What a beautiful morning, the islands were in sight and the ship was floating a little away from the Port.
Passengers starting to assemble on the deck.
Kids getting ready.
Even after 3 days of travel, we are not feeling tired and raring to go to Havelock. The ship was docked at the ADO jetty by 7:30 and we were at phoenix jetty by 8. By auto rickshaw it takes 50 INR to reach there.
One of the light houses near the ADO jetty.
Phoenix jetty has main ticket counter for all the inter-island travel and for travel to the mainland as well. Our purpose was to get the return tickets to Chennai and today’s tickets for Havelock. For Havelock, both normal and speed boats play. Except M.V.RAMANUJAM, all others are speed boat. By speed boat it takes around 2 and half hrs and by normal boat, it takes 4 hrs.
Advance Ticket Reservation Centre (Truly advanced!!!)
Phoenix jetty has a good advance ticket reservation counter, but it doesn’t seem to work even in a normal way. The centre opens at 9AM, but the person who sells the tickets from the counter came not before 10AM. It’s a glass enclosed building, with non-functional air-conditioning. It was hot and humid like hell in there. What is the use of creating such a good infrastructure when it is no good for the passengers?
Ticket PIC Pending
One good thing is that advance tickets can be purchased for all the dates for which the scheduled has been released. Generally for next one month. From mainland it is just not possible to book tickets in advance, from Chennai, Kolkata or Vizag, they open the ticket booking only 3 days prior to the departure and they need a photograph as well, but in Port Blair, no such crazy protocols.
Finally by standing in the queue for 4 hrs we could get the tickets for B-class Cabin tickets for Chennai but still couldn’t get the tickets for Havelock.
M.V.PILOWMILLOW
Fortunately we could get the tickets by turning up at the last moment, not seating but standing tickets for 2pm M.V.PILOMILLOW ferry. By standing it means, we could stand anywhere on the lower deck as well as the upper deck, and in the end it turned out to be better than the seating tickets.
Plilowmillow upper deck.
Atleast, one can watch the scenery and feel the wind. By 4:30, we were docked at the Havelock jetty.
Small and Sleepy island but very beautiful.
It is considered to be the best island in Andamans to spend most of the time. It has seven beaches which go by the numbers as beach #1, beach #2 and so forth. Each beach has a village associated with it as village #1 and so forth. The best among all these is the beach #7, Radhanagar beach. On #7 accommodation is limited and expensive, best place is the #5 to stay. It is lined up with many beach side resorts, which generally offer hut accommodation at cheap prices. During this time of the year most of the resorts are full, but we could manage to get 400 INR double bed room with a clean bathroom in Gold India resort.
Our accommodation for a week.
What else one needs, a good bed and a clean bathroom? But here, a mosquito net as well :)
1 comment:
very impressive.
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