Port Blair

Port Blair climbs a set of green ridges above Aberdeen Bay, and its history is written in brick at the Cellular Jail, built between 1896 and 1906 with seven wings radiating from a central watchtower so that no prisoner could see another. Three wings survive. Walking the corridors past the cell that held Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the gallows shed and the flogging frame is the sobering counterweight to the beaches that come later, and the evening sound and light show in the courtyard tells the story of the transportation settlement in the voices of the men sent here.

Fill the rest of the day with the Samudrika Naval Marine Museum, a good primer on the reefs you are about to dive, and the Anthropological Museum, which gives a careful account of the Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese. The timber yard at Chatham, among Asia's oldest sawmills, still smells of padauk. Late afternoon belongs to Corbyn's Cove, a casuarina-backed curve seven kilometres from town, or the boat to North Bay for a glass-bottom ride over the coral.

Aberdeen Bazaar is where the island's Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Ranchi settler families shop, eat and argue about ferry timings, and the fish market near Junglighat sells the day's tuna and snapper by six in the morning.