Mount Harriet National Park

Lia and I took the small ferry across from Port Blair harbor to Bambooflat and then a rattling auto up toward the park gate, and within ten minutes of walking the road noise was gone, replaced by the kind of dense, dripping green that makes you lower your voice without deciding to. Mount Harriet isn’t a big mountain by any global standard — about 365 meters, the third-highest point in the Andamans — but the trail doesn’t feel small. It climbs through genuine tropical evergreen forest, the kind that was protected as a national park back in 1979, and every few minutes something rustled in the canopy that we never quite saw. A guide at the entrance told us to listen for the Narcondam hornbill, though I’ll admit what we mostly heard was our own breathing on the steeper switchbacks.

What struck me most were the ruins. Half-swallowed by roots and moss, the old foundations and stone steps are what’s left of the Chief Commissioner’s summer headquarters from the British colonial period — the administration would retreat up here to escape the heat and, I imagine, the weight of what was happening down in the penal settlement at Port Blair. Lia sat on one of the crumbling walls with her water bottle and said it felt like the forest was quietly taking the place back, which is exactly how it felt to me too.

The summit itself is why people make the climb, though. We reached the viewpoint mid-morning, sweaty and a little scratched from the undergrowth, and the payoff was immediate: the harbor spread out in silver and blue, Ross Island sitting low in the water, Port Blair’s rooftops catching the light beyond it. I ate a papaya we’d bought that morning at a stall near the jetty, sitting on a rock with my legs still buzzing from the climb, and Lia pointed out a wild pig — an Andaman wild pig, endemic to these islands and found nowhere else — rooting around near the tree line below us, completely unbothered by our presence.

We came down slower than we went up, stopping more often, both of us a bit reluctant to leave the shade. It’s a short trek in distance, but it holds a lot — layers of forest, empire, and geology stacked on top of each other in a few hundred vertical meters.

When to go: Aim for November through February, when the cool, dry season makes the summit trail genuinely comfortable to climb rather than a sweat-soaked slog.