their wing beats slow and measured.

The turtle nesting beaches are the other reason. Kalipur Beach, accessible from Diglipur, is one of the primary nesting sites in the Andamans for leatherback and olive ridley sea turtles. Between December and February, females come ashore at night to lay eggs, and the Forest Department runs guided nighttime watches in season. You sit on the dark beach and wait, and the waiting is part of it — the sound of the sea, the phosphorescent shimmer where the small waves break, the stars. Then the turtle arrives, and it is nothing like watching wildlife on television. It is heavy and patient and real, and it does what it came here to do, and you watch in silence, and when it is over it returns to the sea and does not look back.

When to go: December through February is the window for turtle nesting and the best weather for the Saddle Peak trek. October and November are shoulder season — the forest after the rains is impossibly green and fewer people make the journey. The bus-and-ferry combination from Port Blair runs daily; book guesthouse accommodation in advance during nesting season, when the limited rooms fill with naturalists and photographers.