India 10 - Lakshadweep, Kadmat Island

These islands are about 450 miles off the coast of Kerala, are 100% Muslim and of all the islands, only 2 are available foreigners. The island I was on is called Kadmat is only accessible by boat for 20 hours which on the journey there was pretty hellish as the sea was rough and made everyone puke - I wasn‘t eating or drinking to avoid the vile mess of the toilets. When I got to the island I found there were 15 other tourists visiting for the week I was there; 2 French (sweet couple from Cassis who were like twins and held hands even when they were snorkelling), 2 German (the man is a retired doctor who spends a month every year helping out at an Indian hospital - I noticed their beach towels were positioned on the best sunbeds before breakfast), 1 Italian man and 10 Indians.

The island is a narrow strip of about 6km long with one single road running through the middle, covered in coconut trees and surrounded by the reef, heavenly! The ship stopped just outside the reef and then we had to climb down a rope ladder and get onto a small wooden boat for a 20 minute trip to reach the island.

As there is nothing here but fish and coconuts it comes as no surprise to learn that there is a tiny desiccated coconut plant and coconut coir rope factory which we visited one morning.

Strangely enough, ask as we might, we were only given coconut to drink/eat once on arrival and as for the fish - we were served chunks of dry burned fish as one of 4 dishes with lunch and dinner and on our last night when we were having a beach BBQ guess what? What we thought were chunks of white fish cooking on the coals turned out to be potatoes! Bizarre! BBQ potatoes!!! And they took hours flaffing around and working up the BBQ grill.


I couldn’t find an underwater camera anywhere so had to take snaps from the glass bottom boat.

And with nothing to do for the whole week, I concentrated on my snorkelling of the wonderful reef surrounding the island. One scary moment, I nearly swam into a huge egg-yellow and black Leopard Moray Eel curled around a coral rock that did the mouth open/hissing look at me, I almost managed to run on water.


Loved all the hermit crabs that rambled all over the sand. The larger crabs that live in holes on the beach are a bit strange, look like they wear sunglasses, and at night two frogs used to come out and catch flies with their long tongues. Never seen frogs on a beach before.

I was in a small beach hut complex 2km from where most of the activities took place. The two retired Indian couples who were in my complex were obsessed by the coach all week and behaved like a press-gang, nagging me to get on the coach to go to and from the restaurant. I was dragged out of the shower, out of bed, literally stood over when trying to finish lunch or dinner. And for what? To either sit in a restaurant which was not yet serving food or back to sleep at 8.30pm. (Quick, quiiiiick, hurry, the coach is waiting, we must go!!! - which it never was as the driver was invariably FINISHING HIS MEAL!)

Apart from that it was a great week and everyone was genuinely very nice. The Italian, Rosarno was the group entertainment for everyone as he had the typical Italian way of ranting about things. At worst he has a bothersome letch and was embarrassingly exposed at the end of the week when he had to remove the bed-throw he had swiped from his rucksack in front of everyone.

By the way, I have noticed that every single man here has a moustache…