Sunil Sethi: How to find the perfect desert island

AL FRESCO

Havelock Island (Andamans): I found my way here neither by accident nor by grand design but completely by chance last week. Some foreign friends were musing in Delhi about where to find the perfect desert island for a short break and said they had heard of a small, remote resort called Barefoot run in the Andamans by a former risk fund manager.

Rumour had it that it was better than anything in Thailand or Malaysia. Would I come along? On a complete impulse" in retrospect one of the best things I've done" I said yes.

I've been to the Andamans before. Post-tsunami Port Blair is a bit of a hole, with the combined force of Indian officialdom" the army, navy, coast guard, IAS administration and a soldier governor" conspiring to make it more depressing than the 19th century penal settlement. Kala Pani's airport is named after Veer Savarkar, its most famous prisoner, and Charles Correa's Fortune Island Hotel, run by ITC, is a sort of modernist prison - with sky-blue tiled bathrooms where rusting faucets virtually fall into your hands.

But a two-and-a-half hour ferry ride to the east of South Andaman is Havelock, a smallish island that the government opened in the 1970s with 400-year-old mangrove trees lining vast spotless beaches, gentle tides lapping at shaded lagoons and dense coral reefs nearby. It consists of a few sleepy villages of Bengali settlers, who tend luxuriant plantations of coconut, banana and betel nut. It is but one of the 50-odd populated islands out of the 500 that make up the Andaman and Nicobar group, including several out-of-bound islands that remain the preserve of tribals.

Bordering the magnificent sweep of Radhanagar Beach at Havelock is the nine-acre property called Barefoot, with a handful of simple, elegant cottages set in a well-planted site. The cottages come in two styles: some thatch-roofed in the traditional way of Nicobar huts and rest prefab elevated teak structures, with airconditioning and en suite bathrooms, imported from Indonesia. Since 2002, when the government banned logging in the archipelago, most wood for building is imported; as a result Barefoot's resident elephant Ranjan has retired, and occasionally entertains visitors by wandering into the warm waters of the Andaman Sea for a ritual bath.

Barefoot is the result of a small company set up by two unlikely partners: Susheel Dixit, whose father came as a chemistry teacher to the Andamans in 1957, and who bought the land cheap when the government opened Havelock for settlement, and Samit Sawhny, a 34-year-old Loyola College and IIM Ahmedabad graduate who gave up a successful career as a risk management consultant in London and Zurich in 2000 to take a year off, travelling round the world. "I knew India was happening," says the rake-thin Sawhny, who exchanged his pinstripe suits for a uniform of T shirts and shorts when he took a boat from Chennai to the Andamans in search of a retreat to complete a travel book. But like many in his situation he wasn't quite sure what he could do in India. The Andamans and Dixit provided an answer. They raised capital from private shareholders and set up the Barefoot Group as a controlled and environment-conscious getaway devoted to sea sports" sailing, snorkeling, scuba diving and deep-sea fishing. Visitors can get into small canoe-like local craft known as doongys, powered by motors, and go on day-long excursions to deserted reefs and islands with names like South Button and Henry Lawrence.

Gradually, the two have built up some of the facilities but it hasn't been easy. The years of the Gulf War, SARS epidemic and tsunami, compounded by the government's confusion over how to promote tourism in the Andamans, have been roadblocks. Until Deccan Air introduced a daily service to Port Blair, Indian Airlines was the only unreliable way of getting there. Foreigners are puzzled by immigration and the passport-stamping procedure at Port Blair. "Isn't Andamans Indian territory," asked my friends. Still, they are the best desert islands that India can offer. The Barefoot Group can be reached at www.barefootindia.com