Bangaram

Bangaram is about two and a half kilometres long and shaped like a teardrop, fringed by casuarina and coconut and rimmed by a reef that keeps the lagoon flat as glass. Nobody lives here permanently; the only structures belong to the island resort, and the staff commute from Agatti, 8 km to the south. That emptiness is the point.

You can walk the entire shoreline in under an hour and pass nobody, only hermit crabs, ghost crabs sprinting sideways and the tracks where a green turtle hauled ashore in the night to lay. Snorkellers wade straight off the beach into gardens of table and brain coral thick with parrotfish, and dive boats run to Manta Point and the Grand Canyon on the atoll's outer wall, where the drop-off falls into deep blue and eagle rays and reef sharks patrol. In the shallows near the lagoon entrance lie the ribs of the Princess Royal, a ship that struck the reef in the nineteenth century and is now colonised by coral.

Short boat rides reach the uninhabited Thinnakara and Parali islets, where you can be dropped for a picnic and collected in the afternoon. Nights are for the stars, which come out over an island with no streetlights and almost no sound but the reef.