Andaman Trip....Day 1

Hi all,
I recently got an opportunity to visit the Andaman Islands in India.It was a wonderful experience visiting the islands. the blue waters, the clean beaches were all part of the lovely time we had there. In this article I will be sharing with you my Day 1 experience at Port Blair.

I started off my journey from Kolkata by boarding a flight from Kolkata to Port Blair, the state capital of Andaman at 8:35 am. The flight took about 2 1/2 hours. During the flight the weather was not great. Our flight experienced turbulence thrice. Anyways, we safely reached at the Port Blair airport, only to face rainy weather. The Port Blair airport is not that big. It is also known as the Veer Savarkar airport.

Now, the one problem at the airport is you will need to haggle a bit with the taxi drivers available as they tend to charge you more for a very short distance. Since, I had already arranged for my pickup with the hotel people i did not face any issues regarding pickup from the airport. Usually, taxi fares range around Rs 100 to Rs 150 depending on the distance, but one noteworthy thing is that none of the hotels are more than 5 km radius from the airport. After all, Port Blair is not a huge city.
By this time, I was joined by the other members of the tour party that I was with. Anyways, we reached our hotel at about 11:30 am. The hotel people had arranged for a local guide, who told us to freshen up and then he would take us all for a local sight seeing tour that included visiting the Cellular jail and the Coven Cove beach.
So accordingly, we all freshened up and then at around 1: 00 pm we left for our sight seeing tour with the guide. On our way we visited this very famous eatery Ananda at Aberdeen Bazaar

Though, the food is great but I must say there is always this huge rush of people. We had to wait for an hour before we could savour some food. Anyways, after lunch we were taken to Cellular Jail, a place known as Kalapani, where hundreds of Indian freedom fighters were imprisoned and most of them did not see there motherland after being sentenced to prison. It was very emotional for all of us to visit the place as it reminded us all of the struggles that our freedom fighters undertook to help us achieve independence.

We then were taken to the picturesque Coven Cove beach where we stayed for a while to enjoy the sound of the waves and also the beach. Though there were water sports activities there, but we did not indulge as we were very tired.
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We also decided to skip the Sound and light show at Cellular Jail, as we were extremely worn out by the journey. Besides, the weather at Port Blair was also very humid and also we had to catch an early morning ferry to Havelock Island.

So, we decided to sign off for the day and recover for the next.