It was a long time. I didn’t have my family at the time, but it was enough.
And I was taken through India to the Andaman Islands. Yes, the same islands mentioned by A. Conan Doyle in his novel “The Sign of the Four.”
At first, the trip promised to be quite restless – landing at the airport of the capital of the islands Port Blair, inspecting the island, and then every few days moving between several of the largest islands by sea boat. Already during the flight from Calcutta to Port Blair, it became clear that something was going wrong. Suddenly a cyclone, unusual for these places at that time of year, shaken the poor plane so that it seemed to want to shake passengers out of it. There was a storm at sea, there were no boats, and in Port Blair we were stuck for an unknown period of time, taking into account the weather forecast, and hoping for the same sudden disappearance of the cyclone.
In a few days, we had time to learn a simple, but constantly thermonuclear Indian menu in local restaurants, to change several hotels, to use the island on auto rickshams along and across, to see the Andaman prison, to get under a tropical rain, and the cyclone never thought to leave. Once we were allowed to go into the sea by boat, but it was so swung and worn on the waves that the captain ordered us to return to the port.
The hotels were overwhelmed by the same stuck tourists as we were. We got to know each other, and we eventually developed a fairly varied company of Ukrainians, Armenians, Latvians, Hindus, Frenchmen and Germans. The Ukrainian, the Latvian and the Armenian communicated perfectly in Russian, the Hindu with everyone – in English, the French woman spotted only on her own, but she understood the Ukrainian, and the German broke out in English. The universe was transformed into a real bird’s market.
The Hindu turned out to be even the dwarf, and got to the reception with the Minister of Tourism of the Andaman Islands. He promised that the cyclone was left to burst for a couple or three days, so you should not leave their luxurious islands in any case. And while the boat does not go, you need to use a beautiful comfortable bus, which will take you to the north of the islands, where you will enjoy all the charms of this region, literally in some 11 hours of journey through the island jungles. Moreover, there are rarely tourists, and the almost virgin tropical region is at your disposal. He painted in our imagination wonderful captivating paintings: the uninhabited islands of Ross and Smith, connected with each other by a thin peak of land... absolutely virgin jungles... groves of mangrove trees... desert sandy beaches with palm trees hanging over golden sand...
The name of the end point of our journey – Diglipur – I remembered for a lifetime. 11 hours of shaking in the starting bus with no depreciation and rigid bars instead of seats turned my ass into a crush. The minister did not lie – there were no tourists even at the stage of boarding the bus. Only local intelligence.
The jungle was truly incredibly colourful, wild, untouched. The only thing that spoke about civilization was the road paved through them for a local bus. We were accompanied by the police on motorcycles, as the road lay across an island, banned from tourists. There is still a tribe that wears hip bandages, uses spies for hunting, and is panically afraid of cameras. It is absolutely impossible to put a camera on them - they are offended by their superstitions, they become very aggressive, attack the bus, and at the same time can hide jewelry and somehow red clothes. We saw them. A few people came out of the forest and stood looking at our bus, with spies in their hands, shining with little evil eyes. It was a surreal spectacle. It’s like a documentary movie showing behind the bus window. Eventually, it went without excesses.
Two times the bus had to be passed by ferry. All the passengers were discharged, and the old rugged ferry barely floating through the bay carried the bus first, and then returned for the passengers, because to ship all at once was equivalent to death for him.
At one of these crossings I wanted to go to the toilet, and I, as a shy girl, and already simply shaken by the indigenousness of the Hindus (the locals watched, ticked their fingers and discussed something all the time), sought to the only structure in my field of sight. Its architecture left no doubt why it was built, and I anticipated a few minutes of solitude.
And here in the very heart of the Andaman jungle, surrounded by island Hindu and mangrove groves, I experienced (as Mikhail Zadornov said) a sense of pride for our people!
On the wall of the toilet in Russian with huge printed letters a crumb was drawn JOPA MIRA